April 5, 2020 “Trust” – Luke 23:44-49

Luke 23:44-49
“Trust”
April 5, 2020 – Palm Sunday

Cross your arms over your chest, lean back, and let yourself fall. Your co-workers or the other kids in your youth group are going to catch you. It’s a team-building exercise called a “trust fall.” Sharing this experience is supposed to create trust among people who work together or, evidently, just hang out together at church.

I’ve never been very excited about those sorts of artificial gimmicks to build trust among people. In my experience, trust is generated by working together on real-life concerns which actually matter and discovering whom you can and can’t really trust. Someone may be willing to help catch me during a game at a silly retreat. But she may not have my back at all when it comes to doing her fair share of a project on time.

Trust is closely related to faith. In difficult times it can be hard even to trust people we could counted on in the past, even to trust God. With my brother-in-law’s passing even as I wrote this sermon, our own faith and trust in the Lord is sorely challenged yet greatly needed in these times. So I’m trying to talk this morning about something I feel deeply we all must do in these days, commend ourselves to the hands of God.

Like each Gospel writer, Luke has his own take on the death of Jesus. He records only two, or perhaps three, if we believe some ancient manuscripts, of the seven last words. This Gospel passes over the most painful words, the Cry of Dereliction in Matthew and Mark, and the “I thirst” in John. Instead, Luke is the one who tells us about welcoming the repentant criminal into Paradise and now, at the very last breath of Jesus, Luke offers us our Lord’s own entry into the tender safekeeping of the Father. My heart today says we need these gentler words which Luke brings us from the Cross.

Verses 44 and 45 set the stage for Jesus dying. Matthew and Mark tell us that darkness fell in the middle of the day before Jesus died, while the curtain of the temple was torn after His death. But Luke mentions the two together. In keeping with what I said in a previous sermon, the darkness is not a sign that the Father has abandoned or turned away from Jesus. It is more likely an astronomical witness to the Father’s own sadness and displeasure at what He sees happening to His beloved Son.

The tearing of the curtain of the temple has been interpreted in various ways, but the most satisfying way to understand it is that the death of Jesus tears open the barrier between us and God. It restores us, as I said last Sunday, to relationship with Him. There was more than one curtain in the temple, but this would have been the one separating the “Holy of Holies” from the rest. In other words, just as Jesus promised the man hanging on the Cross next to Him, and just as Jesus expects for Himself in His final prayer, we too may be admitted to the most intimate and closest connection with God.

One of the most painful parts of the Covid-19 crisis, besides the devastating effects of the disease itself, is that our loved ones are suffering and sometimes dying alone. Our friend Kent spent a week in the hospital alone with his wife Bethel unable to visit him. And he “only” had appendicitis, not Covid-19. Many of you know that in our family, Beth’s brother died almost alone, but his wife was finally allowed to be with him in his last hours. For her, the lifting of that restriction, the drawing back of that curtain, was a blessing. How much more a blessing, then, to know that, as you and I approach death, the curtain separating us from God has been ripped open. We too may enter safely into our Father’s presence.

So verse 46 gives us the seventh, final, culminating last word of Jesus from the Cross, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” We’ve already heard how the Cry of Dereliction, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” was a quotation from the first verse of Psalm 21. This final cry of Jesus just before He died is also from a psalm, Psalm 31, the one we said together in this worship time, verse 5. Jesus simply adds the word, “Father,” before “into your hands I commend my spirit.”

I’ve found it a bit hard to verify, but there does seem to be some evidence in the writings of ancient rabbis[1] that Jewish children, or at least young men, were taught to say those same words as an evening or bedtime prayer. I found at least one current form of Jewish night time prayer which includes it as well.

Whatever the source of the idea, Christians have been struck—and I am too—by the thought that our Lord Jesus in His dying moments prayed a prayer which a child might have prayed, the sort of prayer some of us learned in the words,

Now I lay me down to sleep;
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.

The One who taught us that to enter His Father’s kingdom you must become like a child, became just that, like a child as He died. He prayed and commended Himself into the loving hands of His Father.

The Cross, then, is like a trust fall, not into the laughing, joking arms of friends or colleagues, but into the ever-present arms of the Almighty, the ever-gentle hands of God the Father. As we observe Palm Sunday and move into Holy Week we see that the whole thing, starting with Jesus’ return to and entry into Jerusalem is one huge, week-long trust fall as Jesus gives up control and allows Himself to drop into His Father’s will.

In John 11, verses 7 to 16, the occasion for Jesus’ return to where Jerusalem is, the region of Judea, is the death of His friend Lazarus. His disciples tried to dissuade Him, saying, “Rabbi, the Jews were just now trying to stone you, and are you going there again?” But Jesus insisted, telling them, “Those who walk in the day do not stumble…” They may not stumble, but they can fall, fall hard as Jesus would prove for Himself on the Cross. My wife Beth loves the Apostle Thomas there in John 11:16 for his gloomy response to it all, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.”

As Jesus trust-falls into the hands of God there on the Cross, you and I are invited to take up that somewhat gloomy, bittersweet thought of Thomas. Let us also commend ourselves into the hands of God and go die with Jesus our Lord.

We started this worship time with the joyful, triumphant celebration of the crowd who welcomed Jesus into Jerusalem. “Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!” Jesus is our king, the true king who had authority over the priests and governors and kings who put Him to death. He is still ruler over the kings and queens and presidents and prime ministers of this world. He is also king over coronaviruses and cancers and all other calamities. It’s good to remember and celebrate all that today. It’s good to hear good news. But we also need to remember what “hosanna” means.

Even those shouting it in the crowd on the first Palm Sunday may not have realized that “hosanna” was ancient Hebrew for “Come, save us!” They probably did not know that was just what Jesus came to do, for them and for us. They almost certainly had not conceived how it would happen. Jesus would save us all… by dying on a Cross, by releasing kingship, control, power over the universe, and simply… dying, trusting the outcome to His Father in heaven. That last word He said there, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit,” is His declaration that He has done just that, released control and trusted God.

I’m not sure I can explain this well. Maybe our friend Terry, with a better eye for art than mine, has better words for it. But somehow as I think of Jesus releasing His grip on life and commending Himself to the hands of the Father, I see the image of a famous work of sculpture by Michelangelo, his Pietà, which stands in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Here Jesus lies dead not in the hands of His Father but of His mother, Mary.

It’s a strangely beautiful piece. Mary’s face is not as she really would have been as Jesus died, a woman of 50 plus years, but more the young woman she might have been when He was born. Though the figures look perfectly natural in that pose, Mary holding the body of Jesus, if you pause and think, you can see Mary is much larger, much taller than the man she cradles on her lap. It’s as if we are invited to imagine that the mother holds her dead Son as if He were once more the infant to whom she gave birth years before.

Thus, as in the final saying of a child’s bedtime prayer, the Son of God lets Himself go with complete abandon, becoming in death once again the child He was when He entered the world, reminding you and me that we too must become like helpless and trusting children in order to enter the presence of our Father in Heaven. In these frightening times, you and I are invited, even called, to do just that. Let us, as often as we can, remember to commend ourselves like small children into the hands of God.

It may sound like defeat, like giving up, to say we are no longer in control of the situation, that all we can do is pray baby prayers and let go. But that is not it at all. Let me point just how Jesus said those last words of His. Verse 46 of our text tells us, “Then Jesus, crying with a loud voice, said, ‘Father into your hands I commend my spirit!’” I put an exclamation point after that last word as I wrote this sermon. This was no quiet, peaceful sigh of resignation. This a loud, bold, even defiant cry of affirmation.

Some of the crowd around the Cross mocked Jesus, taunting Him with the fact that God had not come to save Him. No Elijah showed up to carry Him down from the Cross or up to heaven. But what these last words show us is that all along Jesus knows that He is not abandoned, that God the Father is right there with Him. He trusts Himself in those hands.

That’s the kind of courageous trust which Jesus wants to and can pass on to you and me for this awful season in which we live. It is in fact, the very trust in which Christians down through the ages have echoed Jesus’ words for themselves and for each other, starting with my namesake in the book of Acts, the deacon Stephen. There in chapter 7, verse 59, as the stones rain down upon his head, Stephen prays to Jesus Himself, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.”

It became part of the Christian funeral liturgy. It’s there for many denominations of Christianity. In our own Covenant Book of Worship, the service at the graveside is called the “Service of Committal.” We say, “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen. We commend” [and here we say our loved one’s name aloud] “to God’s keeping…” I hope and pray that one day before too long there will be someone to say those words over my brother-in-law who died this past week. We Christians say those words with our dying Savior in and at our own deaths, in the courage and hope that we truly are in God’s keeping, in God’s hands.

Yet we don’t have to wait until death to repeat this sweet prayer of our Lord. Jewish people have used it in night time prayer and now, for centuries, so have Christians. In fact, in the prayer book from which I begin my prayers both morning and evening, there is this responsory every night:

Into your hands, Lord, I commend my spirit.
Into your hands, Lord, I commend my spirit.

You have redeemed us, Lord God of truth.
I commend my spirit.

Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit.
Into your hands, Lord, I commend my spirit.

That, “You have redeemed us, Lord God of truth,” is the second half of Psalm 31:5 from which Jesus drew His last words. It’s the utterly confident conviction that we may commend ourselves into God’s hands because He is true, He is faithful, He has redeemed and saved us. We have nothing to fear as we lay down each night to sleep and let go of our control over the day and over our lives, just as we have nothing to fear when we finally lay down for our last sleep and commend ourselves into His hands forever.

Yet I know it is hard. I talked about my skepticism regarding those youth group or employee retreat trust exercises. I said trust needs to be earned in real relationship and life together. So it does. That’s why you and I are called into an ongoing life and relationship with our Lord so that we may learn, bit by bit, and sometimes in sudden overwhelming moments, that our Lord is true and trustworthy. We are in just such a moment now, a time to learn to pray like children, “Father, into your hands we commend our spirits.”

I remember doing my own sort of silly trust exercise with one of my daughters when she was little. I can’t remember now which of the two it was, but she was just four or five years old, just learning to be comfortable in a swimming pool. I stood in a few feet of water, well over her head, and invited her to jump in from the side of the pool, promising I would catch her and keep her head above water.

It took a minute or so standing there and thinking about it. That water looked deep and this was scary for a little girl. But she finally jumped. And, you know, a tyke like that is more slippery than I had guessed. She went right through my hands as I tried to grab hold of her. Her head went under. I finally got hold and lifted and she came up spluttering and crying. It took quite a few minutes holding her and explaining to get her to believe I hadn’t let her go down on purpose. But she finally decided to get back up there and try again. We both did better the next time, and the time after that, and the time after that… and the many, many times after that when my little girl trusted Daddy to look out for her.

Letting my child’s head go underwater when I didn’t mean to was simple human weakness and miscalculation. We can’t ascribe that sort of thing to God to explain our current suffering or any other trials. Our Lord is perfect and all-powerful. So we can’t say why it feels like He lets us go under sometimes. What we can say is that He has not left us. Jesus dying on the Cross is His demonstration that He is right there in the pool with us. We may go under, but He has already come down to rescues us, to redeem us, to save us. And we are in His strong and tender hands, come what may.

I am always moved by Deuteronomy 33:27, which Keith prayed in our prayer meeting on Zoom this past Tuesday. “The eternal God is your dwelling place, and underneath are the everlasting arms.” They surely are. Pray Jesus’ last prayer as often as you think of it. “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit, into your everlasting arms.” They will never let you go.

Amen.

[1] J. David Strack and Paul Billerbeck, Kommentur zum neuen Testament aus Talmud und Midrash, vol. II, p. 269.