Church of the Redeemer | Iglesia del Redentor

Into your hands I commend my spirit.

Psalm 31:5

Into thy hands I commend my spirit; thou hast redeemed me.

Shame. In any insular community, public humiliation is the ultimate punishment. It is true in junior high schools, where cliques of girls enforce morals about sexuality by blasting judgments of their peers through text messages and face book posts, and it was true in the tribal communities of biblical times.

As anyone who has ever lived in a small town can tell you, the loss of status that follows a public shaming is not only suffered by the individual – it is also suffered by everyone in relation to that person. Their family members, friends, business associates, children may all feel the impact. And during biblical times, when members of different communities prayed to different gods, the shaming extended beyond the individual and included the god they prayed to as well. In essence, a public ridiculing amounted to an indictment of your family’s god, and a declaration of his impotence. Just as you were shamed, your god was shamed as well.

Many of you know that I was raised in the South, and my pride at the culture I come from is often mixed with a measure of shame at what members of my community have done. For this reason, Jesus’ crucifixion is very real to me. The angry mob descending on the jailer, demanding their prisoner; the jailer feebly trying to disperse the crowd before washing his hands and saying this man’s blood would not be on his hands; the public procession with the accused through town; the public beating; the stripping of his clothes to add a layer of sexual humiliation; the final culmination of an accused man, hanging, while a crowd mocks below – the story of Jesus’ death is no different than the story of any other lynching in our history.

And like any lynching, the murder of one person accused of a crime is only the tip of the iceberg. A lynching is designed to terrify the community, to warn them. A lynching is a public statement that the rule of law does not apply here, and we can do this to you just as we do this to him. Your government won’t protect you. Your legal system won’t protect you. Your jailers won’t even protect you.

Jesus’ death on the cross was intended as a message to his followers to stay in their place. Don’t challenge Rome. Don’t challenge the priesthood. Don’t try to change things. Look what will happen to you if you do. The public humiliation of Jesus was not merely a punishment to him; it was a lesson intended to warn others not to do what he had done.

And Jesus was learned in the scriptures. So it is no surprise that his last words were actually the words of one of the Psalms – Psalm 31, where David, having been publicly shamed, pleads to God for redemption.

In Psalm 31, David pleads with God, saying, “I am the scorn of my adversaries, a horror to my neighbors.” He describes himself as “beset in a besieged city.” Certainly, this was true for Jesus as well, who was fighting the Roman occupation as much as he was battling the establishment of the high priests in Jerusalem.

At this moment, we know that Jesus, the human, must have been in incredible pain. Close to death, he was not able to deliver a long sermon or summon another parable to help his followers understand what was happening to him. But he knew that his followers, and those in the lynch mob, would be familiar with the Jewish texts, and so he spoke a line from this psalm. Into your hands, I commend my spirit.

Just as we sing the Psalms here every Sunday, Jesus’ contemporaries did also. The Psalms are songs – indeed, the word psalm comes from the Hebrew word that means “to pluck” meaning to pluck the strings of a harp. The Psalms were folk songs, hymns that most in the crowd likely would have known the words to. And when Jesus, close to death, cried out, as the text tells us, in a loud voice, Into your hands, I commend my spirit, it is likely that the crowd should have known the next line: thou hast redeemed me, O Lord, faithful God.

The passage in the text can be interpreted in many ways. Jesus, in pain, was pleading with God to end his suffering and hasten his earthly death.

Or, Jesus was accepting the plan that God had created for him, just as we should all be willing to fulfill God’s plans for us.

Or, Jesus understood that, under Jewish law, one who was hanged was thought to be cursed by God. Knowing that his contemporaries would believe this, he instead was reminding his followers, and the people in the lynch mob, of his teachings, reminding them that things were different now. Jesus preached often that the only commandments were this: to love the lord with all your heart, and to love your neighbors as yourselves. By speaking this line from Psalm 31, Jesus was once again turning everything upside down. Whereas before, a hanged man was cursed by God, now, Jesus led us to the text that says instead you have redeemed me, God.

At the moment of his death, Jesus had one more opportunity to teach the people he had walked among for so long. By speaking the verse of what was likely a well-known hymn, Jesus was instructing those in the crowd – his disciples and his persecutors – to look to the message of the hymn and the scriptures from which it came.

The final lines of Psalm 31 are this: “Love the Lord, all you, his saints! The Lord preserves the faithful but abundantly requites him who acts haughtily. Be strong, and let your heart take courage, all you who wait for the Lord!”

This could have been a reminder to the disciples that they should not despair in the months and years ahead, when the Christian experience would not be an easy one. It could also have been a reminder to us, that we must not focus only on Christ’s death, but on his life and teachings – especially that we must love the Lord with all our hearts, for the Lord, as the Psalm says, will preserve the faithful.

Kara Vona

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