Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Luke · About this commentary
Into Your Hands
Luke 23:44-49
44 It was now about the sixth hour, and darkness came over the whole land until the ninth hour. · WEB
Darkness, a torn curtain, and a last word that is a child's bedtime prayer.
It was now about the sixth hour, and darkness came over the whole land until the ninth hour Luke 23:44.
Midday to mid-afternoon, the brightest hours, gone dark. The prophets had said the day of the Lord would be darkness and not light Amos 5:18–20, and Egypt's ninth plague was darkness before the night the firstborn died Exodus 10:21–22.
The sun was darkened, and the veil of the temple was torn in two Luke 23:45.
This account places the tearing before the death rather than after it, and puts the two signs in one sentence. The curtain closed the holy of holies, where one man went one day a year with blood Leviticus 16:2. It tears while the afternoon sacrifice is being prepared, and the writer of this book — who began it with a priest at an altar of incense — knows exactly what that room was.
Jesus, crying with a loud voice, said, "Father, into your hands I commit my spirit!" Luke 23:46.
The last of the three sayings this Gospel alone records, and it is a quotation. The line is from a psalm of David Psalms 31:5, and it was the evening prayer Jewish mothers taught their children to say at bedtime. He dies saying the words a child says before sleep, with one addition: the psalm does not say Father.
The voice is loud, which crucifixion does not permit at the end. And commit is the verb for placing something in safekeeping with someone trusted. In the earlier account the cry from the cross is the opening line of a psalm about being forsaken Mark 15:34; here it is a psalm about being kept. Both are in the record, and this Gospel — which has shown him praying at every turning point — closes the pattern with the last prayer of all.
Having said this, he breathed his last.
When the centurion saw what was done, he glorified God, saying, "Certainly this was a righteous man" Luke 23:47. The officer commanding the execution is the fifth voice in this chapter to declare him innocent — after Pilate three times, Herod, and the criminal. The account has been building that list on purpose.
All the multitudes that came together to see this, when they saw the things that were done, returned home beating their chests Luke 23:48. The gesture is the tax collector's in the temple Luke 18:13. The crowd that shouted for Barabbas goes home doing what a man does when he knows.
All his acquaintances and the women who followed with him from Galilee stood at a distance, watching these things Luke 23:49. The women are named as having come the whole way. They stay to the end, and they see where he is buried.
settled What this mark means