Seven Last Words

Seven Last Words

Today is a day when heaven seems to not only meet with earth, but fall down and collide with it.

Word 1: Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do

At the heart of the Christian message is forgiveness. Throughout Jesus’ ministry we hear this time and time again – ‘Master how many times shall we forgive’ ‘seventy times seven’ - forgive, and forgive, and forgive. Yet how much do we live up to this command. Often we might say to ourselves ‘but it’s too difficult, I’m too hurt, I can’t’, yet here is our Lord and savior, nailed to a tree, not only forgiving but praying to the Father to forgive too. Jesus, our mediator, is praying not only for us, but with us – praying with us for all those times we find forgiveness too hard to bear, and praying for us, when we are the ones who need forgiveness.

Now forgiveness is no easy task, and we often say that to forgive, someone must at least show some remorse – yet where is the remorse of the soldiers who crucify Jesus, or the crowd who call for his death? Love one another, as I have loved you. Jesus, as He is crucified, holds the world up for forgiveness and we are asked to imitate him too – not to hold grudges, or seek revenge, or to threaten others, but to pray to the father for forgiveness and imitate Our Lord and Saviour. This is no easy forgiveness of friends’ simple mistakes – this is the forgiveness of intentional betrayal, of hatred. This is also not the acceptance of evil or despair – but it is a placing of our own fragility in the hands of God. When others are wronged, we are not to stand by – and when we are wronged, we are to take it to the Father.

Let us never forget our own need for forgiveness from God and from our neighbor – and let us never stop asking for it. Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.

Music: Quatuor I – Messiaen

Word 2: Woman, behold your son: behold your mother

Just two weeks ago, I was on retreat at Walsingham in Norfolk, the shrine to Our Lady who appeared to Lady Richeldis many centuries ago, asking her to build a copy of the holy house, that where Jesus was born and raised. It has made me think about the quiet role of Mary throughout Jesus’ ministry, and about the importance of these words at the cross. Some of my colleagues on retreat couldn’t accept that Jesus’ giving of His mother to John at the cross was anything more than a safety blanket for her – to ensure she was well looked after once He had died. That Jesus was giving Our Lady to us all was simply too much to read into this simple text. Yet Jesus always surprises us, by giving more than we could ever imagine.

Here we are, at the foot of the cross, and Jesus turns to us and says ‘behold, your mother’. Behold a mother who has carried God Himself within her womb, who said ‘be it done to me according to thy word’. A mother who sang the praises of the Magnificat, to bring down the proud in their conceit and to raise up the humble and meek. A mother who so frequently mistakes the role of Jesus, yet is there to the bitter end. A mother who takes down the body of her dead son, her executed son, her murdered son, and holds it in her loving arms. A mother who buries her own son.

To think over the past year in this parish and more widely, how many mothers there are whose sons have been buried. How many mothers whose sons have been brutally murdered on our streets, not least even here in Deptford. How many mothers who have wept tears of anger and frustration and despair as they cradle their children, taken from them brutally and without just cause.

And Mary weeps with them.

One of my colleagues at Girton College, in Cambridge, Malcolm Guite, who is a poet and priest wrote this:

This darker path into the heart of pain
Was also hers whose love enfolded him
In flesh and wove him in her womb. Again
The sword is piercing. She, who cradled him
And gentled and protected her young son
Must stand and watch the cruelty that mars
Her maiden making. Waves of pain that stun
And sicken pass across his face and hers
As their eyes meet. Now she enfolds the world
He loves in prayer; the mothers of the disappeared
Who know her pain, all bodies bowed and curled
In desperation on this road of tears,
All the grief-stricken in their last despair,
Are folded in the mantle of her prayer.

That is the mother we are given by Jesus – behold your mother. Mary, behold your children, and pray for us.

Music: Ave Maria – Duprè

Word 3: Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise

Paradise might seem rather a long way away from us today, standing at the foot of the cross of our crucified savior. Yet even as Jesus hangs dying, he listens to the heartfelt confessions and prayers of those dying with him. ‘Jesus, remember me, when you come into your kingdom’ says the repentant thief – ‘today, you will be with me’ says Jesus.

It is easy sometimes to think of the two thieves being executed next to Jesus and picture ourselves as the repentant thief – the one who goes to paradise, the one who recognizes Jesus and who trusts in this crucified man. Yet is that always who we are? Are we not often the condemned who look at this other condemned man and shout ‘aren’t you the messiah? Save yourself and us’. When we look at the terrible outrages in the world, when we look at the dreadful way the poor are exploited and the environment destroyed, at the way gay people are executed and women are abused, at the way our own lives might feel ruined and destroyed – do we not often look at this weak and dying man and shout the very same? Is this man, Jesus, really the messiah? How can the world still be this way? If He was really God, then he would save Himself and us too.

Yet the other thief, perhaps Himself a saint, looks at Jesus and simply asks to be remembered. No James or John is he, asking for the highest seat at the table, but he looks into his own soul, sees the error of his own ways, and just looks on our dying Lord, the ultimate sacrament of love, and asks simply to be re-membered – to be put back together, to be made whole again. He trusts in Jesus – and places himself into his loving care, arms widespread on the cross.

That is what we must ask of the Lord – to be re-membered, in His image – for a re-membering of God’s holy world – for a re-membering of creation. For in three days, the temple will not only be destroyed, but rebuilt – and Christ is the first fruits of the new creation.

Music: In paradisum – Duruflé

Word 4: Eli, Eli, lama sabachtani – My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?

When I was a young, and admittedly a little sad, teenager, piously reading through the four passion narratives on Maundy Thursday night before I slept, I used to miss out this bit from Matthew and Mark, because I felt it didn’t really give the right impression of Jesus. Yet this is the only saying that appears in more than one gospel. That I was already attempting to censure liturgy meant only for myself might strike you as a little concerning – yet in the wider church we often censure parts of the psalms that we feel aren’t quite ‘Christian’. One need only think of the psalm of Babylonian exile that speaks of dashing children against stones in vengeance, or psalm 58 which speaks of breaking teeth in the enemies mouth, and compares them to slugs that dissolve in their own slime to see why some people are a little uncomfortable about using the full uncensored version. When I was a choirboy in Chichester, these verses were underlined – that meant ‘don’t sing’ – so the genteel populace of England’s Riviera weren’t exposed to such needless violence. But God’s world is not one without violence – and God’s people are not immune to the reality of the world outside.

Here is Our Lord and Saviour, crying out to His Father, and Our Father – the Father whose cup has not passed from Him – in pain and misery, dying on a cross, deserted by his friends, given vinegar to drink and made the mockery of Jerusalem. Here is Our Lord, seemingly alone and forgotten, depised, a man of sorrows, who is bearing our grief in his body on the tree. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

Yet, as real and as stark as the pain and desertion of Good Friday are, this is not the end. Whilst there may seem to be no hope, and faith is gone, love continues – the love of a God who loves the world so much that he gives His only son. A God who doesn’t give on his own terms but gives freely, and even when all seems lost, he gives again.

For the psalm continues

But thou art holy, O thou that inhabitest the praises of Israel.

A seed shall serve him; it shall be accounted to the Lord for a generation.

 They shall come, and shall declare his righteousness unto a people that shall be born, that he hath done this.

Jesus’ agony is real, but so is God’s transformation of His life, and our own lives. ‘A seed’ is all that is needed for new life to come, and in those times of mourning and sorrow, in those times when we have so grievously offended others or God that we cannot begin to see the light – yet, even then, we know that God is working.

Music: Miserere - Allegri

Word 5: I thirst

‘And for my thirst, they gave me vinegar to drink’

Jesus, the life-giving well, the water of life, cries out for something to drink as he hangs dying on the cross, and yet all those standing by can give him is vinegar. Jesus, who gave living water to the Samaritan woman, the outcast – here, the very centre of creation is left thirsty, parched, uncared for, forgotten. Even in his agony he is taunted with vinegar – a sour wine, a mockery even of the wine He gives us as His very blood.

In our own time, how often we give vinegar to those who ask for water – how often we turn to those who ask for a little and give them nothing. In our own community in London, people die from lack of housing, from lack of healthcare, from lack of basic human love. Yet we often hide behind schemes or projects, behind government or charity, to ensure we aren’t floored by our own greed. Worldwide there are still children dying – human, like us, yet not here. We sleep soundly whilst warfare, violence and simple indifference allow the poor, God’s favoured, to suffer and to die.

Pope Francis tells us that we must be a poor church for, or of, the poor. Until we realize that in our own church, by God’s mercy, God’s own transformation of the world, God’s kingdom, will remain ‘not yet’. When our Lord thirsts, what do we give him?

The words of St Oscar Romero:

We have never preached violence, except the violence of love, which left Christ nailed to a cross, the violence that we must each do to ourselves to overcome our selfishness and such cruel inequalities among us. The violence we preach is not the violence of the sword, the violence of hatred. It is the violence of love, of brotherhood, the violence that wills to beat weapons into sickles for work.

Music: Quatuor II - Messiaen

Word 6: It is finished

And so, with this word, the whole of creation comes to its climax. Jesus’ mission on earth is complete. He has preached the gospel to the poor, has healed the broken hearted, preached deliverance to the captives, brought recovery of sight to the blind, preached the acceptable year of the Lord. He has fulfilled all that is written in the scriptures. And yet still, he has been rejected – still, we say ‘no’ to God’s forever ‘yes’.

For God’s overflowing love, we nail him to a cross – we mock Him, we rebuke Him, we hate Him. We refuse to believe Him – rather we would rule our own world and rule our own wills. God is merely an illusion – the life of heaven a silly fantasy.

And yet, Jesus says, ‘it is finished’. God’s work is finished – the new creation is finished. Despite everything, God sees that it is very good – and wills us come in.

We might despair, and we might fight God – yet it is finished. We need only open our eyes and walk into His garden of delights once again.

Music: Quatuor VIII - Messiaen

Word 7: Father into your hands I commend my spirit

Jesus bows his head, and commends himself to God – seemingly alone, but held in the heart of God Himself.

And here is the great paradox of the crucifixion – Jesus dying alone, yet in the heart of God. Jesus calling out in despair, yet commending his spirit in faith and hope to love itself. Jesus, the savior of the whole world, killed by that world. Jesus, the high priest but also the sacrifice. Jesus, a light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of Israel.

Let us gaze on the cross of Christ, who holds these things together, who dies that we might be set free. With God, nothing is impossible. Divisions in our church will be healed; our world will be healed - for it is of God, and He asks only for our trust. My yoke is easy and my burden is light.

Dare we believe? Dare we hope? Dare we love?

Today, in the shadow of his crucifixion, we must give him our all.

When I survey the wondrous cross
On which the Prince of glory died,
My richest gain I count but loss,
And pour contempt on all my pride.

Forbid it, Lord, that I should boast,
Save in the death of Christ my God!
All the vain things that charm me most,
I sacrifice them to His blood.

See from His head, His hands, His feet,
Sorrow and love flow mingled down!
Did e’er such love and sorrow meet,
Or thorns compose so rich a crown?

Were the whole realm of nature mine,
That were a present far too small;
Love so amazing, so divine,
Demands my soul, my life, my all.

Music: Jesus accepte le suffrance - Messiaen