‘Father, into Your hands I commit my spirit.’ (Luke 23:46)
Jesus has clearly moved from the place of dereliction and forsakenness to the place of childlike trust and simplicity. This is a prayer of security prayed in the most horrendous of circumstances. Many of us find it difficult to pray this prayer in the ordinary circumstances of life, often struggling with surrender and submission to the Father’s will even when everything is going well. But Jesus demonstrates for us how to pray even when we are in distress and pain, for we must constantly develop that childlike faith and trust (Matt 18:3, Matt 11:25).
Our lives and times are in God’s hands. (Ps 31:15) He is our Maker, the One who created us and knows us. (Ps 139:1-18) Nothing happens to us without His foreknowledge and permission (see Job 1.) The more we meditate on these truths, the more we are able to surrender to God’s will for our lives, for we know that He is for us and that nothing can separate us from His love. (Rom 8:28-39) Secure in this knowledge, we can commit our lives and deaths to His hands.
Eugene Peterson reminds us ‘this is not a prayer we hold in reserve for our deathbed, a prayer of reluctant relinquishment as we give up the ghost. We pray it when we get out of bed each morning, alive yet another day, ready to go to work painting a house, teaching a class of kindergartners, surgically removing a cancerous breast… planting a field of barley.’ (‘The Word Made Flesh’, P 253) Jesus could pray this as He was about to die because He had prayed this every day of His life. That is the level of trust we too must acquire, and it only comes as we become like little children and place our lives in God’s hands.
