John 19:30
Good Friday
March 25, 2016
I.
The final description of the Lord’s death on the cross shows his complete and utter submission to God. “He bowed his head and gave up his spirit.”
It is an acceptance of brokenness, and an embrace of the shattering death that exemplifies and fulfills his spiritual path. The word here in the original Greek for spirit is the same as the word for breath: pneuma. And we know that the actual cause of death when someone is crucified is often suffocation, as the victim’s energy is exhausted from trying to breathe with no support but the three nails attaching their body to pieces of wood. The Lord is basically saying that he is finally out of breath, and gives his breath now back to his Father who is the One who breathed all things into being at the beginning.
Everybody gives up their breath, eventually. But not everyone is conscious that they are commending their breath, their spirit, into God’s hands. Not everyone knows who has been the source of the oxygen they have been tapping into all their lives. Not everyone is aware that this air they have been breathing has been an awesome and gracious gift from their Creator. Indeed, few of us have had any realization at all that there even is a Creator.
This is because we all begin our life — and most of us continue through all our days — unconscious and utterly unaware of who we are, of our true nature, of our actual purpose. We cut ourselves off from reality by building psychological walls and filters through which we see and react to our world. And we fall into familiar patterns and behaviors that serve to reinforce our separation from God and others, and express our fear. And we build a world based on these fears, a world of ignorance, alienation, enmity, and violence, expressed in the familiar list of sins, like greed, lust, gluttony, anger, envy, and so forth. And we appoint leaders over ourselves in this world who come to dominate based on their mastery and perpetration and perpetuation of these sins.
And these leaders are precisely the people who, with perfectly legal reasons, rationales, justifications, and cause, nailed Jesus to two pieces of wood and left him to suffocate to death in the first place. Just as they have managed to hold on to power for thousands of years by similar acts of scapegoating terror against the weak and the innocent.
II.
So when Jesus breathes his last and gives up his spirit into God’s hands, he is affirming to the end the truth that God, the Creator, is the ultimate and final reality and source of life and breath, and that no matter how horrific and ghastly may be the machinations of worldly power in continuing to impose upon us a false vision, the truth remains unassailable and always present and waiting to receive his spirit, his breath, his life. He is saying that these leaders can order soldiers to use brute force to cause his physical organism to cease its functioning, and do it in a way that maximizes the pain and humiliation involved, but what they can’t do is mitigate the truth of God’s love which holds us up forever. Nothing in all creation can separate us from that, as the Apostle Paul will most eloquently state a few decades later. In the end, Jesus’ spirit, Jesus’ breath, rests with God, his Father, the One into whose hands he commends himself.
And by doing this the Lord is revealing both the powerlessness and impotence of these counterfeit, self-appointed authorities, and at the same time showing us the way to be free of them, and free of the sin inner own hearts that spawned them. We only have to die. This is the example, this is the path, this is his message to his disciples. It’s simple. We just have to die.
He says, “If any want to be my followers let them deny themselves, and take up their cross and follow me” (Mark 8:34). “Very truly I tell you,” he says, “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who live their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life” (John 12:24-25).
The book I read when I was 16, that turned me into an intentional follower of Jesus, was The Cost of Discipleship, by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. In that book, Bonhoeffer pulls no punches. “When Christ calls [someone],” he writes, “He bids [that person to] come and die.”
Those are not words that I have ever seen on a church message board to attract people driving by to attend worship. “Come die with us!” sounds more like what a perverted and demonic suicide cult might say. And yet the necessary fulcrum of the spiritual life is this commendation of our spirits, our breath, our life, to the Creator. Following Jesus means dying with him. It means commending our spirit into the hands of God.
This basic truth is all over the New Testament. “If we die with him, we will also live with him” (2 Timothy 2:11); “if we have been united with him in a death lie his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his” (Romans 6:5). The whole point of the rite of Baptism is this symbolic sharing in the death of Jesus, and rising to a participation in his resurrection life. And this “death” of baptism, and the “rising” to new life, happens on this side of the death of our physical bodies.
III.
The spiritual life is not an easy, smooth, comfortable, convenient sailing into salvation, as if it were all downhill with the wind at our back. Still less is it something Jesus did and we just sit back and watch, reaping the benefits at no cost to us, something that Bonhoeffer derisively calls “cheap grace.” On the contrary, salvation requires nothing less than our death. That is, it requires the immolation of our ego-centric, personality-driven, sinful self, the very self that we have come since we were very young to identify with our whole selves, the very self we think is all we are. This is what must be surrendered, released, renounced, and relinquished.
Jesus’ giving up his spirit, must come to characterize our whole life. Commending our spirit into God’s hands must become the conscious rhythm of our daily lives. This is why we find inscribed above the entrance to one of the Christian monasteries on Mt. Athos the motto: “If you die before you die, then you won’t die when you die.” Which means that if by a life of repentance we continually let go of our sinful, narrow, shallow, small-minded, fearful, and violent old selves, then the death of the body has no power over us but is itself a commendation into the hands of the God of love.
His commending of his spirit into the Father’s hands is at once an affirmation of confidence in the truth of God’s ever-present love, and a categorical rejection of the other false powers and authorities, in our souls and projected into our world, that keep us in bondage to sin and death. It is not an empty or theoretical statement, but something we prove in our actions. For commending our life to God is to function in the world in a way exactly contrary to commending our life to any of the other goals, objectives, loyalties, allegiances, and powers. Commending our life, our spirit, our breath to God, which is sharing in Jesus’ final words, means sharing in Jesus’ life of peace, justice, equality, inclusion, gentleness, and forgiveness. It means a rejection of violence, hostility, fear, hatred, exclusion, and walls of division.
Because we know that death is not the end. We know that when Jesus commends his spirit to his Father, it was towards his reemergence three days later in resurrection. When Christ bid us come and die it is not to extinction and annihilation that he calls us. Rather, the more we commend our spirit to God, the more God’s true life and presence and love may infuse us and shine in us and flow through us into our world. The more we commend ourselves to God, the more we become ourselves “participants in the divine nature,” as Peter tells us. The more what is false in us dies, the more what is true grows and multiplies.
So in a sense, the last words of Jesus on the cross, are the first words of our rebirth in the Spirit. May we commend ourselves, our spirits, our souls, every breath we take, to the living God who is always bringing life, goodness, peace, blessing, and joy.
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