Healing in Three Voices

The last words someone speaks before they go to meet their maker can carry a great deal of significance. Sometimes those final words reflect the faith of the person who uttered them. The last words of John Paul II have a childlike simplicity: “Let me go to the father’s house.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s last words before his execution by the Nazis have a courageous, almost defiant quality: “This is the end, for me the beginning of life.” Henry Ward Beecher, the prominent clergyman who struggled with doubt throughout his life, expressed uncertainty even in his last breath: “Now,” he said, “comes the mystery.”

Of course, not all last words have such gravity to them. In his final moment, Groucho Marx is supposed to have said: “Die my dear? Why that’s the last thing I’ll do.” The wit and writer Oscar Wilde, passing away in a dingy Paris hotel room that offended his aesthetic sensibilities, left this world saying: “Either that wallpaper goes or I do.” And the story is told that Lady Astor, recovering briefly from unconsciousness and seeing her family gathered around her, asked “Am I dying or is this my birthday?”

Whether full of gravity or levity, we think of last words as having special meaning. Perhaps that is why the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa made this deathbed request of those gathered around him: “Tell them I said something.” In light of the fact that his last recorded words are “Tell them I said something” it appears they may have taken him a bit too literally.

So it’s not surprising that we attach particular importance to the last words of Jesus Christ – words spoken from the Cross itself. Matthew and Mark record those words as the cry “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthanai,” or “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Luke recounts them as “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” And John captures them in the simple three-word phrase “It is finished.” This raises an interpretive problem because, in a strictly logical sense, only one of these things can be true. Only one of these statements can be the actual final words of Jesus Christ. He can’t have said all these things in his last breath. Or can He?

Years ago I read a book by a renowned biblical archeologist that helped me understand a fundamental truth about how people in the ancient Near East thought about matters – and particularly religious matters. This scholar pointed out that our thought processes are heavily, although unconsciously, influenced by Greek philosophy. So, for example, without even knowing it we follow Aristotle’s principles of logic whenever we think about something—even when that something is God.

When we talk and think about who God is and what God does we try to follow the same logic we follow elsewhere in life. As a result, when we reach a conclusion about God we necessarily exclude other, logically inconsistent, conclusions we might otherwise entertain. To put it bluntly, we allow logic to limit our holy imagination.

But the people of the ancient Near East didn’t think in these terms. They could imagine things about God that would appear to us internally inconsistent. They were not bound by the laws of Aristotelian logic.

Years ago, I witnessed a delightful contemporary example of non-Aristotelian thinking. An itinerant preacher came to the University of Michigan campus, perched himself on an outdoor concrete bench, and began sermonizing to the passing students. I disagreed with much of what he had to say, but he did have a wonderful moment. A skeptical undergraduate, no doubt thinking himself extraordinarily clever, called out this question: “Can God make a rock so heavy he cannot lift it?” Without missing a beat, the preacher responded: “God can make a rock so heavy He cannot lift it. And He can lift it if He wants to.”

As I say, the people of the ancient Near East – like this preacher – were not constrained by the limitations of formal logic. And I suspect God isn’t constrained by them, either. I assume that the God who created order also controls order. It therefore seems completely plausible to me that Jesus Christ, the perfect expression of God in this world, said more than one thing to us in his final words. I find nothing astonishing in this. I take it as just another example of how the theological takes off when the logical comes to the end of the runway.

Of course, a simpler – but no less compelling – explanation presents itself. It has nothing to do with logical possibility or theological plausibility, but everything to do with psychological reality. The psychological reality to which I refer is simple enough: we tend to hear whatever is most important to us. Perhaps, therefore, the people gathered at the foot of the Cross heard different things because they needed to hear different things. Perhaps the gospels record different final words because individual listeners experienced these various statements as if they were Christ’s final words.

The text provides some support for this explanation. After all, these words speak in three very different voices. We can understand how listeners with varying needs and perspectives could attach more significance to one of them than to the others.

These different voices do share a common context: all of them come at the ultimate moment of the Passion. All of them therefore relate to the magnificent reconciliation that occurred by God’s grace and through the death of Jesus Christ. As Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams puts it, Jesus’s death is “the gift that once and for all makes peace.” Or, to phrase matters a little differently, the death of Jesus is the gift that, once and for all, makes healing possible.

“Father, into your hands I commend my spirit” speaks in the voice of holy surrender. These words call us to give everything over to God – right down to our spirit, right down to our ineffable essence. When we surrender everything, when we place in God’s hands all that we have and all that we are, then healing can begin.

“It is finished” speaks in the voice of gracious duty. These words call us to find purpose in our lives, to pursue that mission with all our heart and mind and soul, and to complete the work God gives us to do. When we commit our efforts to what matters, when we live lives of love and forgiveness and praise and devotion, then healing can begin.

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” speaks in the voice of sacred suffering. These words remind us that even in our times of brokenness and questioning – especially in our times of brokenness and questioning – we must continue to reach toward God. When we turn to God at all times and in all things, even amid our confusion and desperation, then healing can begin.

More than two thousand years ago, on an obscure hill in an empire’s outpost, words fell from a Cross. Those words spoke in different voices – so they might offer hope and healing to each and all. Those voices echoed through time and resound to this very day, in this very place, in our very lives. As it is written: “Those who have ears to hear, let them hear.”

Amen.