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+ + + In Nomine Jesu + + +
The First Word
And when they came to the place that is called The Skull, there they crucified him, and the criminals, one on his right and one on his left. 34 And Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” (Luke 23:33-34a ESV)
We might be more inclined to demand that our enemies first recognize their sin and repent, but Jesus practiced what He preached: to love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you (Matthew 5:44; confer Romans 12:14 and 1 Corinthians 4:12). Jesus did, but we do not. And, we cannot even claim ignorance as an excuse for what we do, for God’s law is written on our hearts, and we have His Holy Writings. Yet, as prophesied (Isaiah 53:12), Jesus interceded not only for the Roman soldiers crucifying Him, but Jesus intercedes also for all transgressors, including us, even now (Romans 8:34). And, out of God’s great love, Jesus’s death on the cross for all transgressors merited God’s grace that does forgive us when we repent and trust in Him to forgive us. The Divinely‑inspired St. Paul says that, if the Jewish leaders had known what they were doing, they would not have crucified the Lord of Glory (1 Corinthians 2:8; confer Acts 3:17). But, they did crucify Him, and, as we receive the benefits of His crucifixion through His Word and Sacraments, we are made children of our Father Who is in Heaven (Matthew 5:45), and thus we are transformed. So, when we stand praying, if we have anything against anyone, we forgive them, so that our Father Who is in Heaven may forgive us our trespasses (Mark 11:25; confer Colossians 3:13). Indeed, we sincerely forgive and gladly do good to those who sin against us (Small Catechism III:16).
Collect for the First Word, and Hymn 447:1-3
The Second Word
And they cast lots to divide his garments. 35 And the people stood by, watching, but the rulers scoffed at him, saying, “He saved others; let him save himself, if he is the Christ of God, his Chosen One!” 36 The soldiers also mocked him, coming up and offering him sour wine 37 and saying, “If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!” 38 There was also an inscription over him, “This is the King of the Jews.”
39 One of the criminals who were hanged railed at him, saying, “Are you not the Christ? Save yourself and us!” 40 But the other rebuked him, saying, “Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? 41 And we indeed justly, for we are receiving the due reward of our deeds; but this man has done nothing wrong.” 42 And he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” 43 And he said to him, “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise.” (Luke 23:34b-43 ESV)
Amidst all the mocking of Jesus, at one point including his own mocking of Jesus, the criminal of a different kind, with a Holy-Spirit-created penitent and believing nature, both implicitly confessed his sin, as he confessed the justness of his condemnation, and implicitly confessed Jesus’s righteousness. For our sake, God made Him to be sin, Who knew no sin, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God (2 Corinthians 5:21). The criminal’s very public individual general confession and his plea for the forgiveness that would grant him entry into Jesus’s Kingdom were answered by what amounted to Jesus’s very public individual absolution, assuring the criminal that that very day he would be with Jesus in the paradise of heaven. We do not know what the criminal’s particular deeds were, though another evangelist refers to him as an open robber, and the Romans did not crucify people for just any crime. But, we do know that any particular sin on our part justly warrants our death here and now and our torment in hell for eternity, apart from our Holy-Spirit-created penitent and believing nature that likewise confesses both our sin and Jesus’s righteousness. How little we may regard the great treasure that is private individual—even general—confession for the sake of private individual absolution! For that individual absolution is the closest that we can come to what the criminal received: the Lord’s personal promise to remember us when He comes into His Kingdom and that, when our life’s brief day is ended, we, too, will be with Him in the paradise of heaven.
Collect for the Second Word, and Hymn 447:4-6
The Third Word
But standing by the cross of Jesus were his mother and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. 26 When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing nearby, he said to his mother, “Woman, behold, your son!” 27 Then he said to the disciple, “Behold, your mother!” And from that hour the disciple took her to his own home. (John 19:25-27 ESV)
One in three Americans reportedly is a part of a “blended family”, either as a step-parent, step‑child, step-sibling, or some other member of a step-family (Encyclopedia.com). Of course, our contemporary society has taken the somewhat-fanciful dream of a “blended family” like that of “The Brady Buch” to a whole new—and far-less God-pleasing—level. Still, the Divinely‑inspired psalmist David’s words are true, that God sets the solitary in families (Psalm 68:6 KJV), in this case, in an extended family in one household. While in the agony of the throes of death on the cross, Jesus lovingly entrusted the care of His mother to the disciple whom He loved, usually identified as the Apostle John, the author of the Gospel account, and already what we might think of as a nephew of the Virgin Mary and a first‑cousin of Jesus. We should fear and love God so that we do not despise or anger our parents and other authorities, but honor them, serve and obey them, love and cherish them! In some sense, as the Divinely-inspired Elizabeth said, the Virgin Mary is blessed among women, and blessed is the Fruit of her womb, Jesus (Luke 1:42), but the Virgin Mary is blessed not primarily because her womb bore Jesus or because her breasts nursed Him, but the Virgin Mary is blessed primarily, Her Son said, because she heard the Word of God and kept it (Luke 11:27). As we likewise by the Word of God are moved to repentance and faith, we are brought into the family of God that is the Church, through the water of Holy Baptism, and in the Church we are fed on the family meal of the Sacrament of the Altar, the Body of Christ given for us and the Blood of Christ shed for us. A truly blended family! As Christ entrusted the care of the Virgin Mary to St. John, so He has entrusted the care of His Church to Her ministers.
Collect for the Third Word, and Hymn 447:7-9
The Fourth Word
Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land until the ninth hour. 46 And about the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, “Ēli, Eli, léma sabachtháni?” that is, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” 47 And some of the bystanders, hearing it, said, “This man is calling Elijah.” (Matthew 27:45-47 ESV; confer Mark 15:34)
When my classmates and I were first learning New Testament Greek, we regularly wanted to know “why” something was the way that it was: an ir-regular noun declension or verb conjugation, or an un-usual principle of syntax. But, our professor would not answer “why” questions, even if we rephrased them by asking “how is it that”. (Frequently there were no real answers to such questions, anyway.) “Why” questions are what we so often want to ask God, as Jesus on the cross, quoting part, if not all, of Psalm 22, asked God the Father, both in its Aramaic original and its English translation, “why” He, the Father, had forsaken Him, the Son. Given the mystery of the Holy Trinity, we may not be able to understand how one Blessed Person could forsake another Blessed Person with Whom He shares the same Divine essence (or nature, or substance), but we may be able to relate, in some small way, to what it feels like to be forsaken, though what God the Son’s being forsaken by God the Father felt like surely is beyond our imagination. Yet, more to the point, the “why” question that Jesus asked has an answer that we can understand and do not need to imagine, arguably the same answer to the “why” questions that we so often want to ask God, when we wrongly think of ourselves as forsaken by Him. The answer is because of our sin. The distress and death that we experience are because of our sin. The distress and death that Jesus experienced were because of—not His, but—our sin. Jesus suffered and died the death that we deserved. Jesus suffered and died in our place. Jesus suffered and died for us, that we are not cast into the outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth for all eternity (Matthew 8:12; 22:13; 25:30) but are welcomed into the marriage feast of the Lamb in His Kingdom that has no end (Matthew 7:21-22; 25:11; Revelation 19:9).
Collect for the Fourth Word, and Hymn 447:10-12
The Fifth Word
After this, Jesus, knowing that all was now finished, said (to fulfill the Scripture), “I thirst.” (John 19:28 ESV)
As I get older, I find myself drinking less water than I used to drink, and I usually attribute my drinking less water to my not being as thirsty as I used to be, even though you and I probably need to drink not less but more water, as we get older. All sorts of medical conditions can affect our sense of thirst, and, somewhat similarly, Bible commentators come up with all sorts of explanations for Jesus’s on the cross saying “I thirst”. Of course, as we heard, the Divinely-inspired St. John explains that Jesus said “I thirst” in order to fulfill the Scripture, seemingly not Scripture about His saying “I thirst” but Scripture, such as Psalm 69 verse 21, about His being given sour wine to drink, likely as a result of His expressing His thirst, even if in some sense He wanted the sour wine only in order to be able to call out with a loud voice the sixth and seventh statements from the cross. Psalm 69 is mentioned earlier in St. John’s Gospel account, when Jesus drove out of the temple both those selling oxen and sheep and pigeons and those exchanging money, and the evangelist says that Jesus’s disciples later remembered the Psalm’s saying, “Zeal for Your house will consume me” (Psalm 69:9). Perhaps ironically, in that Psalm, David says describes waters’ having come up to his neck, and the flood’s sweeping over him, his being weary with crying out, and yet his throat’s being parched (Psalm 69:1-3). And, all that long before English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge put on the lips of the “ancient mariner” the “rhyme”, “Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink”. The Collect and hymn stanzas that we pray and sing next take the “thirst” mostly figuratively of Jesus and of us, but we certainly do not want to ignore that the all-powerful Son of God in the flesh of the man Jesus literally thirsted as He had one day at noon in Samaria (John 4:6), nor do we want to ignore His offer of living water, of which we drink and are never thirsty again, and which, He said that day, becomes in us a spring of living water welling up to eternal life (John 4:14; confer John 7:37-38; Revelation 7:16, with reference to Isaiah 49:10).
Collect for the Fifth Word, and Hymn 447:13-15
The Sixth Word
A jar full of sour wine stood there, so they put a sponge full of the sour wine on a hyssop branch and held it to his mouth. 30 When Jesus had received the sour wine, he said, “It is finished,” … (John 19:29-30a ESV)
“Making whole” depositors of maybe 200 billion dollars in a bailout of two regional banks and making special loans available to other banks, forgiving maybe 400 billion dollars in student loan debt, adding to a budget deficit for this fiscal year of more than one trillion dollars, adding to a current national debt of more than 31 trillion dollars. We talk about leaving the debt to our children or grandchildren, but they may be just as unable to pay it in full as we are unable to pay it in full. Then there are our spiritual debts: the relatively smaller amounts that we owe to one another, like one‑hundred times a laborer’s daily wage, and the relatively larger amount that we owe to God, like ten-thousand times twenty years of a laborer’s wages (Matthew 18:23-35). The Divinely‑inspired psalmist says, “Truly no man can ransom another or give to God the price of his life, for the ransom of their life is costly and can never suffice, that he should live on forever and never see the pit” (Psalm 49:7-9 ESV). So, Jesus in His ministry rhetorically asked, “What shall a man give in return for his soul?” (Matthew 16:26 ESV; confer Mark 8:37). But, the Son of Man came to serve by giving His one life as a ransom for all others (Matthew 20:28; Mark 10:45; confer 1 Timothy 2:6), including you and me. The Son of God took on human flesh so that He could die and redeem us human beings, and, because He was God, His death was sufficient payment for the sins of all. As we turn to Him in repentance and faith, His death on the cross makes us whole and forgives our sins, giving us peace and joy. In turn, as often as they sin against us, we forgive our brothers and sisters in Christ from our hearts. Not sighed in defeat but shouted in victory, Jesus’s sixth statement from the cross marks the debt that was impossible for us to pay as “paid in full”. “It is finished!”
Collect for the Sixth Word, and Hymn 447:16-18
The Seventh Word
Then Jesus, calling out with a loud voice, said, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit!” And having said this he breathed his last. (Luke 23:46 ESV)
In our Midweek Lenten Vespers services this Church Year, among other things, we heard St. Matthew’s full account of our Lord’s Passion, and we considered five different answers to the question “Who handed-over Jesus for you?” The fifth and final answer was “God the Son”, and, in considering that answer, we noted that, as St. John’s account of our Lord’s Passion puts it, Jesus, after bowing His head in death, “gave up His spirit”, which statement can be understood as Jesus’s handing-over the Holy Spirit, something that we normally think of happening, as St. Luke describes with other words, on Pentecost (Acts 2:1-4; confer Luke 24:49). So, St. Luke’s account of Jesus’s seventh and final statement from the cross, about Jesus’s committing His spirit into the Father’s hands, perhaps is not a “parallel” account of the same thing but a separate statement about something different, specifically about Jesus’s “placing before” or “commending”, Jesus’s soul, if not His whole life, to God the Father. Jesus was a good Jew and so likely would have regularly in the evening prayed not just that fifth verse but all of Psalm 31, which served as an evening prayer for the Jews. Like Jesus’s on the cross praying to His Father, St. Stephen in being stoned to death prayed to Jesus, asking for Jesus to receive Stephen’s spirit (Acts 7:59). And we, to whom God gives the Holy Spirit in the preaching of His Gospel and the handing-out of His Sacraments, morning and evening pray with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther’s Small Catechism, commending ourselves, bodies and souls, into our Heavenly Father’s hands. As the Father did with Jesus, truly God will receive us, care for us, and preserve us. And, when we die, God the Father, Who created our bodies, God the Son, Who by His blood redeemed our bodies, and God the Holy Spirit, Who by Holy Baptism sanctified our bodies to be His temple, will keep our bodies to the day of the resurrection of all flesh (Blessing at Committal, Lutheran Service Book: Agenda, 130).
Collect for the Seventh Word, and Hymn 447:19-21
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +