The passage: “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.”
Neither St Matthew nor St Mark records any words of our Lord after the Eloi. With St Luke they tell of a loud cry and the giving up of the ghost; St Luke alone puts between them “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit,” and he omits the Eloi. St John records neither, nor the loud cry; only that after the vinegar Jesus said “It is finished,” bowed his head and gave up the ghost.
Will the Lord ever tell us why he cried so? Relief at the touch of death? Victory? Gladness that he had endured to the end? Or did the Father look on him in answer to his My God, and the blessedness make him cry aloud because he could not smile? Or was it the last wrench of pain before repose? Perhaps all in one. No books or words of thinking men could express as much as lay unspoken in that cry. Now he had made his Father Lord not by the might of making and loving alone, but by right of devotion and deed of love. Now inward sonship and glad sacrifice should be born in men’s hearts, for the divine obedience was perfected by suffering. He had been among his brethren what he would have them be, doing for them what he would have them do for God and each other. God was henceforth inside and beneath them as well as around and above, suffering with and for them, giving them all he had, his very life-being, what he best loved and best was. And the mighty story ends with a cry.
So the cry meant It is finished and Father, into your hands I commend my spirit. Every highest human act gives back to God what he first gave us: “You gave me this; here is your gift; I send my spirit home.” Every act of worship holds up to God what he has made us: “Look, Lord, feel with me in this bounty of yours, my being. I am your child and can thank you only by lifting up the overflow of your life and crying, It is yours; it is mine. I am yours, and therefore I am mine.” The vast operations of the spiritual and physical worlds alike are a turning again to the source.
Commending his spirit at the close of his life only summed up what our Lord had done all his life. He had offered himself all the years, and so had lived the divine life. Every morning when he went out before day, every evening when he lingered on the night-lapt mountain after his friends had gone, he offered himself to his Father in loving words, high thoughts and speechless feelings; and between times he did the same in deed, toward his fellows, in loving word, helping thought and healing action. The way to worship God while daylight lasts is to work; the only “divine service” is helping our fellows.
I do not offer this commending of our spirits as a duty, which would turn our highest privilege into a burden. I want to show it is the simplest, blessedest thing in the human world.
The Human Being may say: “Am I going to sleep, to be helpless and thoughtless, perhaps weak of will and scant of conscience in my dreams? Father, into your hands I commend my spirit; I give myself back to you; refresh me, make me over again. Am I going into the day’s turmoil, with its temptations to be less honourable, faithful, kind or diligent than the Ideal Man would have me? Father, into your hands. Am I about to do a good deed? Of all times then, Father, into your hands, lest the enemy have me now. Am I about to do a hard duty, refusing a friend’s request or urging a neighbour’s conscience? Father, into your hands. Am I in pain, with illness shutting out the glad visions of a healthy brain and bringing troubled, untrue ones? Take my spirit, Lord, and see that it has no more to bear than it can bear. Am I going to die? You know from your Son’s cry how terrible that is, and if it does not come to me as terribly as to him, think how poor I am to bear it beside him. I do not know what the struggle means, for of the thousands who pass through it daily not one enlightens his neighbour left behind; but shall I not long with agony for one breath of your air, and not receive it? Shall I not be torn asunder with dying? I will question no more: Father, into your hands I commend my spirit. It is your business, not mine. You will know every shade of my suffering and care for me with your perfect fatherhood, which makes my sonship and wraps it round. As a child I could bear great pain with my father’s arm about me; how much nearer to my soul can your hands come, with a comfort I have never imagined, for how shall my imagination overtake your swift heart? I care not for the pain so long as my spirit is strong, and into your hands I commend that spirit. If your love, which is better than life, receives it, surely your tenderness will make it great.”
So may the Human Being speak to himself.
Think, brothers and sisters: we walk in the air of an eternal fatherhood. Every uplifting of the heart is a looking up to The Father, and graciousness and truth are around, above, beneath and in us. When we are least worthy, most tempted, hardest and unkindest, let us still commend our spirits into his hands; where else dare we send them? How an earthly father would love a child who crept into his room with an angry, troubled face and sat at his feet, saying, “I feel so naughty, papa, and I want to get good”! Would he say, “Go away, be good, and then come to me”? Shall we think God would send us away if we came so, or be displeased we came, even angry as Jonah? If we, being evil, know how to give good gifts to our children, will God not give us his Spirit when we ask? Will no heavenly dew fall cool on the hot anger, no raindrop on the dry selfishness, no sunlight on the cloudy hopelessness? Bread at least will be given, not a stone; water, not vinegar mingled with gall.
Nor is there anything we can ask for ourselves that we may not ask for another. We may commend any brother or sister to the common fatherhood, and there will be moments when, filled with the Lord’s spirit, nothing will ease our hearts of their love but commending all our brothers and sisters to the one Father. We shall never know the rest in the Father’s hands, the rest of the Holy Sepulchre, which the Lord knew when the agony of death was over and he entered the regions where there is only life, and so all that is not music is silence (for all noise comes of the conflict of Life and Death), until the fatherhood is revealed to us in the love of the brothers. He cannot be our father except as he is theirs, and if we do not see him as their father we cannot know him as ours. We shall never know him aright until we rejoice for our race that he is the Father. If we do not love our brother whom we have seen, how can we love God whom we have not seen? To rest at last even in those hands into which the Lord commended his spirit, we must already have learned to love our neighbour as ourselves.