Lange Commentary - Luke 23:44 - 23:56

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Lange Commentary - Luke 23:44 - 23:56


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This Chapter Verse Commentaries:

B. The End of the Conflict. Luk_23:44-56

1. The Repose of Death (Luk_23:44-46)

(Parallel with Mat_27:45-50; Mar_15:33-37; Joh_19:28-30.)

44And it was [now] about the sixth hour, and there was [came, ἐãÝíåôï ] a darknessover all the earth [land] until the ninth hour. 45And the sun was darkened, and thevail of the temple was rent in the midst. 46And when Jesus had cried with a loud voice, he said, Father, into thy hands I commend [commit] nay spirit: and having said thus, he gave up the ghost [expired, ἐîÝðíåõáåí ].

EXEGETICAL AND CRITICAL

Synoptical Remarks.—The more the history of the Passion hastens towards its end, the more evidently does it appear that Luke sums up his narrative in few words. The commendation of Mary to John, the lamentation of our Lord upon the cross, the last refreshment of the Dying One, he passes over. On the other hand, he gives account of the rending of the veil in the temple immediately before our Saviour’s death, although from Matthew it appears that this took place simultaneously, or, indeed, even a moment later. In view of the rapid succession of events, it is, however, almost impossible to speak here of former and latter. We also owe to Luke alone the communication of the last, the seventh word on the cross, and the statement of the miracles during the dying of our Lord. He attaches himself, although he is very brief, more to Mark than to Matthew, and while he, like the other Synoptics, passes over in silence the breaking of the legs of the robbers and the piercing of our Saviour’s side, he coincides again, in the rather detailed description of His burial, with the other Evangelists.

Luk_23:44. A darkness.—Respecting the cause, the character, and the historical certainty of this darkness, comp. Lange on Mat_27:46. Entirely without ground do the Jews, in the Gospel of Nicodemus, tell Pilate (Luke 11) that an ordinary eclipse took place. See Thilo, p. 592. The well-known testimony of Phlegon, to be sure, we also should not venture to use to prove therewith the credibility of this Evangelical account, since he speaks rather of a natural, although more than ordinarily deep darkening of the sun, as to which, moreover, it is still doubtful in which year of the 202d Olympiad it took place. Yet whoever holds our Lord for Him for whom He declared Himself, will, in this mourning of nature at the death of Jesus, be as far from finding anything incredible as anything insignificant. Unquestionably, there are mythical accounts of similar natural manifestations even at the death of Romulus, of Cæsar, and others; but what in the sphere of profane history is invention, may none the less in the sacred history be true. And if, in certain Rabbinical writings, the death of famous men is compared to the darkening of the mid-day sun, these expressions are, at all events, later than our Evangelical narratives, and may indeed, moreover, have very well originated from the analogy of the here-related fact. In a word, the idea so strikingly expressed in the familiar

Sol tibi signa dabit, solem quis dicere falsum audeat, &c.

has become reality. As respects, particularly, the account of Luke itself, it might, on a literal interpretation, seem as if he meant that the sun until the ninth hour, although there was already a deep darkness, yet had remained all the time visible, but that then, in the moment of Jesus’ death, the sun itself also became invisible. But, even supposing that the genuineness of the words êáὶ ἐóêïôßóèç ὁ ἥë . were above all doubt (De Wette disputes this, and Griesbach is also for omitting them), there would yet be no essential difficulty in connecting the thought thus, that (Luk_23:45) with êáß the proper cause of óêüôïò ê . ô . ë . is stated. It often occurs that two phenomena are coördinated or arranged together, of which the second constitutes the natural ground of the first. Precisely the same interpretation appears, moreover, to lie at the basis of the reading which appears in B., C., L., cursives, Origen [Cod. Sin. has ôïῦ ἡëßïõ ἐêëßðïíôïò —C. C. S.], ôïῦ ἡëßïõ ἐêëåßðïíôïò . The participial clause indicates a causal connection, and on internal grounds it is not probable that Luke meant to give an account of a great darkness, during which the sun for three hours yet remained continually visible.

Luk_23:45. And the veil of the temple.—Attempts have been made to explain these phenomena also naturally, as a mere result of the earthquake, of which Luke has given no particular account. But can we represent to ourselves an earthquake by which—not from below up but from above down—a curtain should be rent which was one finger thick, thirty ells long, woven of purple and scarlet, and, according to the testimony of Jewish scholars, renewed from time to time? How could anything of the kind take place without other buildings in the capital, and especially the temple, having suffered serious harm, and, indeed, without their having been converted by the convulsion into a heap of ruins? Quite as arbitrary is the conjecture that the curtain was old and worn out (Kuinoel), as well as the assumption that it was, perhaps, too tensely stretched and too tightly fastened both at the bottom and on the two sides (Paulus). Even in the last case, a rending through an earthquake would have been impossible without a simultaneous rending of the walls or roof of the temple. As to the rest, Luke is entirely silent as to the sleeping saints whose resurrection Matthew relates; but that John passes over all these miracles appears to be best explained from the character of his whole gospel, which has less reference to the outer revelation of the glory of the Logos than to the spiritual character of His whole manifestation and activity. Of Luke’s account the same holds good, although in a lesser measure, which Lange has remarked in respect to that of Matthew: “The Evangelist has gathered the reminiscences of these traits, and comprehended them in words which, in effect, have the resonance of a hymn, without thereby losing their historical character, for here the history itself took on the character of a hymn.”

Luk_23:46. Father, into Thy hands.—It is involved in the nature of the case that this utterance must be placed after the ôåôÝëåóôáé of John, since he also states the substance of it with a ðáñÝäùêåí ôὸðí . According to Matthew and Mark also, the dying Christ cries out with a loud voice, but what He exclaims Luke alone relates to us. Here, too, we hear from His lips an utterance from the Psalms, Psa_31:5. (The reading of Tischendorf, ðáñáôßèåìáé , deserves the preference above the Recepta, ðáñáèÞóïìáé , which appears to be borrowed from the Septuagint, Psa_31:5.) ÉÉáñáôßèåóèáé is to be understood here not in the weak sense of “commend,” but in its proper sense of “commit,” tradere. Into the Father’s mighty hand our Lord now commits, as a precious deposit, the spirit which is ready to depart from the body, and departs, therefore, with composure and hope, to the condition of separation (Paradise, Luk_23:43), preceding the Penitent Thief and all his fellow-redeemed.

Expired, ἐîÝðíåõóåí .—So also Mark, stronger still Matthew, ἀöῆêåí ôὸ ðíåῦìá , emisit spiritum. Even then, when He, according to the nature of the case, finds Himself in deepest dependence, He yet exhibits and uses His true freedom (Joh_10:18), and does what now is commanded by the course of nature so entirely with free choice, that the dying becomes not only His present lot, but also the supreme act of love and obedience.

DOCTRINAL AND ETHICAL

1. Comp. Lange on the parallels, and, respecting the significance and the purpose of the death of our Lord itself, Christian Dogmatics.

2. The last word of our Lord on the cross impresses on all the rest, as also on His whole life, the seal. With composed, clear spirit, He proceeds, the immaculately Pure, into eternity. With childlike trust He gives His spirit into the Father’s guardian hand; with joyful hope He looks towards the rest and joy of death. Only after He, in the sixth word on the cross, has rendered account of His completed work, does He give us, finally, in addition, knowledge of His personal expectation. A word of Scripture is the torch which lights Him down into the valley of the shadow of death; He dies with the Scriptures on His lips, in which He has ever lived. Therefore, also, it is not necessary to ascribe to the 31st Psalm a direct Messianic signification; our Lord simply takes a word of Scripture on His lips as an expression of His own inward state, while He, doubtless not casually, passes over in silence that which the poet immediately adds: “Thou hast redeemed me, O Lord God of truth.” What

David in a certain sense utters as his motto of life, that He uses as His dying device.

3. The darkening of the sun in the moment of the dying of Jesus, points us to a deep hidden connection between the realm of nature and that of grace, which has yet been but little investigated by theologians. Not only as “sorrowing, as it were, with her greatest Son” (Hase), does nature veil herself in a mourning garment, but where the Incarnate Lord, through Whom all things were made, grows pale in death, there does convulsed nature depose concerning His greatness an unequivocal testimony. And as respects the rending of the curtain, the Epistle to the Hebrews (Luk_9:8) refers us clearly enough to the symbolical significance of this fact. Apparently their terror at the occurrence occasions the first involuntary information on the side of the Jews, since otherwise they would have been glad to keep it hidden. Various Jewish traditions respecting the miracles which at this very time, about forty years before the destruction of Jerusalem, came to pass in the sanctuary, we find collected in Sepp, l.c. iii., p. 586; they permit the faint traces of the truth of a fact to be recognized, whose actual occurrence stands more exactly detailed in the gospels. As respects, finally, the objection that in the Holy Scriptures, besides here, there exist no further actual allusions to the miracles here mentioned at the death of our Lord, we can in part very well acknowledge this without deriving therefrom any unfavorable inference in reference to the Evangelical narratives, but must also refer to Revelation 11, where it speaks of the wakening of the two witnesses, a revelation connected therewith, the opening of the heavenly temple (= the rending of the veil), and other miracles, which involuntarily remind us of what is here related.

4. The dying of Stephen, Huss, Luther, and others, even in their last words, an echo of the last words of our Lord.

5. The last word on the cross an unequivocal argument for the personality of God, as well as for the personality of the human spirit and its individual immortality. “Whoever could think that Jesus, with these words, breathed out His life forever into the empty air, such an one certainly knows nothing of the true, living spirit, and, consequently, nothing of the living God, and of the living power of the Crucified One.” Ullmann.

HOMILETICAL AND PRACTICAL

“When even the creation is stirred, be not thou slumbering, O my heart.”—Light and darkness in the dying hour of our Lord united upon Calvary: 1. Gloomy night in nature, and therein the light of Providence; 2. gloomy night of suffering, and therein the light of Jesus’ greatness; 3. gloomy night of death, and therein the light of a living hope.—The rent veil; of what it gives testimony: 1. That, a. a new economy is begun, b. a perfect atonement effected, c. a blessed fellowship founded; 2. to what it incites: a. to believing beholding, b. to courageous approach (Heb_10:19), c. to holy self-surrender.—Jesus’ death: 1. The lowest depth of His humiliation: 2. the beginning of His exaltation.—“Let us go with Him, that we may die with Him,” Joh_11:16.—A pilgrimage to Calvary on the mortal day of our Lord: 1. What seest thou there? 2. what feelest thou there? 3. what confessest thou there? 4. what promisest thou there?—The ninth hour; the high significance of this moment: 1. For our Lord; 2. for His friends and foes; 3. for the world; 4. for the Father.—“Ye do show forth the Lord’s death,” 1Co_11:20.—Calvary a school for Christian life, suffering, and dying.—Christ has: 1. Died; 2. died for us; 3. died for us that we also might die with Him.

Starke:—Darkness is finally punished with darkness; consider this, ye children of darkness.—Since Christ has died, we need no expiatory sacrifice more.—Christ from the deepest abandonment passing over into the highest composure.—No longer in the hands of His enemies, but in those of the Father.—The saint prays not only in the beginning and the continuance, but also at the end of his suffering.—Canstein:—Jesus dies, like a true corn of wheat, to bring forth much fruit, Joh_12:24.—Die willingly where God wills, for Jesus died not in a sumptuous canopied bed, but poor and naked on the cross.—Brentius:—The souls of the righteous are in God’s hands, and no torment touches them. What would we more?—Heubner:—As Jesus did all that He did for us, so also for us was this prayer; He has committed our souls also with His own to the Father.—Steinmeyer:—The last word on the cross proclaims: 1. The glory of a blessed death; 2. the glory of the dying Son of God; 3. the glory of His high-priestly sacrificial death.—Draseke:—The death of Jesus as culmination and completion of His life. He shows: 1. A supreme composure of soul; 2. supreme love to man; 3. supreme Mediatorial power; 4. supreme Filial glory.—Tholuck:—How the Lord dies: 1. With inner freedom; 2. with clear consciousness; 3. with perfect trust.—Arndt:—Luk_23:46 as cap-stone of the last words. Taken together: 1. The first two, words of compassion; 2. the two following, words of comfort for those outwardly and inwardly forsaken; 3. the last three, words of strengthening for those wrestling with death.—Krummacher:—Father, into Thy hands. The How and Why of the death of Jesus.—Harms:—The word “for you” to be weighed: 1. The faith which the word demands; 2. the repentance which it effects; 3. the consolation which it brings with it.—Schmidt:—How holy and awful the dying of the Saviour is.—Van der Palm:—1. Jesus’ death the fulfilment of all God’s promises; 2. Jesus’ death the main substance of the Apostolic preaching; 3. Jesus’ death the completion of His teaching and the crown of His life; 4. Jesus’ death our life.

Luk_23:44.—̓́ Çäç may here be confidently received into the text. [Found in B., C.1, L. Cod. Sin. omits it. Tregelles brackets it. Lachmann, Tischendorf, Meyer, Alford adopt it. Has dropped out of the MSS. from its resemblance to the preceding çí äå which is found in nearly all the MSS. that omit çäç , instead of êáé çí or çí , which those have that read çäç —C. C. S.]