[Dialogue] 3/17/11, Spong: Examining the Story of the Cross; Part III There Never Were “Seven Last Words” From the Cross

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Examining the Story of the Cross; Part III There Never Were “Seven Last Words” From the Cross
One of the most dramatic services of Holy Week for me has always been the Good Friday “Three Hour Service.”  It was designed to enable Christian worshipers in some dramatic way to watch by the cross as their Lord died.  The traditional content of that three-hour service traditionally consisted of sermons or meditations on what were called “The Seven Last Words,” which were supposedly the words spoken by Jesus from the cross as he died.
Normally, the three hours were divided into a series of eight mini-services of twenty minutes or so in duration.  After one introductory sermon setting the stage for the day, each segment thereafter in this liturgy would usually consist of a reading from the gospel that included the quoted word from the cross; perhaps a Passiontide hymn like “Go to dark Gethsemane” or “Were you there when they crucified my Lord?”, some prayers, which were characteristically of a penitential nature, and perhaps some silence for meditation.  There was opportunity for worshipers to come and go after each of the “words.”  A few, as the final act of their Lenten discipline, would stay for the whole three hours.  Sometimes these services would be ecumenical with clergy from various traditions taking one of the “words.”  Sometimes a number of churches would join in the observance and an outsider would be brought in to preach on each of the “Seven Last Words,” a pattern that would at least give consistency to the overall message.  Sometimes the local pastor would himself or herself do the entire three-hour service that, in my experience, would either be a work of supererogation for which the preacher would feel profoundly virtuous, or an intensely moving personal experience.  In my career I have participated in each of these formats; I have been one of many in a community service; I have done the entire service in the church I was serving; I have been the guest who did the “Words” in another city, and I have sat in the pews and listened to another for the entire three hours.  The three most memorable three-hour services that I can personally recall are first, when I was invited to be the Good Friday preacher at St. Peter’s Church, Charlotte, the downtown Episcopal church in which I had been raised as a child;  second, listening to a priest of my Diocese, David Hegg, in my present parish church, St. Peter’s, Morristown, New Jersey, preach on the death of Jesus on Good Friday, after he had experienced the death of his 27 year old daughter in an automobile accident just six days earlier, and, third, during the year that I had the privilege of teaching at Harvard I spent Good Friday listening to Dr. Peter Gomes, the senior minister of Memorial Church in the Harvard Yard and one of the great preachers of our time, do each of the seven words.
That three hour Good Friday liturgical pattern has, however, fallen into general disuse and for two major reasons I think.  First, churches located in the heart of business districts in the cities of this land have given way since World War II to churches located in the suburbs.  A noon to three p.m. service in the suburbs might not have a critical mass of people in the homes who might attend a midday service.  A city-center church where business people and shoppers could drop by for a convenient part of the three hours was the final expression of this tradition.  In recent years even in city-center churches this traditional Good Friday observance has thus been replaced with some lesser version, perhaps a one-hour services or, at best, one and a half hour services with perhaps a service toward the end of the three hours dedicated to the children, designed, I felt, to perpetuate the illusion of yesterday’s tradition. In many churches preaching has been replaced with liturgical music appropriate to the day.
The second reason for the demise of the Good Friday three hour service was, I believe, the fact that critical biblical scholarship has over the past 200 years demythologized, to use the word Rudolf Bultmann made famous, the way we understand the Bible.  The literal manner in which we once read the New Testament is simply no longer possible.  One of the casualties of that critical study is that we now recognize that Jesus did not actually say any of the supposed “seven last words” from the cross.  In order to reach the number seven people had simply collapsed the four gospels into a single blended collage, as if we could create from these separate sources a single historical and accurate narrative.  In our pre-literate biblical days we also did this with Christmas pageants, which were almost uniformly designed to blend Matthew’s story of Jesus’ nativity, which was the earliest of the birth accounts, with Luke’s story which was both the other and the latest.  The two stories are radically incompatible in many details, but that did not stop pageant producers from putting them together so that Matthew’s star in the east leading the magi to Bethlehem became the last scene in the story following Luke’s account of the angels’ visit to the shepherds and their journey to the manger in search of the baby.  Most people, influenced by too many pageants, still today think of these two stories as a single whole.
The “Seven Last Words” has had a similar history.  In the first two gospels, Mark written in the early 70’s and Matthew, composed about a decade later, the only “word” Jesus was said to have spoken from the cross was what came to be called, the “Cry of Dereliction,” which is “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”  This intensely human cry, however, became an increasingly difficult “word” to attribute to Jesus as Christian history moved and the humanity of Jesus was increasingly replaced by various claims of his divinity.  Scholars also noted that this cry, while attributed to Jesus, was actually the first verse of Psalm 22, a psalm that clearly was used early in Christian history to interpret the crucifixion.  I will look at the influence of that psalm in the story of the crucifixion later in this series.
When the third gospel, Luke, was written, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” disappeared from his story and instead Luke created three brand new “words” from the cross that no one had ever heard before.  The mythical figure developed in II Isaiah (40-55), called the “Suffering Servant,” had clearly been influential in shaping Luke’s story of the cross.  The “Servant” was said to have made intercession for his oppressors so Luke had Jesus do the same, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they have done” was the result.  In Luke, for the first time, one of the two thieves crucified with Jesus was said to have become “penitent.” In the earlier gospels both thieves were said to have reviled him.  In his penitent state he was said to have begged Jesus to “remember him” when he came into his kingdom.  To this plea, Luke has Jesus promise, “Today you will be with me in Paradise.”  Finally, instead of the final word from the cross at the moment of death being a fearful cry of forsakenness Luke has Jesus replace it with a note of triumph: “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.”
When we come to the Fourth Gospel, written near the end of the tenth decade, the author omits everything that Mark, Matthew and Luke have all proposed that Jesus spoke from the cross and he creates three entirely new sayings designed to satisfy his understanding of the death of Jesus.  The first was: “I thirst,” a note that also has its roots in Psalm 22.  The second was: “Woman, behold thy son.  Son, behold thy mother,” which helped the author to develop the character of the one he called “the beloved disciple.”  It is also noteworthy that only in this final gospel is there any reference to the presence of the mother of Jesus at the cross.  Lastly, John suggests as Jesus’ final word from the cross: “It is finished,” which catches up one of the Fourth Gospel’s unique interpretations of Jesus as the author of the new creation.
The fact is that in all probability Jesus never said any of these words from the cross and they certainly do not present a complete and harmonious story, since the “seven words” never appear together in any book of the Bible.
Despite the loss of this homiletical trick of preaching on the “Seven Last Words,” I still think there is a place for a three-hour Good Friday service.  I believe it should be an offering to the community everywhere a church is located in a business setting to which commuters flow in and out each day and where Easter shoppers are present in abundance.  I would, however, like to give “The Seven Last Words” an appropriate burial as the format of this Good Friday liturgy.  In their place I would suggest that the three-hour service be dedicated to understanding the unique way in which the passion story is interpreted by each gospel writer.  One year, for example, this Good Friday service would be based on the passion story according to Mark.  The next year Matthew’s passion narrative would form the content.  Luke’s story of the cross would be the emphasis for the third year. Finally, in a fourth year to complete the cycle, John’s gospel account of Jesus death would be examined in depth.  The clergy conducting these services would themselves in their preparation be forced to embrace the perspective of each gospel writer in order to lead their congregations into the way each gospel writer interpreted the death of Jesus.  Both clergy and their congregations would then be able to experience and to embrace the unique ways in which the story was originally told, to see how each gospel writer added new details, to observe the ways in which the story grew through the years and finally to engage the interpretive task in the quest to understand why the various additions were made.  Above all, this approach would help people know that, while the fact of the crucifixion is history, the interpretive details of each gospel writer are not.  Good Friday would be transformed into a day of entering the interpretive process that might serve to draw us more closely to this Jesus, instead of being used, as is the case so often with Good Friday preaching, as a means of eliciting guilt for what we did to Jesus.  I have never known guilt to help us grow into wholeness.  Such a tradition might help us recover the Jesus of history and the meaning of the cross itself.
~John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online here.





Question & Answer
Nick Bagnall from Omokora Beach, New Zealand, writes:
Question:
When you realize that 10% of the population of the USA owns 87% of the wealth in your country and that this figure has been growing during the past 60 years, you may need to add wealthism (the belief that disparity of income and wealth is OK) to your list of unacceptable prejudices. Do you know how little the bottom of the USA population owns? Perhaps you could find out. That may convince you that capitalism as practiced is not working. How can this be allowed to continue in a country which still regards itself as nominally Christian? 

Answer:
Dear Nick, 

I did not say that capitalism was perfect just that I see no economic system that has served the needs of more people better. Even the poor in the United States enjoy an easier life than the poor in any other society or nation I have ever visited. 

That being said, I pointed out the dangers in capitalism and you have identified the most important one. An unbridled capitalism almost inevitably leads toward a situation in which the poor get poorer and the rich get richer. That always destabilizes a population and, if unchecked, ultimately results in either higher crime rates as the underprivileged seek to balance their lack with stealing or to revolutions in which the disenfranchised seek to destroy the government that has disenfranchised them economically. We see this happening today in countries as diverse as Venezuela, Mexico, Tunisia and Egypt. This is, of course, what Karl Marx predicted when he wrote his Communist Manifesto. 

The gap between the rich and the poor has been growing exponentially in the United States since the 90’s. It grew enormously during the eight years of the Clinton administration. Its growth went off the charts during the eight years of the George W. Bush presidency. Even in this time of economic collapse, the poor have suffered more than the rich. The hope for redress lies in providing a safety net through which no one will fall. That net is built with affordable and universal health care, a healthy social security system, good quality public education, scholarship help for those who qualify for higher education and a fair and equitable tax system. When Steve Forbes, a billionaire, argues that a flat tax is fair since all people would the pay the same percentage of their income, what he is proposing is little more than smoke and mirrors. That would only increase what is a fact today, namely that the poor and middle class of this country pay a much greater percentage of their spendable income in taxes than do the rich. To make that figure more equitable would be a step in the right direction. 

To give more purchasing power to the poor and middle classes is also good economics. For the engine of our economy is located in the spending power of the masses. To keep the debt of the nation rising while handing out tax breaks to the rich, as this nation’s government has just done, may be good short term political policy, but it is a prescription for long term disaster. I would still prefer to perfect capitalism than to opt for any other economic system yet devised. We run enormous risks, however, if we opt for maintaining the status quo. 

~John Shelby Spong 






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