“In Grandma’s Hands”
(Seventh Word: Luke 23:44-46
© Valerie Bridgeman
St. Paul’s Baptist Church
March 29, 2013
Preaching the Seven Last Words
(The Message): 44-46: By now it was noon. The whole earth became dark, the darkness lasting three hours—a total blackout. The Temple curtain split right down the middle. Jesus called loudly, “Father, I place my life in your hands!” Then he breathed his last.
Luke 23:44-46 (NRSV)
44 It was now about noon, and darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon, 45 while the sun’s light failed; and the curtain of the temple was torn in two. 46 Then Jesus, crying with a loud voice, said, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” Having said this, he breathed his last.
Father, Abba, Parent
Holy One, Ancient of Days
Mother Eagle, Strong Deliverer:
Into your hands…
and then a gasp, a deep breath,
a sigh so strong we still hear it.
Jesus breathes his last.
We tumble these words out
and wrap them in sermonic rhetoric;
we prettify them and preachify them and sanitize them
in robes and candles and hymns and the gurgling sounds of happy babies.
We rumble them around in our minds
and mumble them in our mouths…
these seven last sayings,
not all of them recorded by any one of the gospels we have,
but we mash them together liturgically
and bring them all in the room at one time….
You’ve heard them today:
forgive them;
you’ll be with ME in paradise (wherever that is);
behold your son;
a god forsaken soul curdling, “WHY!?”;
a dry-throated whisper “I thirst”;
a declaration of completion, “It’s finished”…
and now: A RESOLUTE RESIGNATION.
What do you do when you’ve done all you can do?
What do you do when “standing” isn’t the answer to that question?
WHAT DO YOU DO, JESUS?
TEACH us in your tattered, torn, terrorized body…
beaten and bruised, battered and beleaguered… TELL US!!!
Well, all along, seized with pain, he sings!
The Psalms raise their tune as a baseline to his suffering.
Here, the last recorded words, he says:
“INTO YOUR HANDS I COMMEND/ I COMMIT MY SPIRIT
THESE WORDS ARE AN ECHO OF a part of the temple song,
now numbered Psalm 31, verse 5.
I wonder what the tune to this ditty was?
(in the tune of Amazing Grace: Into Your hands I commit my spirit”)…
I wonder how it reverberated out of his belly
(SING: Into your hands I commit my spirit).
Is it Jesus’ song or the voice of the ancestors
who had known what it was to be brutalized
and humiliated before a voyeuristic crowd?
Was it the cosmic hum,
the eternal note rising in his throat
As he hangs in the Roman province
And is surrounded by people watching
As if crucifixion were a spectator sport,
As if this moment was Rome’s version
Of March Madness?
Psalm 31 and in this hour,
the final words he could muster from the weight of pain: “Into your hands….”
Tell me, spectator?
What did you expect to hear him say in the end?
Tell me, over-hearer?
What would you have imagined?
Curses?
But he’d already said, “Forgive them.”
What did you want him to say?
Did you want him to call for TEN THOUSAND ANGELS
to deliver him in the end?
Did you want a Hollywood ending
where Will Smith swoops in
takes out the aliens
untie him from that rough and rugged wood?
Did you long for him
to get revenge on those
who perpetrated this MADNESS?
Did you want Gethsemane’s blood-sweated brow
to somehow now bow in shame?
Oh, onlooker, what would you have guessed
he would do except turn
to the gnarled hands
of the Ancient of Days?
Here he is: Jesus
Calling on the songs from his youth again…
Whispering a prayer from the Psalms,
begging a relief that only singing can bring some time.
I wonder if he pitched the song
by the memory of his mother’s melodic voice?
I wonder if the last gasp,
what the King James Verson translates as “giving up the ghost”—
I wonder if he heard the last phrases
of Psalm 31 in his ear, ringing between anguish and trust.
“In you, Lord, I have taken refuge; don’t let me be put to shame—
deliver me in YOUR righteousness.”
And verse 5 from where these words
come careening from the past:
“Into your hands I commit my spirit”—
and the second part of the stanza
that his death snatched from us:
“DELIVER ME, LORD, MY FAITHFUL GOD.”
Ah, there it is!
The verse behind the verse
The promise behind the pain
The hope behind the holla
YOU ARE FAITHFUL
A Rock, A Fortress
You saw my affliction and my anguish,
I will rejoice in your love
“INTO YOUR HANDS….”
There it is: hiding in the
puzzling struggle on Golgotha’s Hill
You guide me; be merciful
Into YOUR hands do I commit my spirit
There it is: crawling in the dust of Calvary
In a loud, piercing song
There it is
Psalm 31: 9:
Be merciful; I’m in distress; my soul and body with grief/consumed
I am like broken pottery (v. 12)
But I trust in you; (v 15): “My times are in your hands…”
What would you have expected from a rabbi,
a son of the ancient wisdom
except this wisdom to come rumbling up out of him?
My mama used to say,
“Sometimes the first thing you put in
a barrel is the last thing to come out of it.
But it can’t come out if you didn’t put it in.”
I can hear Mary, Jesus’ mama, singing Psalm 31:
“Into your hands I commit my spirit, My God, My Rock, my Fortress, my Savior…”
His mama singing Psalm 31: “My times are in your hands”
I wonder whether the women gathered
at his feet that day started humming it with him;
you know the way we pick up the melody
and find the counter-melody
and sound out the tenor line
and put the base underneath a song
when we first hear it faintly winding its way
through another person’s soul?
You know that way we catch on
The way we say to ourselves, “OH, I KNOW THAT SONG.”
Oh, this crucifixion is bad: make no mistake.
This is horrific: do not be deceived.
And there is no song that can fix it in this moment.
But there is a melody that can carry you to the end.
These hymns are for the faint of heart
and the weary of body
and hanging there, humiliated and hurt,
Jesus’ last sayings reflect the first things in his soul,
the first thing in the barrel, if you will.
He learned to trust in God
and heard the songs of pilgrimage,
the prayers sung for healing and for deliverance
David’s battle songs and worship words
(I know. I know.
You will tell me “but he IS God,”
and I will tell you that we ought not avert our eyes
from the anguish by rushing past this very human horror.
I will tell you to behold the man, Jesus.
I will tell you to smell the stench,
to hear the flies buzzing,
to see the buzzards circling overhead
at the sight of flesh torn open by whips,
of wounds dripping with blood-caked flesh
crusting in the heat of noonday)
I tell you: LISTEN! Do you hear what I hear?
Do you hear the song rising from Calvary’s cross?
And a song, a cry: Into your hands…
Allstate wasn’t the first to say “you’re in Good hands…”
In 1971, Bill Withers debuted a song on his album, “Just As I Am”
titled “Grandma’s Hands.”
In one performance,
he told his audience that of all the songs he’d ever written,
this song was his favorite.
He said, in introducing the song,
“Most of us at some point in our lives have someone
that means more to us than anyone else ever has or ever will again….
Grandma’s hands
Play tambourines
Warn with a firm hand on shoulder
Soothes a local unwed mother
Used to ache sometimes
Used to lift her face and say, “Baby Grandma understands”
Used to hand me candy
Grandma's hands
In some Native American spiritual traditions
and in some African traditional religious systems,
God, the Great Creator,
is envisioned as the Great Grandmother…
the Great Grandmother Spirit.
This idea makes sense to me,
I’m a Grandmother who didn’t think you
could love someone as much as you love your grandchildren.
It makes sense when I watch grandmothers or grandfathers
scoop their grandchildren up into their arms
and swing them around;
it makes sense to me, that God is Grandmother Spirit,
when I see grandmothers use their hands
to discern whether a child has a fever,
or to calm the energy of that same child.
Grandma’s hands…
Here Jesus is, in the very end of his life
Singing the songs of ancient Israel
Leaning into 4-part harmony into the good hands
Of the Ancient of Days
Singing the songs of pilgrimage
Leaning into the bosom of a Great Grandmother
THE GNARLED HANDS OF THE ANCIENT OF DAYS
THE HANDS THAT SMOOTHES
BLOOD-SOAKED BROWS
AND WEARY SOULS
THE GNARLED HANDS OF THE ANCIENT OF DAYS
GRANDMA’S HANDS
GOOD HANDS
GOD’S HANDS
INTO YOUR HANDS
GRANDMA GOD
INTO YOUR HANDS
INTO YOUR HANDS
I COMMIT MY SPIRIT
And with the reality of God’s good hands
Grandma God’s Good, Good hands
Jesus breathed his last breath
And let go
Sighed into eternity’s hope
And heaven’s help
Rested in The Gnarled Grandma Hands
What, onlooker, did you expect?
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