WORDS OF LIFE FROM THE CROSS:
Into Your Hands I Commit My Spirit
A Sermon On:
Luke 23: 44-49; 24: 1-8
PREPARED BY
KEN GEHRELS
PASTOR
CALVIN CHRISTIAN REFORMED CHURCH
NEPEAN, ONTARIO
Has it ever happened to you?
Someone gave you something for safekeeping - "Here, hold this."
and it slips right out of your clumsy or careless hands?
Embarrassing, at best. If the item is fragile, it can be downright horrible as you're left to sweep up the pieces and make the phone call explaining what's happened.
When Sharon and I were first married we house-sat for a missionary family. In their home was an expensive glass table centrepiece - worth over $2000. "Please be careful" they said. Well, it never broke, but boy were we nervous!
Sometimes we entrust something into the hands of someone who ends up cheats us. Their hands manipulate, hide, twist and steal.
Sometimes we encounter rough hands. We commit our lives in marriage to someone whose hands first held us so tenderly. But soon after something changes, and those hands strike out in anger. Violence. Mistreatment.
Hands -
On this Easter Sunday morning, a morning of great celebration and the wonder of life, we hear the last words spoken by Jesus while on the cross -"Father, into your hands I commit my spirit." (Lk 23.46)
We hear the words, and remember the response of God to those words.
Father, says Jesus.
It's traditionally understood as the last of the 7 phrases uttered by Jesus while on the cross. Three of those phrases are directed towards God. The first is spoken while they are nailing him:"Father, forgive them..." There is that Father-Son relationship evidenced.
The next one is very different. It is spoken -- cried in agony -- from out of a horrible, unnatural mid-afternoon darkness. No Father. All Jesus can say is, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Any sense of connection to a Heavenly Father has been lost. Jesus is all alone. Isolated. Abandoned.
But now the darkness has gone.
The time is at an end. And once more Jesus speaks - "....Father"
The connection to heaven is restored. The union between the precious Son and Holy Father is whole again. The separation that was demanded as payment for sin, the crushing isolation, is no longer necessary. It was endured and completed. We saw that on Friday.
Humanity's sin and rebellion against God demanded the punishment of them being abandoned to the presence and whims of Satan, rejected and forsaken by God. That is hell.
Jesus stepped forward and endured hell in our place.
Satan stepped forward to claim his victim.
But listen! "Father."
That one word -- signalling that Satan was unable to sustain his evil grip.
He could not hold on to the Son of God.
Oh - the Evil One had tried. For three hours there was intense darkness on that Judean hillside. Christ has suffered in physical and spiritual darkness, surrounded by all the fiends of hell.
Alone.
But the sun returned.
The season of darkness -- for an afternoon on that hillside -- for so much longer over the human race and over God's once pristine creation -- the season of darkness has come to an end.
The separation is OVER.
"Father," said Jesus, "Into your hands I commit my spirit."
"....Into your hands...."
No longer in the hands of death and darkness.
The grip of death over the human race, which had been so final, so total, so completely dominant --- none could escape it that grip was broken!
The hand of death was not able to hold down the spirit of Jesus.
For a greater hand swooped in to claim Him.
Jesus' spirit was claimed by the Great Hand that at the beginning of time formed the mountains and scooped out the oceans;
the hand that reached down and carefully formed the first human from the dust of the earththat is the hand that reached out to claim the spirit of Jesus.
And confronted by that Divine hand, the dark hand of death was powerless.
For when the hand of God stretches out and lays hold of someone, there is no one, there is nothing that can come in between.Jesus said, "My Father, who has given these people to me, is greater than all; no one can snatch them out of my Father's hand." (Jn 10.29)
There is perfect protection in the Hand of God.
The hand that closed round the spirit of Jesus.
"Father.....
Into your hand.....
I commit my spirit."
Notice that third phrase - "I commit my spirit."
There is a control that remains with Jesus. Earlier He had said of himself:"The reason the Father loves me is that I lay down my life - only to take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again. This command I received from my Father." (Jn 10.17-18)
People at the time thought Jesus was stark raving mad.
But on this Easter Sunday we know different.
He gives His life deliberately over to His Father in Heaven.
And on the third day that life is raised up again. Taken up.
Resurrection!
The end of earthly life for Jesus does not come in a wild, uncontrolled fashion.
So often when I stand at the bedside of someone who is terminally ill, loved ones share how powerless they feel. They have no control without resorting to violent measures. The giving of life, and its passing is an act far beyond them.
But not beyond Jesus.
He gives it.
And takes it up again.
That is the amazing news of Easter.
Death has been stopped dead in its tracks!
The force that still appears so incredibly great and overpowering to us mere mortals, us finite human beings,has met its match in a far greater force a far higher power - the power of Eternal God in Jesus Christ.
Life Power!
Which is why the hand of God moves once more, rolling away a stone to reveal an empty grave.
Do you understand that? The stone did not have to be moved in order to let Jesus out. He was already out. There was no force, no power, no obstacle that could keep His body in the grave.
God's hand moved once more to let the disciples in.
That they might see, and seeing, believe.
Believe that there is a power greater than death. A power that is available to them through faith in Jesus Christ.
There is a thief, an illegitimate resident, in the Cosmos. His name is death.
Jesus has beaten him at his own game.
He said, "The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that you may have life and have it to the full." (Jn 10.10)
Amazing words.
Astounding news.
Almost too much --
except
except for the empty tomb.
The empty tomb stands as a great silent monument in history to the power of the Hand of God, and the failure of the hand of death.
This morning we see it, and believe!
We join with the first ones who had the honour of seeing the evidence;
We join the women at the tomb unveiled by the hand of God.
And we remember these words of Christ.
Remember - and believe!
It would not do to simply glance at what has happened, make a quick mental note of things, and carry on with life as if nothing had happened.
For there has been a fundamental shift.
You see - the time will come when each of us will stand at the doorway to death. We will stand and a hand will reach out to grab hold of us.
Which hand will it be?
On this Easter Sunday the Good News of the power of God's Hand is told us. And we have the opportunity to surrender our lives to that Hand.
To say as humble human beings, "Heavenly Father, for the sake of Jesus your Son, forgive my sin. I surrender my life to you. Into your hands I commit my spirit - my all."
To all who take this step comes the witness of the empty tomb.
Death's hand could not control the spirit of Jesus. It went that very day into Paradise, into the presence of God the Father.
Death's hand could not control the body of Jesus, either.
3 days later it was resurrected. It still lives.
Jesus lives -- bodily -- in heaven. He is the first to bust free of death.
Forever free.
All who believe in Jesus, surrender their lives to Him, can come away from Easter with the confident assurance that at the moment of death their spirits will be transported by the Hand of God to Heavenly Paradise.They can also have the confident assurance that though their body will be laid to the ground, and will return to the dust from which it came, one day that same body will be reclaimed from the hand of death - reclaimed by the greater hand of God;
restored
resurrected
JUST like the body of Jesus.
And they too will live in Paradise glory. body and spirit restored.
That is the message of Easter.
That is the message of life in full abundance.
That is reason for our joy; joy.... Because He Lives!