Father, Into Your Hands I Commend My Spirit

 

Ezekiel 37:1-14

Romans 8:6-11

St. Luke 23:44-49

Ezekiel, the first human that the Bible calls “Son of Man,” stands in an empty valley, strewn with the scattered bones of a battle lost long ago. “Son of Man, can these bones live?” asks the voice that Ezekiel knows belongs to God. “Lord, you know,” Ezekiel says, judiciously, thus avoiding giving the wrong answer.

Bones rattle and fly together. Flesh appears. Fully formed human beings stand, but they are silent, unmoving. Then, the wind blows. The wind of the Spirit. The breath of God.

And they live.

In Hebrew, the word ruach means “wind,” or “spirit,” or “breath.” That is the word that is used here. The source of human life, the Bible tells us in Genesis, is God’s breath breathed into our nostrils. From that same Divine Breath, we receive God’s Spirit to form our own spirits, our essential selves. Our spirit, our breath, our lives, come from God—God has breathed into us a piece of God’s essence. Our life can come from God alone. Our Spirit belongs to God alone. We belong to God.

Into thy hands we commend our spirits.

Jesus, the human most fully deserving the title “Son of Man,” hangs desolate on a cross, a broken symbol of a battle He could never win. There’s a question that no one dares ask, because the answer is so obvious: “Son of Man, can your bones live?” Of course not. This is true and ultimate death. His pneuma, the Greek word for spirit that is used here in John, is going to leave Him. Pneuma means the same thing in Greek that ruach means in Hebrew. Wind, Spirit, Breath. The breath of God that gives us life. The Spirit of God that gives us our spirit, our essential selves. We know from Ezekiel that the Wind of the spirit can give the dead life. Life belongs to God. But what about when the life is gone, and the spirit leaves? Can God be trusted with our life AFTER we die?

A couple of weeks ago I told you that Jesus’ words, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me” were taken directly from Psalm 22. His Jewish listeners would have known the reference and it would have evoked certain responses from them. The same is true here. When Jesus says, “Into your hands I commend my Spirit,” He is quoting from Psalm 31. The verse he’s quoting is often rendered as “Into your hand I entrust my life.” And indeed that’s really the sense of it. In death, Jesus is entrusting His life to God. His life—the breath of God. His spirit—God’s essence living in Him.

He’s letting it all go, and entrusting it to God, because He believes that even in death, his ruach, his pneuma, His life, will be in the best hands of all when they are in the hands of God.

One of the great challenges that we all face is surrendering our lives fully into God’s hands. There comes a point in illness, for instance, or in a prolonged process of dying, when there’s nothing you can do anymore. That’s very hard for most of us. We’ve defined ourselves by what we do all of our lives. We even believe that God judges us by what we do. So when the time comes when we can’t do anything for ourselves anymore, we feel ashamed—we feel frustrated—we feel vulnerable. Often people fight it to the last minute, trying to take control of something that is ultimately out of their hands. It can make illness and dying miserable for the patient, and miserable for those who love her.

Jesus has come to that point. Death is inevitable. He has no choice but to surrender to God.

Except, that’s not quite true. That would be true for you and me, but it wasn’t quite true for Him. In Matthew 26: 53-54, Jesus tells Pontius Pilate, “Or do you think that I cannot appeal to My Father, and He will at once put at My disposal more than twelve legions of angels? But then, how will the scriptures be fulfilled, which say it must happen this way?” Jesus could have, at any moment, even right up to His last dying breath, called down an army of angels to defend Himself. He had an authority you and I do not have, to call on God to perform a miracle for Him. But He chooses not to, because, ironically, it would have proved that He did not have faith in God. He didn’t trust God. He didn’t believe that, even in death, His life would be safe in the hands of God.

I said a moment ago that Jesus’ fellow Jews would have recognized that He was quoting Psalm 31. They would have known that Psalm 31 is what is known as a psalm of deliverance. God will save me from the troubles I’m facing, is the theme of the psalm. For Jesus to pray, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit,” would be an extraordinary statement to make right at the edge of death, right at the point when no earthly hope was left. It would mean that you believe that you will live eternally with God. It would be an assertion of life after death.

It’s important to remember that the concept of life after death was hardly universal among Jews at the time of Jesus. Remember that Jesus got into a debate with the Sadducees about whether the resurrection of the dead even existed. Until about 200 years before the time of Jesus, most Jews took it for granted that after you died, you were dead. Concepts of the afterlife were nonexistent, vague, or vaguely unpleasant. And even today, the majority of Jews does not believe in life after death, but believe that your responsibility is to live with God faithfully in this life. And that’s an extremely noble ethic. Sometimes it seems too many Christians don’t do right because it’s right, or because they love God and neighbor, but because it’s their ticket to heaven. Not exactly an unselfish motivation!

By asserting that He entrusts His life to God even in Death, Jesus is affirming that there is a resurrection of the dead—that life after death exists—because God is sovereign Lord even over death, and in God’s sovereign Lordship God also loves us and will not let us down, or let us go. Because of God’s Lordship over everything, and because God loves us, our lives are safe in God’s hands even after death. As the Presbyterian Brief Statement of Faith puts it: “In life and in death, we belong to God.” That’s our whole hope in a nutshell. In life and in death we belong to God. Therefore, as John Calvin says, “in dying let us not hesitate, after Christ’s example, to entrust our souls to God.”

But we’re not done with this theme yet. As I said earlier, as we are sick and dying, we often have a hard time entrusting our lives to God. The reason is that we also have a hard time entrusting our lives to God when we’re well and able. Why is it we judge ourselves by what we do? Why is it that we Protestants, who affirm that we are saved by God’s grace through faith, and not by works, also have a Protestant Work Ethic? That’s not to say that work is wrong, at all. But what has happened is we have developed an ethic of self-justification, rather than trusting our lives over to God. And so we always have a hard time with trusting; we always have a hard time letting go of power and control we always have a hard time surrendering our control of our lives over into the hand of God.

And so it’s important to look not only at how Jesus dies, but how He lives. During and after His arrest, Jesus refuses to resist His accusers, other than simply to state what He stands for, because He has surrendered Himself to the will of God. Now, we will all immediately say, “I’m not Jesus: how’m I supposed to know that some terrible thing I’m going through is the will of God I’m supposed to surrender to?”

I can’t answer that except to say, do what Jesus did, and Jesus practiced.

From the beginning of His ministry to the terrible moment of His death, we see a man dedicated, first of all, to seeking the will of God, and second of all, to doing it to the best of His ability. It always involved risk, sacrifice, prayer, and service to others. Those are good clues that you’re entrusting your day-to-day life to God—when you do things that take risks and make sacrifices for the sake of others and for the sake of God. It could be as simple as serving a meal at Samaritan House when you’d prefer to do something else, or making a pledge to the church or to a charity that stretches you and makes you hurt a little, or conceding that someone else may be right. But these little, but consistent actions that force us to surrender our control and to trust that God will make things right begin to add up, and increase our willingness, and our ability, to trust God and seek God’s will when times are hard and difficult.

The point is this: Jesus didn’t only place His life and being in the hands of God at death. He did it in His life. Let’s do the same thing. Let’s affirm not only at death, but in our lives, that we belong to God.

Into God’s hands let us entrust our spirits, right here and right now.