The Parish Church of St John-at-Hampstead

During our reflections for the next two hours we shall reflect on  Jesus’ crucifixion and we shall ask ourselves, what sort of community has this kind of story at its heart?  Christianity emerges from this one crucial week which we call Holy Week. Though some of the people Jesus met in his life time had already begun to follow him and to reflect on who he might be, this week threw everything into the melting pot. When the evangelists began to tell Jesus’ story in the gospels they told it through the lens of this week. And before the gospels were written when Paul was writing letters to his churches  – it is the crucifixion and the resurrection that we hear most about – none of the miracles and very, very little of Jesus teaching appears in Paul’s letters. What we hear about over and over again is the cross and the resurrection. So it is the story of this week which makes Christianity what it is, and which should shape the Christian community.  This afternoon we shall be looking at some of the final words that Jesus spoke on the cross. The one sentence  we shall not consider in detail   concerns the moment when Jesus gave his mother and the disciple he was closest to, into each other’s care as they stood at the foot of the cross. They were to create a new family just as the Church was to be a new family of believers. This afternoon we stand with them at the foot of the cross. And because this part of Jesus’ story is so important all those who seek to become Christians should probably start by learning the Holy Week story; all those who begin to question their faith and who feel tempted to abandon the church because it seems no longer really relevant, should go back to the Holy Week story. As we reflect on this story again this year we are wondering what sort of vision it should provide for the Christian community? What sort of community has this kind of story at its heart?
1. So in this first meditation we shall begin with the words : ‘Father forgive them for they know not what they do.’
Jesus speaks these words as the cross is still lying on the ground and as he is being fixed on it by the Roman soldiers, under the guidance of the centurion. It is the final word of forgiveness in a gospel where forgiveness has been a major theme. So perhaps we should begin by asking, ‘What does forgiveness mean, what does it involve?’ Why is forgiveness one of those things which is crucial for the life of a Christian community?
We can begin by thinking of an ordinary everyday situation. Someone barges into you. He says ‘Sorry.’ You say, ‘That’s all right.’ You know that he has realised that he wasn’t looking where he was going – he has apologised. It is a respectful human exchange. But what happens when someone barges into you and makes no sign of apology? You feel angry. This person has behaved as though you don’t exist. The offence is much greater than in the first instance even though the physical hurt is the same. The first instance might be described as a hurtful act which merited an apology. But the second instance is an insult which requires forgiveness.
Why does an insult require forgiveness rather than an apology? Our second example provided the clue. The person who has barged into us and walked straight on has acted as though we don’t exist. And that kind of action threatens our deep seated fears that we don’t matter, that we mean nothing. We react angrily in order to reassert ourselves, to force the other person to realise that we can’t just be ignored. And if reconciliation is to take place the other person has to ask your forgiveness, by acknowledging that he has failed to treat you as a person with feelings, someone who deserves to be respected. And his apology can’t be responded to with the ‘don’t worry it doesn’t matter’ kind of response. That kind of response isn’t gracious; it is in fact a kind of revenge. It implies that you are such a superior kind of being that you haven’t been affected by what has been done. But reconciliation is not achieved that way. Reconciliation is achieved when one person admits they have been hurt and the other person admits they have been hurtful. Your humanity has been reduced by the hurt. But it is also the case that the person who has been hurtful has also been reduced in their humanity too. To treat another person as though she doesn’t exist also makes you less of a person – it affects who you are. To treat another person as though she doesn’t exist denies that there could be a relatedness between you; but to deny that there can be a relatedness between any two human beings reduces the humanity of both of them. It implies that we don’t need each other; and yet mutual need, mutual up-building is precisely what makes each of us human. So to treat another human being as though she doesn’t exist reduces both your humanity and hers. Reconciliation is about rebuilding relatedness. It is an act of grace. Grace  leads the other person to seek forgiveness and grace  enables you to put aside your hurt and anger and to accept it.
All this is rather obvious except for the fact that I have ended up using the word grace. And in this instance grace is that which enables this act of reconciliation to take place working both in the person who has received the insult and in the person who has given it. Grace has brought about forgiveness when it would have been a whole lot easier to let the situation simply fester. And this is why in the Creed we say, ‘I believe in the forgiveness of sins.’
It seems a rather odd thing to believe in, alongside believing in God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit. Why should belief in forgiveness be a matter of faith? The example I gave just now of one person barging into another is a rather mundane example of something needing forgiveness. But underlying it was the sin of failing to recognise the humanity of another person. It is that sin which is magnified a hundredfold in the crimes which might seem impossible to forgive. The crimes which should never be forgotten. What is forgiveness in these much more serious circumstances? Is it simply an overlooking of what has been done, a decision not to seek revenge, or demand a recompense? Though the Bible sometimes seems to suggest that this is what God does with regard to our sin – it is not a very adequate idea. Forgiveness can mean so much more. Real forgiveness changes things – it is as we said earlier a moment of grace. Real forgiveness involves the renewal of relationship between the one who has  admitted an offence and the one who has been offended. But what of the sins like Auschwitz which are so awful that forgiveness seems impossible? If the Holocaust and the Killing Fields and the Rwandan massacres and all the other notorious human atrocities demand remembrance how can they also be forgiven, who can do the forgiving?
 ‘Father forgive them for they know not what they do.’ Might it be Christ who has the right to forgive; by identifying with all innocent victims can he offer absolution to their tormentors because he stands alongside them as a victim?
That may perhaps sound somehow too neat. Even if Jesus can forgive his tormentors why does that mean I should forgive mine?  We might also ask how Jesus can forgive people who do not know what they are doing? If forgiveness is essentially about a two way process, a restoration of relationship between the perpetrator and the victim, how can these soldiers who were just doing their duty be forgiven? In the same way how can those soldiers in the Camps and the Killing fields who were doing what they were told be forgiven?
We have reached a point where we might begin to see why the Creed includes the words ‘I believe in the forgiveness of sins.’  It is not the case that we can ever hope to produce a nice knock down argument in the face of the sin and suffering and failures of reconciliation in the world. The death of Christ and his words of forgiveness from the cross are not an argument. What his words do is provide an example and open up a possibility that in the community of his followers his example might be followed.
But we should never talk of forgiveness and reconciliation too easily; sometimes that can be a way of avoiding the sheer horror of what human beings do to one another – but then what? Are we to be paralysed by that horror and our anguished and outraged reaction to it? Or can we move forward by at least expressing a belief in the forgiveness of sins? And in saying that, we mean that in spite of everything we continue to believe in the absolute  value and relatedness of all human beings;  if forgiveness and reconciliation are not possible in the face of the terrible sins we commit against one another, then our belief in such human value and relatedness itself becomes questionable.
The statement of belief in forgiveness is located in the Creed after the statement of belief in the life death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. What we do to one another we also do to God in Christ. Saying that we see Christ’s sufferings in the suffering of any individual human being does not diminish the significance of human suffering, rather we might say it makes of our suffering a thing of absolute or essential significance. We are created by God so what we do to one another we do to God and that is revealed supremely on the cross. So Christ’s words of forgiveness on the cross become an assertion of God’s absolute love for his creation; the horror of what we as human beings can do never exhausts the love of God and the continued availability of his grace to make a difference and to bring about change. But all this is a matter of faith, faith that there is a future beyond the horror of what we are capable of. We do not know how – we can so often talk to glibly about the forgiveness of those who have done terrible wrong. But it would be worse to deny the possibility of grace. A Christian community that believes in the forgiveness of sins  refuses to set limits to love.
‘Father forgive them for they know not what they do’. Jesus says these words as the crucifixion begins. When Jesus dies, the final words spoken in the darkness are those of the centurion who, we must assume, was commanding the soldiers who put Jesus on the cross. The words of the centurion are differently reported in the gospels. Did he say simply that Jesus was after all an innocent man or had he come to believe in the relationship between Jesus and God? Whatever he said perhaps it is true that the words of forgiveness had begun to work in his mind and to bring about a change in him, a moment of grace.
2.  ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’
These words of Jesus from the cross are not easily understood. They ‘re found only in two of the gospels; Luke and John leave them out perhaps because they found them too shocking. Taken in isolation they have a dramatic quality about them which can shock us. Did Jesus feel himself to be abandoned by God at the end? Did his suffering include even that level of human despair?  Given our own fears that if we were really put to the test we might be sorely tempted to lose faith, it can be somehow comforting to feel that even Jesus went through something like that. After the struggle in Gethsemane  to accept what God  seemed to want of him,  these words  seem to imply that the relationship between Jesus and the Father broke down in the agony of that last hour. Did Jesus cease to believe in his mission and God’s purpose for his life? It’s possible I suppose, but it is also possible that these are not words of despair but of protest.
Of course these words come from Psalm 22 which we heard at the end of our service last night and which we shall hear again in the service which follows these two hours at 3.00pm. In order to understand why Jesus uses these words we have first to understand something about the psalms. Our way of dealing with the problem of evil is to have a debate about it, to weigh up the arguments. The psalmist’s way with the problem of evil and suffering is not to argue about it but to talk to God about it, and to talk in pretty strong language. The psalmist doesn’t engage in an argument about God, he has an argument with God. ‘What kind of God are you that this can happen? What is there to praise you for when you can do this to us? God why don’t you do something? My God, my God why have you forsaken me?’
So when Jesus speaks these words on the cross he echoes the lament of all those who have suffered before him – he takes their questioning and protesting even their accusations against God – he takes all this into his relationship with God. And he does so in the traditional words of his people. And yet psalm 22 is not just a psalm of protest.
The first half of the psalm contains three laments each one increasing in intensity. Between each lament there is a pause to find some sort of consolation from the past, but the search fails. Each time the psalmist is drawn back to feeling only the absence of God. He has no sense of God even listening, let alone helping. He reminds himself of the way in which God has helped his people in the past. But his present experience of being mocked and despised cuts him off from his people. He has been dehumanised by his suffering – he feels that he is not a man but a worm, he feels like something God could not possibly cherish. He remembers his own mother’s care for him and his past sense of God’s presence with him at his birth and as a child but that maternal care has now all gone. He is powerless before his oppressors who also seem dehumanised; they are like stamping bullocks or roaring lions or grinning dogs. The lowest point of this lament is where its relation to Jesus’ situation on the cross is clearest: ‘I am poured out like water and all my bones are out of joint. A band of evil doers hem me in, I can count all my bones. They stand staring and gaping upon me. They  part my garments among them and cast lots for my clothing.’
Here is the point of greatest humiliation; he has become a mere spectacle with all sense of his own personal identity emptied out. It is death by public helplessness. There is no explanation for this situation but suffering can still be given words and those words can be flung out into the emptiness. When Jesus has no strength to think of words for himself, the psalmist’s words  are still available to him. He can pray this prayer of protest and demand that someone will still give him a good listening to. Even though the psalm is a protest and an accusation against God,  it is still to God that the protest is made – for there is no one else to hear it. In the moment of supreme agony the definition of God is, you might say, reduced to this. God is that to which we continue to cry out  in our suffering when all else fails;
My God, my God why have you forsaken me?
All this is contained in the first 20 verses of this psalm but then in verse 21 (in the BCP numbering) something very odd happens, though a more modern translation makes it most clear. “Save me from the lion’s mouth. From the horns of wild oxen. You have answered me!’ (Common Worship) Having poured out all  his misery the psalmist suddenly experiences a totally unexpected breaking in of grace. He suddenly comes to believe that God is listening and responding. And so he starts to praise God, or rather to picture the day when he will again be able to praise God. Lonely and abandoned by all companions now, he pictures the time when he will again praise God as part of a great congregation. Isolated now he can believe that he will be restored to the community and sit down to eat in the company of all the powerless people who  go on trusting in  God. The psalmist is perhaps a leader of his people. Though God had seemed absent   now this leader in Israel  looks to the time when he will be remembered by all the families on earth  and even perhaps among the dead  Despairing of life now he looks forward to the time when people will be able to talk about the way in which God has saved him.
So this psalm of protest and despair ends as a hymn of praise. Just as we may have felt awkward about accusing God and shouting our protests at him so now there seems something equally difficult in praising God in the midst of such suffering. Can grace indeed enable us to believe that we might rejoice in spite of our sufferings?
And yet that is what the faith of the psalmist is like and it is therefore perhaps a part of Jesus’ faith as he hangs dying on the cross. Of course we cannot know what was in Jesus mind. We cannot know that by speaking the opening words of this psalm he was thinking of the rest of the psalm or even trying to recite it from memory. Perhaps he just chose these few words because they were ready to hand and said what he needed to say.
And yet as a Jew he would always have known that  this psalm is  the prayer of a displaced people; it arises out of a loss of control over you own life. Handed over to what is agonisingly unpredictable and frightening the psalmist protests. It is a very human reaction and it is part of Jesus humanity that he protests too. But it is also one of the ways in which the transcendent reality of God can break through to us. When we are forced to accept that there is  nothing we can do but cry out. Perhaps just there in the word of agonised protest grace enables the energy of faith to be reborn.
And so a community which tells this story and which recites this psalm will be a community which can look evil and suffering in the face, a community which will never deny the extent of evil and inhumanity in the world. It will be a community which prays week in week out, for all those who suffer. It will be a community which is not afraid to question and challenge God and voice its protest to God on behalf of his suffering world. It will be a community which accepts that we cannot hope to deal with such suffering ourselves – we may try to relieve it, but we cannot put an end to it. Only the grace of God can do that – the grace which hears and responds to our prayer of protest; the grace which gives us a good listening to. Amen
3.I THIRST
When Jesus arrives at the place where he is to be crucified, the soldiers offer him a drink of wine mingled with gall or myrrh. This may be intended to dull the pain or it may be another piece of mockery. Whichever it is Jesus refuses to drink. Later on just before he dies he is offered a sponge soaked in vinegar. The intention is probably to prolong his life and so prolong the entertainment. Only in John’s gospel do we find it recorded that just before the end Jesus says, “I thirst’. It is in response to these words that he is offered the vinegar soaked sponge. John’s gospel is a gospel full of imagery and double meanings; beneath the surface of many of the words and actions in John’s gospel further meanings are to be sought. John records these words, ‘I thirst’ perhaps because they resonate with other elements in his gospel.
It is about midday when Jesus says from the Cross, ‘I thirst’,  and earlier in the gospel it is about midday when he asks the Samaritan women  at the well  in the town of Sychar for something to drink. This request introduces a discussion about the meaning of the living water which Jesus brings to all who come to him – the water of eternal life. So Jesus says, ‘He who believes in me will never be thirsty’. Or again ‘If anyone is thirsty let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, streams of living water will flow from within him’. By contrast the other gospels never mention such thirst except at one significant moment in the Beatitudes. ‘Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.’
John’s gospel is telling us that belief in Jesus releases in us the living water which slakes our thirst by giving us eternal life. But what is eternal life?   In John’s gospel it is the equivalent language to Jesus’ talk of the Kingdom in the other gospels. The purpose of Jesus’ mission is to proclaim and prepare for and inaugurate the kingdom – or, in John’s understanding, his mission is to proclaim and to give eternal life. Eternal life and the Kingdom both represent a state  in which God’s will is done, and the righteousness which we thirst for is accomplished.  In this life we can have glimpses of the eternal life of the Kingdom, while trusting that it will be fully realised in the future. John puts great emphasis on the possibility of experiencing eternal life here and now. The adjective ‘eternal’ obviously means ‘endlessness’ but it can also imply a special quality of life, suited to the new age of the Kingdom. Eternal life represents our salvation from any form of life which drags us down, or which is turned in on itself; life which knows little of truth or beauty or goodness, a life which is starved of hope or love or meaning.
We will come back to the thirst which Jesus speaks of on the cross, but first we might think about thirst as the symbol for desire. Thirsting for something is a metaphor for desiring or even desperately wanting something. Desire is a word which has perhaps become too associated with sexual desire; but it can also mean something much more fundamental. From the moment a baby stretches out to grasp his parent’s finger a deep current of desire animates our life. From the moment children demand just one more chapter of their bed time story this desire for something more is well underway. It is a desire to explore, to understand, to create and build up, to love and be loved. What I desire shapes who I am. And yet who I am is not solely shaped by what I desire.
When the baby stretches out to clasp her parent’s finger, it is because the finger has first been stretched out to be grasped. The father longs for his finger to be grasped by his child. And for the rest of their life together  parents will go on desiring things for their children, just as teachers, friends, and colleagues  may desire things for them. I am who I am because of my own desire and the desires of others. And Christians would say that behind all this desire is God’s  desire for his creation. The love between the Father and the Son finds expression in the Spirit and the Spirit  desires that we shall  grow into persons made in the image and likeness of God.
And yet desire does not always work like that. Our desires can be all too easily distorted. The story of  Eden is an illustration of distorted desire. Suspicion enters into the relationship of Adam and Eve with God. Does God restrict what they can eat out of a desire to subjugate them? If we take for ourselves what he refuses to give, might we become like him – Gods in our own right? The Eden story reveals that Adam and Eve are not created perfect from the start. Like all of us they have to learn. And knowing that there is something we do not know and at the same time not knowing what we do not know makes us vulnerable. And when we feel vulnerable we need to assert ourselves, and  to emphasise our independence. Unfulfilled desire makes us feel weak and restless; we may not know quite what it is we desire so we look for quick substitutes in all those things we can so easily become addicted to. By way of compensation we come  to believe that we can be God to ourselves. In the absence of belief in God, we have indeed become like Gods in the range and extent of the knowledge and power we have accrued to ourselves – the only thing missing is the wisdom of God.
The distortion of desire is always a part of what Christians call their fallen nature and yet the distortion is not perhaps complete. However, we try to suppress it, the desire somehow to transcend ourselves may still be there. John Donne says in one of his sermons that ‘God hath imprinted in every natural man, and doth exalt in the supernatural and regenerate man, an endless and undeterminable desire of more than this life can minister unto him. Still God leaves man in expectation.’  He is saying that this thirst for transcendence is there in everyone and even more so in those who have faith; faith does not put an end to the desire to go beyond, to go deeper and further than all that we presently know or experience. Faith simply enables us to hear more clearly this desire in us and perhaps enables us to resist the substitutes, the temporary satieties.
Our former neighbour in Frognal, Kathleen Ferrier, famously sang the aria from Mendelssohn’s Elijah, ‘O rest in the Lord, wait patiently for him and he shall give thee thy heart’s desire’ – a version of words from psalm 37. It prompts a question we  all have to ask ourselves; what is my heart’s desire, what do I truly thirst for? That must be a defining question, a question which Christ asks each one of us, what do you truly want? What is it that makes me most restless, what is it that digs deep down under whatever satisfaction, complacency, self confidence I may have? What makes me restless and unsatisfied in a way I can’t quite understand? Sometimes this feeling has an obvious answer – there is something I need the courage to change in my life – perhaps to do with my pattern of work, or my relationships. But then do I also have this thirst for something more, an expectation which I can’t resolve, something which points to transcendence?
Christianity challenges us with the question, what do you desire.  And yet the transcendent dimension of this question ensures that the answer will not be straightforward. It will not for example involve becoming better at something; it will not in any way involve our becoming better equipped to face competition in our lives. The God who will answer our request is a God who has made us and is remaking us in his own image. And what God makes and remakes in each one of us is valued by God for its own sake. God delights in us and wills us to delight in one another; and such delight has no purpose – it does not exist for any goal. We and God exist for mutual delight and fidelity. So the act of self transcendence means in the end, a letting go – a letting go of all need for self justification, self belief, pride and competition, so that all we are left with is this challenge to delight in one another as we accept that God can actually delight in us.
When John recalls Jesus words on the cross, ‘I thirst,’ a deep irony is present. The source of living water himself cries out in thirst.  The cup of suffering which he accepts in Gethsemane has to be drained to the last drop – he must thirst to the end – and his thirst is to complete the work which God gave him to do, the work whereby he becomes for us the source of eternal life.
The community which tells this story  will be a  community which also thirsts. It will be a community in which people are encouraged to explore their deepest desires. It will be a community striving to identify and heal its distorted desire. it will be a community which gives itself in prayer and worship to  the transcendent God who takes us way beyond ourselves and wills us always to go further than we want or believe we can.
4. Into thy hands I commit my spirit
Our final meditation on Jesus last words from the cross will look at a group of sayings all of them related to the ending of life: ‘Into thy hand I commit my spirit,’ and ‘It is finished.’ We shall also look back to the moment when Jesus says to the penitent thief, ‘Today you will be with me in Paradise.’
I was talking recently to the chaplain of a hospice and I asked him about the concerns patients wanted to talk to him about. He replied that by far the most frequent question people  ask themselves in such circumstances is ‘Have I lived a good life?’ And that reminded me of the closing sequence of Steve Spielberg’s 1998 film ‘Saving Private Ryan’. It concerns a small group of American soldiers who have survived the D Day landings and are asked to go in search of Private Ryan, a soldier missing in action whose three brothers have all been killed in the landings. Eventually they do find him but only two out of the group of seven survive, the last to die being the captain who has led the mission. His last words to Private Ryan are, ‘Earn this, James. Earn it.’ At the end of the film, a now elderly Ryan  comes back to France to visit Captain Miller’s grave. He remembers Miller’s dying words and says, “I’ve tried to live my life the best I could. I hope that was enough. I hope that at least in your eyes I’ve earned what all of you have done for me’. His wife joins him by the grave and he says to her, ‘Tell me I’ve led a good life; tell me I’m a good man.’ It’s not clear in the film whether Private Ryan has any kind of Christian faith or whether all his reflections are made from a wholly secular point of view.
It used to be the case at least up until the 17th century, that preparing for death was a common spiritual practice. Books were written entitled, ‘The Art of Dying’, ‘ or ‘Holy Dying’. They included practical advice about the moral responsibility of making a will, leaving directions for your funeral, reconciling yourself with people you may have fallen out with, and spiritual advice about  prayer and preparing to meet God.
But now we might ask why in our secular world  might it be important when approaching death,  to believe or hope that you have led a good life?  Private Ryan had an impossible burden laid on him. To be told by the dying man who has helped to save your life that you have somehow to make up for his death, earn it or merit it in retrospect, lays a heavy burden of potential guilt on someone. One can see why Private Ryan has worried about whether his life has been good enough. Perhaps something a little like that lies behind any question about whether one has led a good life. Has my life been worth the sacrifices my parents made for me, or the sacrifices made by those who defend my country? Have I merited the  advantages or the good fortune I may have received in life? But why this calculation? How could one possibly know whether one had led a good enough life – good enough according to what scale of values? Good enough for whom? Or might there be more significantly a sense lying behind this question that life itself is somehow a gift and that by living a good life we are somehow expressing gratitude for that gift? Or conversely is the fact of death itself, the finality of it, something that makes us want at least to find some consolation in knowing that we have done our best with the time we had? Does a good life somehow give life meaning in the face of the nothingness of death?
If we turn now to what is implied by Jesus last words from the cross we find something a little like this reflection on a life coming to an end, but seen from a very different perspective. When Jesus says, ‘It is finished,’ it is as though he is saying, ’It is accomplished’ or ‘It is completed’. It is as though his whole life was a piece of work which he has seen through to the end. It might be seen as a cry of victory or less dramatically as a gentle expression of relief that the work is done.
But what is the work Jesus has accomplished? Some readings of this gospel story  make it sound a little like the task given to Private Ryan. It is as though Jesus says to us, ‘Look what I have done for you, see to it that you respond appropriately, see that you earn what I’ve done for you’. And yet that cannot be right. Whatever the crucifixion achieves it is an expression of the free gift of divine love. That gift is not something we must live up to but simply something we are to receive, a gracious and oh so costly loving which wants to draw out of us the response of faith – faith which will change our lives. If Jesus’ life is a piece of work, that work is the crafting of a life and a death, hinted at by the prophets but only brought to fruition in Jesus. And that work is done both to show us God’s kind of living and to enable us as a community to carry it forward. No-one can repeat the work alone but in the community of the church it is to be worked out throughout the rest of human history. And so it could be said that each of us has a part to play in re-enacting Jesus’ work for our time – each of us has a part of that work to accomplish before we die.  As it was done for us so it is to be done in us.
And the final part of that work is to be not a looking back but a handing over. In Luke’s gospel Jesus says, ‘‘Father into thy hands I commit my spirit’. Again he is quoting the psalms, in this instance from Ps 31. And he adds to the words of the psalm his familiar address to God as Father, to whom he now hands over his life as in the next sentence he breathes out his spirit. And in this way he also perhaps gives to us the possibility that our death can be, not an anxious calculation of past goodness, but the simple handing over of all that a life has been. Whatever my life has or hasn’t achieved, whatever I know was not good about my life I can simply hand it over to God, trusting that he will receive it and that what I try to give to him with love will be received with a love I cannot now comprehend. We must give ourselves to God without trying to calculate the goodness of the gift. What would be the point because whatever good there has been in my life, I have been enabled to do through God’s grace not my own ability?
One major  point of those early manuals on holy dying concerned not the plus side of a persons life but the troubled conscience in the face of what had not been done right. And perhaps the elderly Ryan would have been helped far more at that graveside not by the reassurance that he had led a good life but by a gentle listening to his anxiety about those parts of his life which made him feel guilty or ashamed. Holy dying involves confession and absolution – something akin to the words between Jesus and the penitent thief. One criminal mocks Jesus, but the other rebukes him, ‘Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed justly; for we are receiving the due rewards of our deeds; but this man has done nothing wrong.’ And he said, ‘Jesus, remember me, when you come into your kingdom.’ And he said to him, ‘Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise.’
This is an extraordinarily intimate and painful moment. Out of the clamour of mockery, a dying man finds the strength not only to rebuke his fellow criminal, but also to make a kind of confession – we’ re being punished justly – but then for the only time in the gospel Jesus is spoken to simply by his name, without the addition of a title like Lord or Master.  ‘Jesus remember me.’
And Jesus replies ‘Today you will be with me in Paradise.’ Paradise is a word which means a garden – perhaps the garden of Eden or perhaps the redeemed state of the new Jerusalem; whichever it is, the imagery of a garden is in direct contradiction of the bloody, barren and stony harshness of Golgotha. ‘Today’ asserts that this will all soon be over. ‘With me’ asserts their brotherhood, even though in Paradise, Jesus will be a king and his brother will be a redeemed criminal. As Jesus commends his spirit into his Father’s hands he holds out his own hand to the criminal next to him so that he may take him with  him as his companion through death into the presence of the Father.
A community which tells this story need not be afraid of death; at least if we are naturally sometimes afraid we should not fear talking about death. We should perhaps develop our own art of dying – at least setting ourselves the task of making sure that  we live in a state of reconciliation, we cultivate self knowledge, we prepare for that time when we shall see God face to face; and most importantly of all we try consciously to put ourselves in the presence of our Father God each day, so that when the time comes we can say ‘Father into thy hands I commend my spirit’, and if necessary think it faster than we can say it.*
*Some members of the congregation may remember that I have taken this final phrase from a sermon by Sir Alan Goodison.
Other sources of these sermons include “God, Christ and Us” by Herbert McCabe, “Mysteries of Faith” by Mark McIntosh, and Rowan Williams’ book on Dostoevsky as well as his collection of sermons, “Open to Judgement”