The Last Words of Jesus: A Joint Reflection

By Dr. Brian Bantum, Divinity '03
Assistant Professor of Theology
Seattle Pacific University

In Christ’s last words I am reminded of the observation of one theologian regarding Christ, that there are no words outside the Word... In reflecting upon these last words of Christ I am stopped. My speech ends for a moment as I begin to hear how my own words and my own hopes clang against Christ’s words spoken to me and about me, to humanity and about humanity. But rather than being driven to remain in silence, I am compelled to sing. To sing a song that is broken and out of tune even as I seek to sing with these words spoken to us, spoken about us. As I sing, in my tone-deaf desperation to hear the tune, I am left to humbly sing of this…

Only within Christ’s words of forgiveness (“forgive them…”) am I told what I do not know (…for they know not.)

Only within Christ’s words do I find the possibility of God’s presence, of a possibility fulfilled (…you will be with me.)

Only within Christ’s words do I find kinship, a kinship reordered and returned to me, a community gathered together at the foot of the cross (…behold your son, behold your mother.)

Only in Christ’s words do I find God taking my desolation and hopelessness into himself (…why have you forsaken me?)

Only in Christ’s words do I find my own thirst and do I discover the manifold ways I sought to quench my own thirst (I thirst)

Only in Christ’s words do I find my own completion (It is finished)

Only in Christ’s words do I find my end (To you I commit my spirit.)

These last words of Christ draw us not to the finality of a moment, but to the utter completeness of Christ’s words, of the presence of all of his words within these few words. In these brief utterances we find ourselves bound up together in his words concerning us, in his words for us, in his words within us. Let us receive the Word broken for us, the Word broken within us, that our words my sound within the manger of Christ’s body, declaring the depth of his love, the profundity and mystery of his life, God’s Word to us.

The Last Words of Jesus: GODFORSAKEN

Dr. J. Kameron Carter
Associate Professor of Theology and Black Church Studies
Duke Divinity School

From the sixth hour until the ninth hour darkness came over all the land. About the ninth hour Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?”—which means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (St. Matt. 27.45–46)

Jesus’ life was a becoming. It is constituted by which it was going, not by what was behind. Thus, “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” The life of Jesus was movement. It was ever pressing towards the moment spoken of in this, the first of Jesus’ sayings from the Cross. The moment of the Cross, and thus this saying from the Cross, was not superadded to Jesus’ identity. It was not some additional to who he was. No, not all. The Cross, the moment of Jesus’ death, is an expression of his identity as God with Us, his identity as Emmanuel (Isa. 7:14). He is the God, who in and as this man in solidarity with us, has stepped into the human condition, into our becoming. Again, “the Word became flesh.” And now from the Cross we have a new vantage point on our condition. It is one of Godforsakenness.

But what is Godforsakenness? Many a Christian thinker has tried to plumb its meaning. But perhaps more than anyone else, Harriet A. Jacobs, author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)—according to many literature scholars, this is the first female authored slave narrative—gives us some sense of what Godforsakenness means. Her experience of New World slavery and sexual exploitation through rape offers us something of a parable of Godforsakennes.

For 7 year, Jacobs was confined to a coffin-sized roof-top garret or attic to avoid the sexual advances of her master, Dr. Norcomb. Her only contact with the outside world was the sight afforded her through a loophole in the roof to still keep an eye on her children, still slaves themselves. This “loophole of retreat,” as Jacobs called her place of incarceration, was a place of abandonment, of Godforsakenness. Indeed, Jacobs invokes the scriptural language about Jesus’ own death and entombment to describe her situation.

I contend that Jacobs’ story of her experience as a slave girl, her experience of social death poised on the brink of actual death, gives us a window into the social processes, and thus is a parable, of “Godforsakenness.” It points to what Godforsakenness looks like on the ground, as the hidden reality of the everyday life of slaves. Godforsakenness is the situation of abject abandonment, the situation in which identity is constituted through hiddenness, invisibility, and death. Godforsakenness is to have one’s identity bounded on all sides by death. One ever stands on the precipice of death.

It is precisely this situation that God, as the man Jesus of Nazareth, entered into, for this is the condition that has befallen the creature in its will to be like the Creator. What we hear in this first word from the Cross is God having taken up this condition on our behalf.

We rejoice, however, that this is the not the last of Jesus’ words, and thus Godforsakeness, while being taken seriously, is not the final word, the final verdict on the human condition. There are yet six more words to be heard from the Cross. With these words we further hear of God’s entry in Jesus into our condition. God wills to see our condition through to the end, even unto death, and thereby drain our condition of the poison of death that has come to mark it. God wills to carve out a space of life in the tight spaces of death, in the spaces of Godforsakenness.

The Last Words of Jesus: AT THE FOOT OF THE CROSS

By Dr. William C. Turner, Jr.

Associate Professor of the Practice of Homiletics

Duke Divinity School

The Sayings known as the "Seven Last Words" are recorded by the evangelists as words spoken from the cross in his passion. During the earthly ministry Jesus was moved with compassion toward the world. This is a world the Father has not abandoned. This is a world that God loves. The Son is not unmoved; rather, he is sent in the Spirit that creation might be restored to communion with God.

There is no scene that more clearly this passion, and there is no word that articulates it with more force than the "Cry of Dereliction," namely, "My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me." [Mark 15:34]

This scene is grasped in bold and glaring proportions by a member of Mt. Level Missionary Baptist Church, where I serve as pastor. She has depicted Jesus in that moment in a powerful portrait. The space on the canvas is accented by pushing the two brigands who hanged with him into the rear. Pushed forward is the figure of the Son. The face is scarred and disfigured by thorns, and it is not brought forth with the sort of clarity we expect from a camera shot. It is almost hidden in darkness. Drops of blood are shown coming from the face. At the foot of the cross one can see blood flowing from the nail scarred hands and feet and the pierced side.

Near the foot of the cross one sees the lamb with marks of slaughter upon it. Fissures are in the earth all around, and three women are kneeling in horror. No men are to be found. The clouds are shot through with streaks of lightning. At the same time they break with fragments from the gospel.

The fragment that gripped me with fresh force was from the charge made against him--that he is the "friend of taxcollectors and sinners." Was it for crimes that I had done that he groaned upon the tree? Did he die because he made himself my friend?

Surely this was a charge made against Jesus by his enemies. He was charged further with being a winebibber and a glutton. He was charged with blasphemy for saying he was the Son of God. In the words of the apostle, "he became a curse on the tree." He bore the reproach of creation, and in particular, the seed of Adam.

Forsakenness on the cross was the deepest dimension of death. Cut off from eternal communion, he bore our transgressions in his body. He was numbered with the transgressors. But in his passion he restored communion, bearing the weight and guilt of our sin, but also by returning in the Spirit to communion with the Father. In that return he carried friends with him.

We see mercies breaking forth from the clouds. It is for proclaimers of the gospel to tell this Good News to the world around us. In the midst of pain, suffering, disease, hurt, and oppression, the mercies of God continue to break in healing streams that flow from the wounded side. But in the broken body of the Lord, mercies stream to those who will receive them and are extended in the proclamation of this good word of life.

These mercies can be seen in acts of love for victims of natural and human disaster. We can see these streams of mercy in gestures of our republic to care for the sick, the helpless, and the dying. Despite the dark clouds and the dim days, the mercies continue to burst.

"Ye fearful saints fresh courage take, the clouds ye so much dread are big with mercies and shall break in blessings o'er your heads."

Let us pray for those who dare position themselves at the foot of the cross. Let us pray for those are chosen to bear the cross with Jesus, and those who for their love will not abandon him. Even while we pause to await the proclamation of the glorious triumph of the resurrection, let us not neglect to see the mercies of God that come to us from the identification of our savior with us on Calvary and the healing that comes from the cross.

The Last Words of Jesus: I THIRST

By Dr. Esther Acolatse
Assistant Research Professor
of Pastoral Theology and Global Christianity
Duke Divinity School

Of all the words spoken on the cross that day, these words were the only ones that were related to the person of Jesus, as it were the only egocentric words. All others were exocentric, done in fulfillment of his calling as the son of Man who comes to take away the sin of human kind and fulfill his Father’s will. These are the last but one words from the cross of one who hung bruised and burned for the sins of others. It was as if at the lowest point in his life, abased to the lowest levels, his soul takes center stage and divinity bursts forth in him until the actual act of dying begin.

First he forgives directly the soldiers who mock, beat, and nailed his battered body to the cross, but then that forgiveness extends to all for whom this cruel at was necessitated, Jews and Gentiles alike.

Next he promises a dying penitent rest and peace and paradise. He had not broken faith with his Father despite the suffering, for this thief had heard him call God Father, when he asked God to forgive those who ill treated him.

He fulfils his filial duties by entrusting his mother to the disciple whom he loved the best. He gives his mother a son in place of the one that is being lost that day, for even on that cross he was still her little child. This is only the second time Jesus calls his mother woman- at his first miracle and at this his final miracle.

When he feels the weight of sin on himself through the severing of the bond from Abba, he is the obedient servant of the Lord, sensing the absence of fellowship and longing for the spiritual symbiotic relationship. But that rift was the signal that the work of grace was being done and he enters into his body rather than a spiritual plane to accomplish this act of dying so that it may count for us. He returns to his body and in this body he declares, “It is Finished” and commends his spirit to his God.

“I Thirst”, says the living water, the one who announces that all who thirst may come and drink freely of himself. My people say “Se kwatrikwa se obe kye wo ntuma, bisa ni din” when naked promises you cloth, ask for its name. With what shall we quench the thirst of water?

The human body is made up of sixty percent water, and about eight-three percent of our blood is water. He bore our sins in his body on the cross; his blood poured out depleted him of water. I THIRST, says the Lord, your savior. With what shall we quench his thirst?

May be we can join him in his thirst, at least in thirsting after righteousness, justice and peace this Easter season, but in our bodies, the place of our conscious acts, in our bodies, the place we share with others intimately or otherwise and in a way that translates into fullness of life for other bodies.