The seventh word of Jesus is from the Gospel of Luke, and is directed to the Father in heaven, just before He dies. Jesus recalls Psalm 31:5 - "Into thy hands I commend my spirit; thou hast redeemed me, O Lord, faithful God." Luke repeatedly pleads Jesus' innocence: with Pilate (Luke 23:4, 14-15, 22), through Dismas (by legend), the criminal (Luke 23:41), and immediately after His death with the centurion" "Now when the centurion saw what had taken place, he praised God and said, "Certainly this man was innocent" (Luke 23:47).
John's Gospel related that it was the Day of Preparation, the day before the actual Passover (Pesach in Hebrew, Pascha in Greek and Latin), that Jesus was sentenced to death (19:14) and sacrificed on the Cross (19:31). He died at the ninth hour (three o'clock in the afternoon), about the same time as the Passover lambs were slaughtered in the Temple. Christ became the Paschal or Passover Lamb, as noted by St. Paul: "For Christ our Passover lamb has been sacrificed" (I Corinthians 5:7). The innocent Lamb was slain for our sins, so that we might be forgiven.
Jesus fulfilled His mission: "They are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as an expiation by his blood, to be received by faith" (Romans 3:24-25). The relationship of Jesus to the Father is revealed in the Gospel of John, for He remarked, "The Father and I are one" (10:30), and again, at the Last Supper: "Do you not believe I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I speak to you I do not speak on my own. The Father who dwells in me is doing his works" (14:10). And He can return: "I came from the Father and have come into the world; again, I am leaving the world and going to the Father" (16:28). Jesus practiced what He preached: "Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends" (John 15:13).
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