The Sermon of the Seven Words

The Sermon of the Seven Words: Curiosities

The Sermon of the Seven Words, consists of the 7 words that the Lord Jesus pronounced at the moment in which he was going through the crucifixion, some 7 words that had to be expressed so that the word of God would be fulfilled according to what was said in the old testament In the following article we will know what these words were expressed by the Lord Jesus and what each of them mean.

Sermon of the Seven Words

Brothers, I truly admire these two great Dominican speakers: Fr. Granada, who has been read on many occasions, as well as Fr. Royo Marín, whom many have been lucky enough to hear with his eloquent oratory. These 2 men, like so many others, came to preach the Passion of the Lord emphasizing, all about, the vindictive justice of God and in the same way the redemptive suffering of Christ to return satisfaction to the Father.

Many people come to be from other times, and are inclined to think more like a type of modern theologian who, coming to interpret what the Passion of Jesus Christ is, come to write:

“How annoying and disturbing is that blood of Jesus that, according to what is said, saves us! How outrageous becomes that bloody treatment demanded by God, that great sacrifice necessary to appease him!… And yet, already in what is the Old Testament, the believer comes to discover a different God, a God whom ” he does not like sacrifice” as the book of Psalm 51:18 says.

A God who “is repugnant to the blood of bulls and goats” according to what the book of Isaiah 1:12 says. And the advance of the Revelation from the Old to that which is the New Testament, will the pleasure of God reside in the refinement of the unhealthy, who comes to discover his taste for what is the blood of a man through his growing disgust for it? that of the animals?

A man named Francois Varonne, who becomes the author we are referring to, then says: “Blood and Christianity have become good friends over time. And this is because Christianity has become much more widespread from the religious attitude, which comes to affirm that the weak man must assert himself before the Almighty God in order to obtain his favors, and must pay a type of price to obtain your forgiveness.

And what can be much more effective than a human sacrifice? For this reason, the blood and also the sacrifice of Jesus are the ones that have fallen into the most absolute and the most disastrous of misunderstandings. And this becomes the reason why many reject the Christian faith today .

Given this, what should be done? How should one come to preach the Passion of the Lord? And the same theologian is the one who comes to answer: “The blood and also the sacrifice of Jesus are the ones that must be taken out of the context of satisfaction, in order to placate God, and returned to their true context, which becomes the of revelation, in order to manifest the heart of God .

Jesus Christ was the last Word of God to this world, in a kind of supreme attempt to reveal his Father’s heart to us through the one who knew him best, that is, his Son. And, if revealing the Father becomes what Jesus did in the course of his entire life, will this not be in the same way and above all what he wanted to do at the moment of his death?

In this way, in reality, as the Evangelists have come to contemplate on the Passion of the Lord, with a very different look from all of us. The stories about the Passion, in the Gospels, are the ones that suppose a kind of contemplation much more theological than pietistic.

As Theological it can be said that the Evangelists have come to contemplate the Passion more in the light of God than in the case of the religious light of man, even of the man of study, that is, a theologian or a jurist. For this reason, the contemplation of the Passion that the Gospels transmit to us becomes sober and not dramatic, as on several occasions the various preachers present it or the different artists represent it in their works.

So many would have to ask themselves the following: What have we come to do to the Lord Jesus: a kind of superhero of suffering, in which many have come to want to see as the limit of what people cannot get to reach? Who truly becomes the Lord Jesus:

Is he that man or supreme hero, who gets to fight against suffering and against the most horrible death, or is he the Servant of Yahweh, without gesture, without grandiloquence, who has come to give his life at the rate that the same circumstances give him? were marking, in order to reveal to us the infinite love of God? Who becomes Jesus dying on the Cross: a kind of superman who crosses all the different barriers, even the barrier of death, or does he become the King in humble majesty, as the Evangelist has been able to see above all? Juan?

The look of the great and different Evangelists has become more theological than in the case of humanizing and also legal. Which means that they have been able to see everything from the divine side. The mystery of the Humanity of the Lord Jesus becomes the overwhelming mystery that tends to infinitely surpass what is the gaze of humanistic religious devotion and all kinds of theological or legal precision.

We, perhaps because we are not able to penetrate to the depths of the mystery of the Cross, make a sentimentality or an apparently lofty theology that is mixed with justicialism. Which comes to distort the contemplative and also theological view of that Great Event, which becomes the core of our Christian faith, which is the:

For what we would need to get to have the look of Mary at the foot of the Cross: standing, as the strongest woman, the lady of herself, the silent one and at all times contemplating with great anguish what is the separation that comes to suffer his beloved Son Jesus when he came to see himself abandoned by the Father.

And, like Mary herself in that same supreme hour, coming to act our faith and also our hope, knowing at all times that what is happening there is something more than the atrocious suffering that is observed: the Lord’s Supreme Revelation God, the Birth of something New, the Promise of God finally comes to pass.

For what they have much to do with each other in the Birth of Jesus in the Cave of Bethlehem and also his Death on the top of Calvary: what at that moment began in the cleft of a rock, here it is that it reached its fullness in top of another rock. The only difference is that the powerful, who did not come to worship him in that place, were already crucifying him here.

Mary becomes the one who, keeping everything in her heart at all times, manages to unify those 2 great moments. So many ask you to join us in the contemplation of the Last Words of Jesus. “The essential Words according to what Martín Descalzo says in which we must come to discover the meaning of how much she was and how much she had come to do in this world, the last and great treasure of her life. And also of her death.”

the seven words

The Seven Words of Jesus in the Latin language known as “Septem Verba” is the denomination in a conventional way of the last seven sentences that Jesus came to pronounce during his crucifixion, before dying, as they come to collect in the canonical Gospels. The first 2, which are that of Matthew and the book of Mark, are the ones that mention only 1, which is the 4th word of Jesus.

The book of Luke comes to relate about 3, which are the 1st, 2nd and 7th. The book of John comes to collect the remaining 3 that are, the 3rd, 5th and 6th. The chronological order cannot be determined. Its conventional order becomes according to the Spanish translation of the Jerusalem Bible:

  • Primera Palabra: “Father, forgive them, because they do not know what they do.” – Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing (Luke, 23: 34).
  • Second Word: “I assure you that today you will be with me in Paradise.” – Amen dico tibi hodie mecum eris in paradiso (Luke, 23: 43).
  • Third Word: “Woman, there you have your son. Son, there you have your mother”. – Mulier ecce filius tuus […] ecce mater tua (John, 19: 26-27).
  • Fourth Word: “My God, my God! Why have you abandoned me?” – Eli, Eli! lama sabactani? (Matthew, 27: 46) – Deus meus Deus meus ut quid dereliquisti me (Mark, 15: 34).
  • Fifth Word: “I thirst.” – Siege (John, 19: 28).
  • Sixth Word: “Everything is completed”. – It is finished (Juan, 19: 30).
  • Seventh Word: “Father, en tus manos encomiendo mi espirito”. – Father, into your hands I commend my spirit (Luke, 23: 46).

His devotional interpretation becomes a kind of comparison with the moments through which the life of every believer inevitably comes to pass; to which all kinds of exegesis are usually added. The same evangelical text is the one that attributes to these “words” an end of fulfillment of the prophecies found in the Old Testament: knowing that everything was already fulfilled, and so that the Scripture would be fulfilled until the end (John, 19:28).

The seven words are considered of particular devotion at the time of being considered as the “true words” of Jesus, a condition that is shared with certain different expressions, which are collected throughout all the Gospels, which are the ones that pretend to quote them exactly although those that are translated into Greek, except for a few that were transcribed literally in Hebrew or in the Aramaic language by the evangelists and are those that receive the particular denomination of “ipsissima verba” or “ipsissima vox”.

first word

It can be said that everything started right in the Garden of Olives. It was in this place where Jesus dedicated himself to praying, in the middle of the night, in the middle of his consecration, he pronounced the most endearing word of his heart which was: “Abba, Father” . In the midst of his “agony”, which he wants to say in the midst of his combat, the Son had come to surrender to what is the will of the Father. And he began his journey to the Cross, as a kind of progressive epiphany, as a kind of manifestation of his lordship as the great Messiah the Savior, and as a great revelation of the loving heart of God.

In the same Garden of Gethsemane, upon saying “I am” , Jesus was when he manifested himself to be the Son of God, and when the Roman authority who was Pontius Pilate presented him before the rioting crowd with all those words: “Ecce Homo” , it became very clear that he was also the Son of Man. On the Cross, therefore, Man and God were going to be nailed.

On that same sublime Cross Pilate had come to write: “Jesus, the Nazarene, King of the Jews” . It was written in the 3 languages ​​that were better known at that time, which were:

  • Hebrew
  • Latin
  • Greek

In this way, even without knowing it, the Roman Procurator was the one who implied that Jesus was truly the universal King. Which was rejected by all, this was the one who had come to Calvary.

The First Word that the Lord Jesus addresses to his Father is: “Father, forgive them…” He finds himself praying with the prayer that he came to teach us all and practicing what he had come to preach on many occasions: “Love your enemies do good to those who hate you” This can be seen in the book of Luke 6:27-35.

Jesus in his last minutes of life reminds us of that kind of prayer that appeals to the heart of God that He came to know much better than anyone at all times: “Father, forgive them . ” Jesus touches the heart of God, the unfathomable mystery of his paternity, his gratuitous love, his absolute love. This kind of prayer at the top of the Cross is the one that reveals to us, at the same time, the great love of Jesus for all of us and also the love of the Father.

At this very moment when man becomes worthy of all kinds of punishment, Jesus had told the daughters of Jerusalem, God, always being faithful to his love, makes the giving of his own Son an unfathomable reason for salvation and also of mercy. Jesus, who in the midst of his agony in the Garden had come to surrender to the will of the Father, who now wants to win the fight together with the Father. Since he knows his heart, infinite in mercy.

In this kind of new prayer, he dares to tell God that those who are crucifying him “do not know what they are doing” and, once again forgetting himself and his great pain, he asks for forgiveness for all of them and for all humanity: for the judges who have come to condemn him, as well as for the soldiers who have come to crucify him, including the crowd that shouted for his death, for you and even for me.

Jesus knows very well that if man’s sin becomes great, the Father’s mercy becomes greater. And here, in this same agony, in this great combat in the form of prayer, Jesus has come out victorious. The Father, to whom the Son in the midst of the Garden of Olives surrendered for his love and who accepted the way of the Cross, is now defenseless before the pleading prayer of his beloved Son.

The Heavenly Father loves the Son and, in response to the plea that he is directing to him in favor of all men with whom he has come to be in solidarity even in sin, as the book of 2 Corinthians 5:21 says, all divine holiness that comes to reject sin absolutely, returns to the eternal mystery of his eternal fidelity, of his mercy. Now the Father does not get to look at man as he usually is, but he looks at him as he comes to be loved in the heart of his Son.

Definitely, man must come to renounce justification by his own works, by his own law or by his own goodness. Only in the trustful prayer of the Lord Jesus obedient to the Father until death, and in the “Yes” that the Father has come to grant us in Christ, do we have full forgiveness, justification and also redemption of all our sins as it is written in the book of Ephesians 2:4-10, so we have an eternal covenant with him.

More than ever, in the Cross of Jesus and also from his First Word, the loving heart of the great God that we have, as well as of the Son and the Father, has been revealed to us. This has been the first word that the Lord Jesus came to exclaim while hanging on the cross of Calvary, for the forgiveness of all our sins.

second word

Now, by means of your imagination, place yourself at a certain distance from Calvary. On a sky that is gray, the 3 crosses can be seen, from which the 3 executed men hang. Jesus becomes the one in the center. Towards Him the other 2 who accompany him come to look. The apostle Luke, who is known as the evangelist of mercy, has placed this kind of scene here, on Calvary, at the pinnacle of Salvation History.

Jesus, as he becomes the revealer of the Father, before dying, he will show us what is the core of his mission and also of the message that the Father had come to entrust to him: The Good News of Grace.

This kind of scene lends itself to being understood in a kind of superficial sense. Usually we stop at what is anecdotal: how the Lord Jesus comes to be insulted by the 2 malefactors who are crucified with Him, and how 1 of them, turning about 80 degrees at the last moment, he dares to pray to the Lord Jesus asking for the Kingdom.

It is fair that, in the face of the horrible pain of all those crucified, this kind of humanistic and also sensitive reading is made. Anyway there’s something else. Here it is revealed to us in a much more radiant way that this one who is dying between the 2 malefactors has come to judge the entire world, and will do so with a type of judgment of mercy.

He is truly the Son of Man, the one who is to come with the power and also with the majesty of God. It is before Him that the good thief comes to make a solemn confession of faith in which he says: “Remember me when you come into your Kingdom” .

This is the man who recognizes in Jesus the Son of Man of the Apocalypse, who will come to judge the entire world. This malefactor comes to belong to the Rest of Yahweh, to all the little ones, to all those sinners who know that the Lord God’s final judgment on History is going to be carried out on this humble Servant, that the great Good News has already arrived, that the time of Grace is at this moment, that God does not come to destroy, but rather to save.

In the death of the Lord Jesus, the final judgment of God begins. And the good thief was given eyes so that he could behold it as the judgment of mercy. For this very reason, it is that he was able to hear this word of Jesus who said: “Today he will be with me in Paradise” .

It is necessary for all of us to come to hear and to be able to truly understand these same words with all the force and with great certainty with which Jesus pronounced them at that moment: “I assure you” . In them, the authority of the Lord Jesus is manifested, his claim to have the last word over man. At this precise moment, Jesus also comes to testify about Himself, that He possesses the key to Paradise.

On the Cross, truly, the entire History of the Salvation of Jesus is summed up. What a man, due to his great rebellion, closed for all human beings, due to the obedience of this great Man, the mercy of the Father has reopened it for all human beings of this world: Paradise. And “today” is right here.

Humanity has come to be restored and also Paradise again comes to be offered to all men. How can this be done? Here is the most surprising part of the case: God only asks man for faith.

So we can get to look very well at this kind of Calvary scene. Next to the Cross of the Lord Jesus there are about 2 men crucified next to him. Neither of the 2 has works or merits that are acquired, but rather it is the opposite of this. They are miscreants, the very representatives of humanity. One of them is the one who comes to insult the Lord Jesus; the other is the one who recognizes his sin and tells him: “We are here with reason, because we have deserved it with what we have done . “

It is in these two same figures that we find the unfathomable mystery of the human heart: light and darkness, faith and unbelief, the freedom to be able to decide between one and the other. One of these criminals is the one who prefers to stay in the dark. The other, seeing the Lord Jesus die, finds the light and for what he begs, with faith, great mercy for him.

Jesus, surely looking at him with great and immense tenderness, sees in him a little one, one of his own, the truly poor of those whom he had previously said is the Kingdom of Heaven, he can see it in the book of Luke 18: 16, sees a sinner, to whom it had been given to listen to the Gospel of Grace.

The first thing, brothers, is to come to recognize one’s own sin, in addition to accepting radical poverty, one’s own misery. To those who act in this way, the Lord Jesus gives the Kingdom. This is how he had come to preach it in his life, and in this way he finds himself preaching and practicing at the time of his death.

Speaking with great evangelical property, God does not require our works to be able to save us. Now the Lord Jesus is the one who gives testimony, the last and most definitive testimony, the great supreme revelation, that God is the one who wants to save all men by pure grace. “By grace we have been saved” , these are words expressed by the Apostle Paul in the book of Ephesians 2:5.

Here is the King, acting from the Cross itself. He has the keys to be able to open and also close. From the Cross he comes to offer his Kingdom, the Father’s Paradise, to all men. However, only the poor, as well as the sinners who truly humble themselves, have seen in Him the great King. He reigns over all sin by forgiving, just as he will reign over death from which he has risen and overcome.

Jesus, and in a very radiant way in this scene of Calvary, in the dialogue that he maintains with the Good Thief, it has been possible to reveal the great messianic power of God as grace. We men expected a God who would come to exact vindictive justice, a type of apocalyptic judgment in favor of all the just and also the good, and a great condemnation judgment for all sinners. That is why Jesus’ message was so strange.

The righteous man, like the Pharisee of that time, was scandalized that the Lord Jesus ate with some of the sinners and offered the messianic banquet to those who were pointed with the finger, as well as to the publicans. Wasn’t this one of the many reasons why the Pharisees asked Plato to kill him?

The Pharisees became the representatives of the Judaism of the Law, of the religion that is official, of the good ones, of the so-called practitioners of the cult in the Temple. They were the representatives of the “religious” heart of man, which at all times is the one that seeks to be able to justify itself before God.

They always sought their security in each of their works, in compliance with the strictness of the Law. In reality, the Pharisee is the one who represents the most intimate of the human heart, of his own heart, who usually acts in that way. Because every type of human being needs to have a correct image of himself and thus affirm himself in the eyes of God and also of himself.

Jesus is the one who establishes the definitive judgment: that God comes to give Paradise by grace. And that this thief had come to understand. No type of thief has ever become a better thief. This was the one who snatched Paradise from God, simply with a simple act of faith, with a great look of trust. Why is this called the good thief?

We are at the core of the New Testament. The apostle Paul explains it wonderfully in his letter to the Ephesians. Will we be able to build our human life and also our spiritual life on the Gospel of Grace? And what does getting to say about the hour of death? If only we had at that moment the lucidity and also the faith of the good thief!

Let no one misunderstand when these things are said. Who comes to believe that what is being mentioned is proposing a much easier or lukewarm life, is that he does not know what love truly is. The same who comes to measure the work of God from his own effort and from his human virtues does not know what love becomes.

The Christian is not good so that God gives him Grace, but he tries to be good because of the great gratitude he has towards God for the gift of Grace. “God has loved us first, even when we were sinners” this is what the book of Romans 5:8 says.

Only the poor, the one who has the heart of a child according to what the Gospel says, becomes capable of understanding this kind of Calvary scene. For this reason, someone has come to say that “the life of a Christian becomes that of learning to be a good thief, a good sinner” (Javier Garrido), this means, a truly repentant sinner.

third word

And now at this moment, will Christ already begin to have to take care of himself? In the first of his words he has come to reveal to all men and has given them the promise of forgiveness. In the second he has come to demonstrate that forgiveness becomes a free gift from God, by giving it to a bandit. Isn’t it time to be able to forget everything around you and dedicate yourself to your pain that you are experiencing at that moment?

No, the revelation of the great love he has must continue until the end. Jesus was still missing the best of his gifts to all mankind. He, who has nothing, being naked on the Cross, he still has something so great: a mother. And he sets out to deliver it. This is found in the book of the apostle John who is the one who transmits this third word to us.

By this time a large number of the group of onlookers have already left. Much of the enemies have also left the place. Only the soldiers of the guard and the small group of those faithful to Jesus remain. They were the nascent Church, which was in this place for something much more than just sentimental reasons. Being united to Jesus, standing next to the Cross, is her mother the Virgin Mary, united not only to her sorrows, but also to her mission.

The scene is reminiscent of the wedding at Cana. Juan’s profound idea is usually this: Mary does not appear until this precise moment of the “Hour” . She has come to be asked for the sacrifice of the Son in the course of the time of her preaching on all the roads of Palestine. Driven away by the Son in the years of his great mission, she now comes to be brought here by himself into the foreground of this great scene of his passion.

Jesus has his place in the saving work, associated with his mission. Here he enters into the mission of the Son with the same office that he had at his origin: that of a mother. The most natural feeling that generally comes over everyone when contemplating this kind of scene, is that the Lord Jesus, as the most loving and delicate Son that ever existed, when he died did not want his mother to be left alone and trusted his care to his beloved disciple who was Juan, his best friend.

If it were to be that way, Jesus, taking up again what is the word on the Cross, would have addressed his disciple in the first place. However, he did not do it this way, but he first addresses the Mother, whom he calls “woman” and tells her: “There you have your son” . Then he turns to the disciple and says: “There you have your mother . “

What is the Lord Jesus interested in all this in the first place? Coming to reveal the universal motherhood of the Virgin Mary and coming to deliver his Mother so that she at all times would be the mother of many, the mother of the (Catholic) Church and of all humanity, with whom He, in his own Incarnation, had come to brotherhood. John, the beloved disciple who came to receive Mary in his house, is the one who represented all men.

The last gift that the Lord Jesus gave to humanity before he died was this, being the great task that he entrusted to his mother Mary. It was like a kind of second announcement. About 30 years ago an angel invited her to enter into what were God’s plans. Now, she was no longer an angel, but rather his own Son, it was the one who announced a slightly more difficult task if it should be noted that it consists of:

Receive as his children of his heart all the men of the world, even those who kill their own Son. And she simply accepts, acting again on her faith, and saying, now silent, “Let it be done , ” my Lord . That is why the smell of Calvary’s blood strangely begins to have a kind of newborn taste.

From that moment that becomes very difficult to know if now it is usually more what dies or what is born; hence we cannot know if we are witnessing a kind of agony or childbirth. There is so much smell of the mother and also of childbearing in this dramatic afternoon…! May Mary, the Mother, come to give the eyes to be able to see and the faith to be able to understand these events.

All of this, in the case of the Third Word of the Sermon of the Seven Words of Jesus, becomes more explicit on the part of the Catholic Church, they are the ones who consider the Virgin Mary as the mother of the Church, the mother of many.

fourth word

The death of the Lord Jesus was very close now. It would be more or less like 3 in the afternoon. With the group of the most intimate ones, that there was hardly anyone left at the top of Calvary. Around the Cross the loneliness had increased. Jesus was truly alone. Everyone comes at some point in their life to die alone, even when they are surrounded by love.

In the deepest part of his interior, while he is dying, he is alone, in what is the last fight. However, there is a kind of loneliness that no man has been able to know, which only Jesus knew. A kind of solitude that must be approached with fear, because nothing exists that is more dizzying. And that is what is being revealed to us in this Word of the Crucified.

It becomes a very perplexing Word. A Word that in the course of many centuries has moved all the saints and has even upset the great theologians. It was not a simple phrase, it was a sorrowful phrase, however, serene, like the other Words of Jesus. It was a scream, a scream that was going to pierce history.

There was already a great silence at that moment on Calvary. And it was then that the Lord Jesus, making a great and immense effort and filling his lungs with air, which by that time were already exhausted, shouted in a loud voice: “Elí, Elí, lama Sabactani? What he means in his translation: My God, my God! Why have you abandoned me?”

The Gospel of the Lord actually says that our beloved Lord Jesus cried out. Why is it that he screamed? Did some type of torment come upon Him added to the one that was already presenting or happening at that moment and that was already killing Him? Christ had come to sweat drops of blood in the Garden of Olives without having to cry out for it.

He had come to endure whipping without having to scream. She had come to suffer during all this time without screaming the drill in her hands and also in his feet. Why is she screaming now? The only thing missing is the easiest for everyone who finds themselves in the same situation: simply finish dying gently. And yet he screams.

“Oh, fatal word!, comes to comment a theologian. Why have you been pronounced? Why didn’t you become able to be held within the lord’s chest? Did not Christ know that many would use it against Himself…, to come to deny his divinity? (This is what Journet says).

Do you understand any of this? I hardly understand anything. Because, effectively, how could the Father come to abandon his own Son, if the 2 are a single God? How could the divinity get away, if it was united to humanity to the point of being able to form a single being in Him? Can the Son of God become without God, when he becomes substantially one with the Father?

Many are those who will say that they do not understand any of this. However, the Lord Jesus if he comes to say that the Father has abandoned him, it is because in truth He at that very moment comes to experience that type of abandonment. In a way that perhaps or perhaps all human beings would never understand, however, that He was the one who experienced that kind of true remoteness.

What became the dimension and also the meaning of this kind of remoteness? Here is the key to understand the mystery that Jesus comes to reveal with this Word: Christ is carrying the work of his Salvation to the end, the fact of his Incarnation. He is descending to the so-called “hells”.

However, what does the word “hell” mean? In the Latin Creed it was said from earlier times: “Descendit ad inferos”. And “inferus, a, um” that this means or means “the depths”. Jesus, in these very moments of his last minutes of life, when the moment of his death is almost upon him, finds himself descending into the depths of the human condition as it exists in reality, in order to be able to reach assume everything and also to fill everything with life and in the same way with resurrection.

In this descent he meets all the pains, as well as all the distortions of the original work of the Lord God and, above all, the sins of the entire world. And what is so strange that he came to experience the Father moving away from Him, if God cannot come to live with either evil or sin?

The Son had to become consistent with the obedience he owed to the Father. And, although he came to experience all kinds of miseries and all the consequences of the various sins of men, his sorrows did not become that of a sinner, but rather that of a savior and also a purifier. The Passion of the Lord Jesus became the last stretch of his Incarnation, of what is his descent to the depths of the human.

And, for this reason, it was a very luminous Passion, not desperate. Moreover, as Journet describes it, the luminous suffering of a God who comes to die for all of us, which becomes even more heartbreaking than the suffering of a desperate being. Because only he is usually given the full measure of the abyss that separates what is good and evil, the presence of God and what was his absence, love and also hate, the yes said to God and the denial of him.

Now it comes to be when, in truth, the sinless one truly becomes 1 of us. As the apostle Paul rightly says: “God made him who knew no sin to be sin for us, so that we might become the righteousness of God in him” (2 Corinthians 5:21). Jesus, out of great obedience to the Father and also out of love for all of us, has reached rock bottom in his Incarnation.

One and also the other come to know that the destiny of man, of the whole man, becomes God and they do not want this to be lost. And the Son, in order to return man to God, has felt so terribly alone, separated from the Father in the depths of himself in his soul. That’s why he screams.

Because this type of pain becomes much more acute than all those of the flesh put together. However, his cry is usually not one of despair. But it is a kind of accurate complaint, however, loving and safe. It is a kind of prayer. In fact, he takes his words from the book of Psalm 21, which is a psalm of tears, yes, however, also of hope: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Brothers, at this moment let us all shout to the Lord Jesus, in the silence of our hearts, always saying: Thank you, Lord, because that same cry of yours has been able to reach my life on this day or at this hour. Penetrate with your Holy Spirit in my depth. Assume everything that is found in that place, even sin, and please return us to the Father.

fifth word

It is this same Word that becomes the most radically human word that Jesus was able to pronounce on the Cross of Calvary. Upon hearing it, a person can understand that the Lord Jesus was dying a real death, that the one on the Cross becomes a man, and not some kind of superman who would not know death, or a kind of ghost that did not get to feel it with all its crudeness. This is when the kind of humanity of the Lord Jesus is revealed to us in all realism.

Thirst becomes one of the most terrible torments applied to the crucified. When a large amount of blood is lost from the body, the torment of thirst is often experienced. Water, which is a liquid that is part of the cell in proportion to 60 or 70 percent, when blood is lost, passes through a kind of osmosis into the bloodstream to be able to hydrate the blood plasma.

This occurs naturally, the dehydration of all tissues and suddenly you begin to experience what is the phenomenon of thirst. Jesus had already lost a great deal of blood:

  • On Mount Gethsemane
  • at the scourging
  • With the Crown of Thorns
  • On the Way of Calvary with the Cross on His Back
  • At the Crucifixion.

There were many times that he was shedding his precious blood. At the top of the Cross she was also bleeding little by little. It is not at all strange that she begged for some water. One of the soldiers, who was moved, wets a sponge in a pitcher of posca, with a mixture of sour wine, vinegar and water, which they always had for their own relief, and brings it to the lips of the gentleman. , while another tells him laughing:

“Let’s see if Elijah comes to save him.” And so another of the biblical passages from the book of Psalms was fulfilled, which says: “In my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink” (Psalm 68:22).

Jesus has come to show what his complete humanity is by begging for a little water to quench his thirst, like any other dying person. However, wouldn’t he be talking about another kind of thirst? A Thirst for much love, a thirst for great understanding, a kind of thirst for salvation…? Is this not the thirst for justice to which he himself alluded during his many teachings in the Beatitudes? (according to what the book of Matthew 5:6 says).

In a way, it’s true. Jesus comes to experience in his last moments, within his great heart that is already tired from this long journey, the drama of being able to see his offer of salvation despised, of knowing long before that, for many, all this great pain it would be useless.

He would have always wanted to be able to draw everyone to Himself, as He had come to say in the book of John 12:32, however, many would pass by before Him, without realizing that the one who now asks for a little of water becomes for all “the fountain of living water springing up to eternal life” John 7:37.

Sixth Word

“Everything is consummated, everything is fulfilled”

The sixth Word of Christ becomes the cry of the winner, of the runner who reaches the final goal, or simply of the Son who has been able to fulfill the will of the Father. He had said it many times! “I have come down from heaven to do, not my own will, but the will of him who sent me” book of John 6:38. “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to carry out his work” can also be found in the book of John 4:34.

God becomes the Living God. He is life and also the giver of life. God becomes the one who gives and gives himself: in Creation, as in the Incarnation, in the and also in the fullness of Heaven. Throughout his life, Jesus, the Son of God made man, came to reveal him to us and, for this reason, with some human words, he called him Father. By fully assuming our humanity in his divine Person, he gradually introduced us to his divinity, to the very Trinity of God, and told us to call him Lord God the Father.

Now, the Lord Jesus has reached the gates of death. It is not that God came to want death or that he needed death for his loved one’s son, much less in such a cruel way. Neither death will need the good Jesus, the Savior, the beloved son nor the death of anyone. They came to kill Jesus were his enemies, the enemies of God as He had come to reveal it with his words and also with his life.

They did not accept a God who was so close, so human, so Father, nor did they accept that He was his Son and that he made all of us his children. Deep down, it becomes much easier to have a God who is distant and majestic, to whom sacrifices are offered and who is very well appeased and calm, than to have a God who is very close to us, in whom whose presence we can live and whom we have to come to please continuously.

That is why those who rejected this great revelation of God killed the Lord Jesus, the Revelator. “Cursed be he that hangs on a tree ,” said the Scriptures in the book of Deuteronomy 21:23. And so that no one would come to believe in Him, neither then nor ever, they took Him to the Cross.

Now, about to die, in this precise sixth Word, Jesus, the last and also definitive Word of God to the world, can even say: “Everything is finished” . All the prophecies about Him have come to pass. However, above all, He has been able to carry out the work that the Father had come to entrust to Him:

Reveal to us that there is a God, who is the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. That the Father came to create everything that exists by his Son (John 1: 3) and everything was good (Genesis 1:31). That, throughout the ages, “he spoke in many ways to our fathers… (Hebrews 1:1-2). And finally, in the fullness of time, he has come to speak to us through his beloved Son, made like one of us. This Son has come to speak to us with words like ours and with a life that is the same as ours.

And also, that is how the things of God come to be! He has spoken to us of God’s Plan for all of us with the strongest word of all: death. Never did the Lord Jesus of God speak so clearly to man as when he was speechless while on the Cross of Calvary. Everything was consummated with his life.

However, it remained to finish consummating what revelation is with death itself. The death of the Lord Jesus was not to placate God, who has plenty of paternity and love to be able to forgive, but to encourage and also comfort every man who comes into this world.

The letter to the Hebrews made by the apostle Paul says in a text that says: “Just as the children (of men) participate in blood and flesh, so He also participated in them, to annihilate through death the lord of death, that is, the devil, and to set free as many as were held in bondage for life through fear of death” (Hebrews 2:14-15).

seventh word

“Father, in your hands I entrust my spirit”

Lucas 23:46.

This became the last Word of the Lord Jesus. The softest word, the sweetest that he could have taught us for the moment of his death. Man fears death, and that is why he ends up spending his life fleeing from it. However, for the one who believes in the Lord God, for the one who contemplates and also listens to the Lord Jesus dying, dying does not become anything tragic, it is not jumping into the void, nor is it entering an endless night.

Men tend to believe that we die, that we lose our lives. And what really happens is only what happened to Jesus: that we put our heads in his place, in the hands of the Heavenly Father. A famous man named Eugeeny Evtushenko, the great Russian Orthodox poet, said:

“When a person dies, God has just kneaded what his existence is for eternity… And in the hands of God… not a single tear is wasted, nor an effort, nor an illusion, not even a suffering, nor a moment of life… ” Nothing is lost in the hands of God, much less after the death of his beloved son Jesus.

Jesus comes to die peacefully. He bows his head in the hands of the Father and at that moment he gives men his Spirit. That is how the apostle John has seen it. This Spirit of Jesus is the one who would continue his work over time, doing everything anew: new what the relationship with God is, as sons in the Son; a new worship and prayer, not in anguish but rather in praise; new the whole life, always building his Kingdom in what is love; a new death, understood not as if it were the end but as the cradle of life, which already becomes eternal.

“Dad”. Jesus really wanted to end his life by pronouncing again the word dearest to his heart, it is the word that sums up his message to the world: “Abba, Father” . Because God is the Father, who dedicates himself to being Father, he becomes only Father, above all Father. Here is the great revelation of the Lord Jesus.

God always became Father. However, since Jesus called him that, living in our life and also dying for our death, we know much better now. That is why he came into the world. No kind of objection is the one that fits against what is the existence and also the goodness of God seeing how it is that he lives and how it is that Jesus dies.

That is what the Son of God really came into the world for: so that no person feels outside of the paternity of God. No one, not in joy, not even in pain, not even in life or in death. Take away this kind of revelation of God as Father, and nothing will be left to the Gospel. Put it on, and the entire evangelical message will acquire its meaning. Even more, take away what is the revelation of God as Father, and all of life sinks into absurdity.

musical works

There are in the world a number of musical works referring to the Sermon of the Seven Words of Jesus. Among them we have the following:

16th century

  • The Work: Septem verba Domini Jesu Christi, which was performed by Orlando di Lasso for about 5 voices.

17th century

  • The Musical Work entitled: Die sieben Worte Jesu Christi am Kreuz,15 performed by the famous Heinrich Schütz in the year 1645, which is sung in German.
  • La Obra Musical titled por Augustin Pfleger: Passio, sive Septem Verba Christi en cruce pendentis del año 1670.

18th century

  • The Musical Work titled by Pergolesi: Septem verba a Christo in cruciate moriente prolata which is attributed, in the years 1730 – 1736.
  • The Musical Work entitled by Christoph Graupner: Die sieben Worte des Heilands am Kreuz, cantata, performed in Darmstadt in the year 1743.
  • The Musical Work performed by Joseph Haydn entitled: The seven last words of Christ on the cross. In the year 1787 the Brotherhood of the Holy Cave of Cádiz was the one that commissioned an oratorio from the composer (which came to be titled in the German language Die sieben letzten Worte unseres Erlösers am Kreuze where the Seven Words were described, in addition to the earthquake that gets to be described in the Gospel of Matthew.

He was the man who also made a version class for a choir and also for an orchestra of the work, as well as a great transcription for a string quartet, the latter being the most famous version.

  • Another of the Works was that of the famous Francisco Javier García Fajer entitled: Septem ultima verba christi in Cruce carried out in the year 1787, which is an Oratorio in Latin.
  • Finally in this century is the work of Giuseppe Giordani alias “Giordaniello” which has the title: Tre ore dell’Agonia di NS Gesù Cristo made in the year 1790, which becomes an oratory.

19th century

  • One of the main works of this century was that of César Franck: Les Sept Paroles du Christ sur la Croix made in 1859, which is a choral work.
  • Another of the most popular becomes that of Théodore Dubois: Les sept paroles du Christ made in 1867, for a choral work.
  • Por último podemos destacar la obra de Fernand de La Tombelle: The Seven Words of Our Lord Jesus Christ.

20th century

  • For this century the most popular main work becomes that of Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber: The Crucifixion, from the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar made in 1969.
  • Secondly, we can highlight the work by Douglas Allanbrook: The Seven Last Words for a mezzo-soprano, as well as a baritone, a choir and an orchestra, made in 1970.
  • Thirdly, there is the work of the composer Sofia Gubaidulina: Sieben Worte for a cello, in addition to a Russian chromatic accordion known as a bayán, and the strings, made in 1982.
  • Fourthly, we can highlight the work by James MacMillan: Seven Last Words from the Cross, a cantata for a choir and for some strings, made in 1993.

21st century

  • One of the main works of this century became Tristan Murail’s: Les Sept Paroles, for an orchestra, plus a choir and electronic instruments, made in 2010.
  • Another of the most popular works is that of Daan Manneke: The Seven Last Words, which is an Oratorio for a choir made in 2011.
  • On the other hand, there is the work of Paul Carr: Seven Last Words from the Cross, made for a soloist, as well as a choir and an orchestra, this was made in 2013.

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