6 - ‘Father, into thy hands …’

Summary

Jesus' last word

Luke's account of Jesus' last word confirms that he was working with a δίκαιος-model. In Luke's version Jesus' final word was, Πάτερ, εἰς χεĩράς σου παρατίθεμαι τò πνεῦμά μου (Luke 23.46), which is entirely consistent with what Wisdom had affirmed would be the lot of God's δίκαιοι (Wis. 3.1). Whatever seems to be their loss or suffering, they are in God's hands. Whether Luke rewrote Mark's cry of dereliction because he had already begun to think of Jesus as the δίκαιος, or whether the tradition of Jesus' death that he received already treasured Psalm 30.6(31.5) as Jesus' last word which then directed Luke's or his church's mind to WisdomL's model, is probably an insoluble problem. Significantly, in Luke, Jesus' last word schematically coheres with the centurion's recognition of Jesus as ὄντως … δίκαιος; both changes probably originate in the same underlying model, each confirming the other.

This argument recognises that for Luke there was at this point only one word of Jesus from the cross. Attempts to show that Luke's saying was a supplementary form to that found in Mark or Matthew tend to founder on two hard facts. First, the structure of Luke's sentence seems to preclude the possibility of there being more than one ‘final’ word: … καὶ φωνήσας φωνῇ μεγάλῃ ὁ' Ιησοῦς εἶπεν, Πάτερ … τοῦτο δὲ εἰπὼν ἐξέπνευσεν (Luke 23.46–7).