Download Ann Gaillard Palm/Passion Sunday Year C March 28, 2010 “Father

Ann Gaillard
March 28, 2010
Palm/Passion Sunday Year C
“Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” These words, so familiar to us from Luke’s
Passion narrative that we just heard, would have been equally familiar to the Jews of Jesus’ time.
For Jesus’ words are a quotation from the fifth verse of Psalm 31, an evening prayer, and this
psalm, or a portion of it, may very well have been the bedtime prayer of Hebrew children and
their parents.
These words might be familiar to you from a different context as well, for they are in our
prayer book as part of the evening service of Compline. When I was in seminary, we used to sing
Compline every night, in the chapel, lit only by candlelight. I will never forget the sound of the
voices echoing in the darkness. “Into your hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit.” This is a prayer
of “letting go.” When we say these words, we are saying, “O God, take my sticky fingers off the
controls, and place my life in better hands than mine.”
But the verse, the prayer, has a second line that anyone who knows the psalm would hear
implicitly, including those watching Jesus die on the cross: “Into your hands I commend my
spirit, for you have redeemed me, O Lord, faithful God, God of truth.” The whole psalm
expresses hope in God, faith in God, trust in God. Jesus’ words on the cross imply all of this.
His prayer in the garden before his arrest is all about trusting God, too. “Father,” he says,
“Abba, if you are willing, remove this cup from me; yet not my will but yours be done.” Not my
will, Abba, but yours.
Rowan Williams writes that to cry to God with the words “Abba! Father!” is “not a calm
acknowledgement of a universal truth about God’s abstract fatherhood. It is the Child’s cry out
of a nightmare. It is the cry of outrage, fear, shrinking away, when faced with the horror of the
‘world’—yet not simply or exclusively protest, but trust as well.” As children, when we call out
in terror in the middle of the night, we trust that our loving parents will come to us to comfort us,
to take care of us, to keep us safe. In the garden, Jesus calls out to his loving father and expresses
the utmost trust in him—“Your will be done, Abba”—and God sends an angel to him to comfort
him and give him strength.
After all, whom else can Jesus trust? Certainly not the religious authorities who are the local
imperial collaborators, who don’t have the courage to seize him by day when he is with the
crowds but instead grab him like thieves in the night. In them is truly the power of darkness.
Certainly not Pontius Pilate, who despite his belief in Jesus’ innocence, has too much at stake in
keeping order in Jerusalem to resist the demands of the religious collaborators. From Pilate’s
perspective the so-called “justice” of the Roman Empire must triumph over real justice. And
certainly not Jesus’ disciples. They can’t stay awake long enough to sit with him in his pain. One
of them is about to betray him; another will soon deny that he even knows him; all of them will
abandon him, and will watch his agony on the cross only from a distance.
Ultimately, there is no government, no religious or social system, no human being that Jesus
can trust. The only One whom Jesus can trust is his Abba. So in the garden, and on the cross,
Jesus prays his prayers of relinquishment, of letting go, of trusting himself in God’s hands. In
these prayers—“your will be done; into your hands I commend my spirit”—Jesus is offering to
his Abba what he has been offering all along: his life into the hands of God, who is THE mercy
and THE faithfulness and THE love at the heart of all things.
These prayers of relinquishment are the two most important prayers we can offer when
crosses come in our lives. When the world lets us down, as it so often does; when our
government or our justice system or our economy fails us; when our religious leaders are more
interested in protecting their power and preserving the status quo than they are in protecting the
vulnerable and upholding the truth; when those we are closest to betray us, or deny us, or
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Ann Gaillard
March 28, 2010
Palm/Passion Sunday Year C
abandon us, or are unable to be present to us in our grief or pain; when we are alone, on our
crosses, we can be assured that our Abba hears us when we pray, “Your will be done; into your
hands I commend my spirit.” There are no better words with which to live and die.
“Into your hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit. For you have redeemed me, O Lord, O God
of truth.”
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