Andrew McGowan - Seven Last Words: Cross and Creation

Seven Last Words

Cross and Creation

Andrew M c Gowan

Illustrations by Bettina Clowney

I

Prologue

E ach evangelist offers a similar account of what Jesus did on the cross, but a somewhat distinctive account of what he said. This devotion based on the seven sayings gleaned from the different narratives thus embodies the character of the gospel and the Gospelsa diversity appropriate to the variety of human experience, and a commonality appropriate to the depth of human need.

Seven sayings. The medieval Christians who first excerpted and counted them thus doubtless saw something in this number itself. Sevens occur across Scripture and tradition as significant groups and sequences; seven gifts of the Spirit, seven virtues and vices, seven days of creation not least. Of these seven sayings the great Franciscan theologian St Bonaventure said:

Our Vine uttered seven words while he was raised upon the cross. They are, as it were, seven leaves that are ever green. Or if you prefer, your Bridegroom can be thought of as a kind of lute, which is an instrument that consists of a piece of wood shaped like a cross. His body, in place of the strings, is stretched across the wood, but the seven words are the individual strings ( Vitis Mystica ).

Other medieval commentators drew parallels between the seven words from the cross and seven wounds sustained by Jesuscounting them as the four nail piercings, the crown of thorns, the lash, and the spear.

But the seven days and acts of creation invite particular comparison and reflection with these words. Each of Jesuss seven words from the cross can be understood as a creative act, as a new divine work. In the narrative of Genesis chapter , God also creates by utterance seven times: let there be... Here too, Jesusthe divine creative Word made fleshspeaks, and the world is made anew.

The idea that Jesus does anything on the cross is remarkable, because of the nature of a cross. A cross of course is for suffering; but in particular it was designed for immobility, constraint, and passivity. The anguish of the cross was, as much as or more than the agony of the nails, a matter of being prevented from acting, being rendered an object and not a subject, becoming a mere thing to be acted upon.

And yet this cross is for us Jesuss great work, his creative masterpiece. More than any miraculous exercise of power over nature or human infirmity recorded in the Gospels, more than any profound teaching we have from him in longer and challenging words than these, it is this story, this time and place, where he does his greatest work. Bound and nailed tight, he remakes the world and us, and as in the beginning, creates by word.

. Bonaventure, The Mystical Vine: A Treatise on the Passion of Our Lord , Fleur de Lys Series (Riverside, IL: Akenside Press, 2016 ), .

TWO

J esus from the cross remakes the world by Word, as in the beginning God makes all things. In the first saying from the cross, Jesus shouldered the difficult burden of forgiveness, praying for his tormentors. In the second word of his seven, his creative voice draws back from the audience of the jeering crowds to the strange intimacy of a conversation between three dying men.

While the mockery of Jesus by onlookers and/or his fellow-sufferers is reported in all the Gospels, Lukes version analyzes the action more finely:

One of the criminals [Luke never calls them thieves interestinglytheir crimes are not specified] who were hanged there kept deriding him and saying, Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us! But the other rebuked him, saying, Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed have been condemned justly, for we are getting what we deserve for our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong. Then he said, Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom. He replied, Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise. (Luke :)

Paradise. The Israelites borrowed the word from their Persian neighbors and one-time overlords; it refers to a walled pleasure-garden, such as ancient near Eastern rulers might have enjoyed, and which most of their subjects could only have imagined or peeked into. The word occurs a few times in the Old Testament; in the Song of Songs for instance the lover calls his beloved a garden enclosed, and a paradise of pomegranates.

And yes, a paradise is also that sort of place depicted in the Genesis creation story of the first humans, that famous Garden of Eden, a park where out of the ground the Lord God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food (Gen :). To be in Paradise is to hear God walking in the garden in the cool of the evening, to be in the presence of the tree of life, to be naked and not ashamed.

There is no starker contrast with the Golgotha experienced by these crucified men, deprived of all food, drink, and care of any kind, bodies hung as strange fruit on trees of death, and naked, not innocently but stripped and exposed for the sake of shame and degradation.

The strangely faith-filled criminal asked to be remembered in Jesuss kingdom, but Jesuss response is that he will be with him in Paradise. Jesus brings these two things, kingdom and Paradise, together.

The whole of the Gospel has been full of the preaching of a kingdom by Jesus, the kingdom of God. He has told parables that explain what it is like, taught his disciples to pray for it to come, embodied in his own actions the kingly authority of justice and love that mark this true ruler of Israel, a new Davidic king. This kingdom proclaimed by Jesus was a future hope, an end of all things, the point towards which human history was going, where the justice and love of God would be made real, and which Jesuss followers hopedand hope stillhis arrival and his mission had inaugurated, an end of suffering, but an end.

So Jesus answers the criminals desire for the kingdom with a promise of Paradise, offering an assurance of Gods love that goes beyond death, and that is available even to the least likely of us. But he does so by drawing the hope for the end and the remembrance of the beginning together in his body on the cross as one thing, creating Paradise from Golgotha, a garden out of what sounds, from its name, like a barren rocky outcrop. So the promise to the criminal and to us is not only of assurance of Gods love beyond death at the end, but that the end is the whole creation renewed, a vision of humankind and the natural order restored to the beauty of that ancient garden.

One man jeered at Jesus and asked, if he were the Messiah, the Davidic king, to get them down from the cross. Another man asks to be remembered in Jesuss messianic kingdom. We know nothing else about these two and why one speaks so differently from the other; but Jesuss promise to the latter is, because he asks for it, that he has the chance to go back; to go back, as though to begin again, to shed the burden of his lifes pain and wrongdoing, and to be renewed like the flowers of a garden that come again each year mysteriously.

We know nothing of his life, but we do know our own. How many of us do not long to go back, before that thing happened, or that decision was made? How many of us do not wish to go back and begin again, to have that fresh start and not to bear the consequences of things done by ourselves and others? There are things each of us wishes had never happened, and things that we wish had; things done and left undone, our own and others. Jesus offers this possibility without the necessity of erasing all that has happened to us, without pretending that these things are not part of our reality any more than he pretends the criminals life is not his own. The possibility of Paradise comes again and again, not just at the beginning.