Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Meditations for the Seven Last Words of Jesus
Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, New York City
Good Friday 2025
April 18, 2025
To watch a video of this word, please click below:
To listen to an audio recording of the homily based on this word, please click below:
The following text guided the homily:
- Jesus’ very last words, as he was preparing to die within seconds, were of tremendous trust and confidence in His Father. To give out a loud cry would have been incredibly painful and jarring, but he did it anyway. He would finish by channeling everything he had in one more act and sign of love to the Father. “Father,” he shouted with love, “Into your hands, I commend my Spirit,” and St. Luke tells us, immediately after saying that, he breathed his last.
- “His garments,” Archbishop Sheen said, “are consigned to his executioners, his blood to the earth, his body to the grave, his mother to John and [now] His soul to His heavenly Father.” He indeed entrusted all he had left, all he was and had, to his Father in heaven. It was the exclamation point of a life fully given.
- “Into your hands, I commend my spirit” was the prayer that Jewish boys and girls were taught to pray before they went to bed. They still pray it today, as do Christians who pray Night Prayer in the Liturgy of the Hours. The words come from Psalm 31, which is a great hymn of trust in God, whom we call our rock, refuge, fortress, rescuer and redeemer. Like with Psalm 22 in the fourth word, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?,” so Jesus in quoting verse 5 of Psalm 31, was incorporating all of the psalm into his dramatic valedictory. In this Psalm, which he would have prayed countless times in life, he repeatedly said, “I will rejoice and be glad in your love. … I trust in you, O Lord. … My times are in your hands. … Let your face shine upon your servant. Save me in your kindness.” The Psalm finishes first with praise, “Blessed be the Lord, who has shown me wondrous love,” and then with encouragement to everyone: “Love the Lord, all you faithful. … Be strong and take heart, all you who hope in the Lord!” Jesus’ words of total entrustment are therefore a great display of hope, in which he says to us in his last phrase before death, “Love the Lord, all you faithful. Be strong and take heart all you who love in the Lord,” because Jesus was showing us on the Cross that the Lord will fulfill all the hopes we place in him. He was urging us not only to die this way, strong, stouthearted and hopeful, but to live this way. Because, he says, our times are in God’s hands and his hesed, his steadfast love and kindness, will never fail.
- Jesus’ whole earthly life can be summarized in helping us learn how to entrust ourselves to God the Father. All his prayers begin with the word, “Abba,” or Father. He tells us during the Last Supper, “The Father himself loves you” (Jn 16:27). He urges us to trust in his providential care.
- In the Sermon on the Mount, he urged us, “Look at the birds in the sky; they do not sow or reap, they gather nothing into barns, yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are not you more important than they? … Why are you anxious about clothes? Learn from the way the wild flowers grow. They do not work or spin. But I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was clothed like one of them. If God so clothes the grass of the field, which grows today and is thrown into the oven tomorrow, will he not much more provide for you, O you of little faith? So do not worry and say, ‘What are we to eat?’ or ‘What are we to drink?’ or ‘What are we to wear?’ All these things the pagans seek. Your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first the kingdom [of God] and his righteousness, and all these things will be given you besides.”
- In the Sermon on the Plain, he doubled down, saying, “What father among you would hand his son a snake when he asks for a fish? Or hand him a scorpion when he asks for an egg? If you then, who are wicked, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the Father in heaven give the holy Spirit to those who ask him?” No matter what we ask for with filial trust, Jesus was saying, God will give himself in return, a Gift of the Divine giver far greater than any thing he might bestow.
- When his disciples asked him to teach them how to pray, he conveyed this trust in the Father, this trust in his providence, “give us this day our daily bread”; in his mercy, “forgive us our trespasses as we have forgiven those who have trespassed against us”; and in his protection, “lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil.” But he also helped us to trust in him. When we pray, “Hallowed by thy name,” we recognize, as St. John wrote to the first Christians, that God has given us his name and loved us so much that we’re not just called children of God but indeed are. When we pray, “Thy kingdom come!,” we know that God’s plan is to have us eternally enter that kingdom, to make us heirs and heiresses of that kingdom, joint heirs with Christ, members of the royal family. When we pray, “Thy will be done!,” we now that his will is that we become holy as he is holy, merciful as he is merciful, perfect as he is perfect, love as he loves. His will for us is far greater than anything we could want for ourselves. And so Jesus teaches us to trust in that love.
- Jesus’ last words from the Cross are meant to help perfect our trust in the Father if we imitate him. The Cross strips us indeed of all worldly comforts so that we can, like Jesus, give all.
- We see this is some of the saints.
- We see it in St. Stephen, in the pit, as he was being stoned outside the Lion’s Gate of Jerusalem, as he cried out, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.”
- We see it in St. Lorenzo Ruiz, the first Filipino saint, who as he was being tortured as part of his martyrdom in Japan and urged by his executioners to save his life by apostasy, famously said, “Had I many thousands of lives I would offer them all for him. Never shall I apostatize. You may kill me if that is what you want. To die for God—such is my will.”
- We see it in St. Thomas More who serenely went to the guillotine as the good servant of King Henry who has decreed his execution, but God’s faithful servant and son first. God the Father is our ultimate hope. Great hope. The Father indeed stretches out his arms.
- But we’re supposed to see this not just at the end of our life but during our life. And the best way that we’re able to have that trust at the end is by exercising that trust all along the journey. This was a lesson driven home in 2011 by Cardinal Justin Rigali, who as Archbishop of St. Louis, ordained Cardinal Dolan a bishop in 2001. Two days before Cardinal Rigali would retire as the Archbishop of Philadelphia, he wrote an incredible letter to his priests about how to prepare each day to die, what he called an “uplifting” though “challenging” theme. He said, somewhat provocatively, “Preparing for death is the greatest opportunity in our lives.” Rather than dreading death as the inexorable occasion in which our life will be taken from us, he said we need to learn from Jesus how to make our death an act of supreme self-giving love. Sometimes we view the crucifixion as if Jesus suffered it passively, exclusively as a victim. Jesus, however, in foretelling his death, clarified that he was approaching it with full freedom, love and courage. In his Good Shepherd discourse, Jesus had declared, “The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay it down” (Jn 10:11, 18). Likewise, Cardinal Rigali asserted, all of us have been given by Jesus’ death and resurrection a similar power. “We have the possibility to rehearse our death,” Cardinal Rigali wrote, “not in its minute details—although saints have found this useful—but in the sense of accepting it in anticipation by an act of our will that will be consummated freely at the moment of our death and offered to the Father in union with the death of Jesus. He urged us to pray Jesus’ words “Father, into your hands, I commend my spirit!” every day, whether at our early morning offering of the whole day to God conscious that it may be our last day, or at Mass when we enter into Jesus’ self-giving, or at night at our examination of conscience when we pray those words as part of the Compline of the Church. The result of this habit of freely entrusting ourselves to God the Father, he says, will be to liberate us from the fear of a sudden death and get us ready no matter when God will call us to breathe our last. “When the hour of death comes,” he noted, “we may not be conscious. It may come very suddenly, by reason of an accident, by reason of a heart attack. … The point is: the surrender will have been made thousands of times! The Father will understand that each of us had the power, which we exercised, the power, with His Son Jesus, to lay down our life freely, lovingly and definitively. Then there will be no obstacle to the consummation of our love. Life and holiness will be ours forever in the communion of the Most Blessed Trinity.” Death will therefore become the final renewal of our baptismal promises and the fulfillment of our self-offering with Christ to the Father in the Holy Eucharist. And the Father will be able to view our death as the “re-enactment” of the death of his Son and apply to us the “full salvific power of the cross and resurrection.”
- In his last words from the Cross, as Cardinal Rigali suggests, Jesus is inviting us to learn from him how to entrust ourselves together with Jesus to the Father. Just as Jesus prayed each day as a faithful Jew the words of Psalm 31, so we have the opportunity, freely, to make not only those words but the entrustment underneath them to God the Father every day. And if we do so, together with Jesus, if we entrust ourselves to him and his mercy and avail ourselves of the means Christ gives us through the Church to do so in communion with him, then our death can be like Jesus’ and a passage from death into the fullness of life.
- And so we pray: Hail, O Cross, which strips us of worldliness so that we might give all to the Father, you are our only hope! Help us to lift high that Cross, and the trust with which Jesus mounted it, all our days!
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