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Reflections on the Seven Words of Jesus from the Cross: 7 Into your hands

Then Jesus, crying with a loud voice, said, ‘Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.’ Luke 23.46 (https://www.biblegateway.com NRSVA)
Matthew and Mark say variously that Jesus gave ‘a great shout’ (Mark 15.37) or that ‘he cried out again in a loud voice’ (Matthew 27.50) just before he died. John tells us that his last words were, ‘It is finished.’
Only Luke tells us that Jesus said, ‘Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.’ Remember he misses out the cry of abandonment recorded by Matthew and Mark so, as in John’s account, Jesus comes across as more assured and convinced of his destiny than either Matthew or Mark would dare to have us believe. Their accounts are much more edgy, and perhaps more psychologically convincing. If Jesus is to go through death with us, and certainly if he is to go with us through an experience like death from the Coronavirus, he has to understand what it is to feel very alone and very afraid, to be unsure even about what comes next.
And yet there is something comforting about the assurance with which Jesus meets his death in Luke’s account as he calmly commends his spirit into God’s hands. 
For all the people who have gone to their deaths in violent circumstances, or raging ‘against the dying of the light’, there have been at least as many who have either slipped away peacefully or have ended their days with quiet dignity and courage, full of assurance that they can commend their spirit into God’s care. Luke’s account speaks to them, and the more raw accounts in Matthew and Mark speak to those for whom death is harder to face because it is particularly violent, tragic or untimely.
A Prayer
Dear God, this Holy Week and Easter is a time of fear mingled with anticipation. It is unsettling and different. On the eve of Easter we mourn the way that Jesus was killed for love of you and humankind, and laid in a borrowed tomb, but we wait in hope for resurrection.
We bring to mind all those whose lives have been tragically cut short or ended suddenly by violence, accident, natural disaster or illness, and those who have been separated at the end of their life from the loved ones who would have wanted to comfort them, and who are denied the opportunity to grieve their loss and celebrate their life as they would have wished. Especially we remember the victims of conflict, and of the coronavirus, and the victims, survivors and their loved ones affected by last year's Easter bomb attacks in Sri Lanka.
We also give thanks for those who, by their quiet faith and courage at the end of their lives, have been an example to us of your resurrection power already at work among us. And so we ask you to bring new life out of death, new hope out of despair, and a new blossoming of love and compassion in place of all the other priorities that have often crowded them out. Then fear can give way to peace and sadness to joy, in Jesus' name. Amen.

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