The seventh and final word of Our Blessed Lord from the Cross is addressed to “the thinkers.”
By “thinkers” we do not necessarily mean the educated but rather all those who concern themselves with the two ultimate questions of life: Why am I here, and where am I going? “Thinkers” are those who, once they are brought in contact with the spectacle of death, think the whole problem through.
The centurion at Calvary is the representative of this group.
“As a soldier, he was often brought into contact with death. On this occasion, He had nailed Our Lord to the Cross, then sat down, shook dice for His garments and watched Him die. But there was something peculiar about that Figure on the central Cross. Often the tongues of those crucified had to be cut out to prevent their blasphemies. But here was one who forgave those who sent Him to His death. Then, too, he noted that as the end grew near, He seemed to be getting stronger, as if death were not coming to meet Him, but He was going out to meet it. He was not dying on this Cross as other men died in bed. The very second of death, He spoke in a loud, clear voice as if men were not taking away His life, but He was laying it down of Himself:
“Father, into thy hands I commend my Spirit.”
“These were not words of death but of life. While He was accommodating Himself to death, it was only a milestone on the roadway in the onward march of life” (Sheen).
“It made the sergeant think!
Are we just animals who eat and sleep and then lie down to die and rot, or is there something after death, a God into whose hands we go to render an account of our stewardship?
He shook off the thought for a moment but was rekindled to it when the earth shook, and the dead rose from their graves and walked. He went on thinking about life and death as he broke the legs of the two thieves, for they were not yet dead. Coming to the central Cross and finding Christ dead, He ran a spear into His side. Blood and water came out; the Divine Miser had hoarded up a few drops, to prove that death is not the end of life. These drops trickled down the spear, touched the centurion’s hand, and tradition has it that he was immediately cured of a lifelong affliction. In any case, he glorified God by saying:
“Indeed this was the Son of God” (Matt. 27:54; Mark 15:39; cf. Luke 23:47).
A soldier had found faith on a battlefield; a thinker discovered the answer to life’s riddle in the midst of death. This life is not the end of all.
Christ’s final words on the Cross reveal to all thinkers that “life is a return to the God who made us. We came from God. To God again we go. The Greeks had a theory that the perfect movement was the circular movement because the beginning was the end; and, in a certain sense, that was right. The beginning of our life, which was God, is also the end. We came from His creative hands, and then, like a planet, when we have completed life’s orbit, we go back to Him who sent us on our way.”
Prodigal Catholic 
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