Luke 23:46

‘And Jesus, crying with a loud voice, said, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” '

Luke omits Jesus' citation of Psalms 22:1, possibly because he does not feel that his Gentile readers will recognise its source and may therefore receive the wrong impression. He does not want them to think that Jesus died in despair but rather that He was in control of His departure. Thus while both the Jewish writers emphasise the final travail of soul, very much in line with Jewish thinking, the Gentile is concerned rather to present Jesus' power over death. All Luke tells us is that He ‘cried with a loud voice'.

“Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” Luke is the only one who cites these words, but that is not surprising. It is quite understandable why Matthew and Mark both wanted to end with His terrible cry, and did not want to take attention away from it.

The loud voice goes with the experience expressed. It is His one last expression of life as His life begins to ebb away. And following it He commended His spirit to God. The quotation that follows comes from a regular evening prayer, but was here applied to an obviously deeper experience. By it Jesus was committing His spirit to His Father. Luke wants us to see that as in life, so in death, Jesus was in control.

‘And having said this, he yielded up the spirit.'

By these words Luke makes clear that His words had not been just a pious prayer, but a deliberate committing of His spirit to God. He really was in control. His work being done He handed Himself over to the care of the Father, and we are to see that all was finally well. The speed of His death confirmed the severity of the flogging that He had received, a fact further evidenced by His being unable to bear His cross all the way. And yet all His thought had been for others. The weeping women on the road to the cross, the guilty men who stood before Him lying under the wrath of God, the evildoer dying beside Him. His scope had been wide. It was only at the end that He allowed a thought for Himself.