Fulton Sheen said during his last recorded Good Friday address in 1979 that he spoke on the subject of Christ’s 7 Last Words 58 times. This Anthology puts together 7 books Sheen wrote: (1) The Seven Last Words, (2) The Cross and the Beatitudes, (3) The Rainbow of Sorrow, (4) Victory over Vice, (5) The Seven Virtues, (6) Seven Words to the Cross, (7) Seven Words of Jesus and Mary. I will use these #s to reference the quotes below. (NB: I have direct summaries of those highlighted above.)
Our Blessed Lord spoke seven times from “the pulpit of the Cross” (St. Augustine) – and these are called His seven last words.
I have summarized the insights from each of the 7 books into 3 key lessons, with a question to reflect upon for each.
1st Word: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
3 lessons:
1st: Forgive because of ignorance.
Our Blessed Lord used the word “forgive” because He was the innocent God-man who knew all the secrets of every human heart. Therefore, He could find an excuse: “They know not what they do” (3).
“Why, they would be damned if it were not for the fact that they were ignorant of the terrible thing they did when they crucified Christ! It was only the ignorance of their great sin that brought them within the pale of the hearing of that cry from the Cross. It is not wisdom that saves; it is ignorance!” (1).
Have you learnt this lesson? Peter did. In his first sermon, he used this very excuse of ignorance for the Crucifixion: “The author of life you killed . . . and now, brethren, I know that you did it through ignorance, as did also your rulers” (Acts 3:15, 17).
Q. Is there anyone you need to forgive?
2nd: Forgive because we have been forgiven greater sins by God.
As Christ revealed in the Parable of the Unmerciful Servant in Matthew 18:21-35, God has forgiven us infinitely more than we can forgive others. That is one reason why God has said that it is almost a moral impossibility for Him to forgive unless we, in turn, forgive (cf. Luke 6:37-8). When we fail to forget how much God has forgiven us on the Cross, we fail to give pardon to others. But when we are conscious of our need for absolution from God, we are likely to be very indulgent to others.
Q. How often do you go to Confession?
3rd: Forgive to banish hate from the world.
A third reason for forgiving those who make us suffer unjustly is that if we do not forgive, hate will multiply until the whole world is hateful. Hate is extremely fertile; it reproduces itself with amazing rapidity (3). By contrast, forgiveness is true strength. It took so much strength that only Divinity’s cry of forgiveness could overcome the hatred of those who crucified Him (2).
“What right have we to hate others, since our own selfishness is often the cause of their hatred? The first word from the Cross and the Beatitude of meekness both demand that we tear up self-love by the roots; love our executioners; forgive them, for they know not what they do; do a favour for those who insult us; be kind to the thieves who accuse us of theft; be forgiving to liars who denounce us for lying; be charitable to the adulterers who charge us with impurity. Be glad and rejoice for their hate. It will harm only our pride, but not our character; it will cauterize our conceit, but not blemish our soul — for the very insult of the world is the consecration of our goodness” (2).
Q. Do you want to banish hatred in the world?
2nd Word: “This Day Thou Shalt Be With Me in Paradise.”
3 Lessons:
1st: Be merciful.
“Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy” (Matthew 5:7). The word mercy is derived in the Latin from miserum cor, a “sorrowful heart.” Mercy is, therefore, a compassionate understanding of another’s sorrow and a response that seeks to unburden the sorrows of others as if they were our own. Christ showed perfect mercy to the good thief on Calvary Hill. He not only understood his sorrow but also unburdened it with a promise that was soon to be fulfilled.
Q. How do you practice mercy?
2nd: Pain can have meaning.
By contrast to the thief on the left, the thief on the right is “the symbol of those for whom pain has a meaning. At first, he did not understand it and, therefore, joined in the curses with the thief on the left. But just as sometimes a flash of lightning will illumine the path we have missed, so, too, the Savior’s forgiveness of His executioners illumined for the thief the road of mercy. He began to see that if pain had no reason, Jesus would not have embraced it. If the Cross had no purpose, Jesus would not have climbed it. Surely He who claimed to be God would never have taken that badge of shame unless it could be transformed and transmuted to some holy purpose (3).
Q. In your pain, do you ask to be taken down (like the thief on the left), or taken up (like the thief on the right)?
3rd: Forgiveness is possible.
“If you insist you are disgusted with yourself, remember that you can come to God even by a succession of disgusts. What does your disgust mean except that everything earthly has failed you? That is one of the ways God makes you feel hunger for the divine. Do you not crave food most when you are hungry? Do you not want water most when you are thirsty? Your own disgust, if you knew it, is the distant call of divine mercy. If, then, the poverty of your merits makes you shrink from the divine presence, then let your needs draw you to Him” (5).
Q. If the Lord forgave the thief, and Magdalen, and Peter, why not you? Don’t go to a psychoanalyst to have your sins explained away, go to a priest to have them absolved away.
3rd Word: “Woman, behold thy son; behold thy mother.”
3 Lessons:
1st: Mary reveals why the innocent suffer.
“To find an answer to the question, “Why do the innocent suffer?” we must go not merely to the suffering of innocent people, but to the suffering of Innocence itself. In this third word, our attention is riveted upon the two most sinless creatures who ever trod our sinful earth: Jesus and Mary. Jesus Himself was sinless by nature, for He is the all-holy Son of God. Mary was sinless by grace, for she is “our tainted nature’s solitary boast.” And yet both suffer in the extreme. Why did He suffer who had the power of God to escape the Cross? Why did she suffer who could have dispensed herself because of her virtue, or could have been excused by her Divine Son? Love is the key to the mystery. Love by its very nature is not selfish, but generous. It seeks not its own, but the good of others. The measure of love is not the pleasure it gives — that is the way the world judges it — but the joy and peace it can purchase for others” (3).
Q. What is your answer to the question, “Why do the innocent suffer?”
2nd: Mary is the refuge of sinners.
Mary knows what sin is by seeing what it did to her Divine Son. Mary chose a converted sinner as her companion by the Cross… The measure of our appreciation of friends is our desire to have them about us in the moment of our greatest need. Mary heard Jesus say, “The harlots and publicans will enter the kingdom of heaven before the scribes and Pharisees” (Matt. 21:31). So she chose the absolved harlot, Magdalen, as her companion at the Cross. What the scandalmongers of that day must have said when they saw Our Blessed Mother in the company of a woman who everyone knew was the kind who sold her body without giving away her soul. Magdalen knew that day why Mary is the Refuge of Sinners, and certainly our day, too, can learn that if she had Magdalen as a companion then, she is willing to have us as companions now (4).
Q. Do you take refuge in Mary?
3rd: Mary is our higher love.
To key to conquering lust is to cultivate a higher love. The only real escape from the demands of the flesh is to find something more than the flesh to love. When your older brother says to you, “Don’t do anything of which mom would be ashamed,” he is offering you an “escape” by way of a higher love. If you have a higher love for your mother, you “will always have a consecrated sense of affection, something for which [you] will be willing to make sacrifices.” Jesus gave His Mother to us and He says to us, “”Don’t do anything of which Mom would be ashamed.” Christ is offering us an “escape” by way of a higher love. Our Blessed Mother, therefore, plays an important role in our moral life. She is that ideal love for which lesser and baser loves and impulses are sacrificed. We tend to become like that which we love. The higher our loves, the nobler will be our character. Mary is “an object of love so pure, so holy, and so motherly that, to be worthy of it, we refrain from doing anything that might offend her.” Given a woman like the Mother of Our Lord as our supernatural Mother, you have one of the greatest inspirations for nobler living this world has ever known (5). If we fail to correlate morality to any love nobler than self-love, we fail.
Q. Do you have a Marian-inspired morality?
4th Word: “My God! My God! Why hast Thou forsaken Me?”
3 Lessons:
1st: Poverty in spirit
“Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven” (Matthew 5:3). Jesus practiced on the Mount of Calvary what He preached on the Mount of the Beatitudes. The poor in spirit are those who are so interiorly detached from wealth, from social position, and from earthly knowledge that, at the moment the kingdom of God demands a sacrifice, they are prepared to surrender all. On the Cross, behold the Poor Man: economically poor because stripped of garments; socially poor because deserted by friends; spiritually poor because abandoned by God. From that day to this, then: Blessed are the poor in spirit.
Q. Do you seek to be poor in spirit like Christ?
2nd: Faith is taking your “whys” to God.
Jesus gathered up the lonely cries of every sinful heart that ever lived. That cry was the hope of man. It was the denial of the chaotic amidst chaos! We too can take our whys to God! Taking your “why” to God is a great exercise of faith. Faith being a virtue is a habit — not an acquired habit like swimming, but an infused habit given to us by God in Baptism. Being a habit, it grows by practice. The ideal is to reach a point in practice, where, like Our Lord on the Cross, we witness to God even amidst abandonment and the agony of a crucifixion: “My God! My God! Why hast Thou forsaken Me?”
Q. Do you vulnerably take your “whys” to God in prayer?
3rd: Humility.
“He humbled himself . . . even to the death of the cross” (Phil. 2:8). To atone for false pride of ancestry, He thrusts aside the consolation of divinity; for pride of popularity, He is laughed to scorn as He hangs cursed upon a tree; for pride of snobbery, He is put in the company of thieves; for pride of wealth, He is denied even the ownership of His own deathbed; for pride of flesh, He was scourged until “there was no beauty in Him” (Isa. 53:2); for pride in influential friends, He is forgotten even by those whom He cured; for pride of power, He is weak and abandoned; for pride of those who surrender God and their faith, He wills to feel without God. “God’s instruments for good in the world are for that reason only the humble; reducing themselves to zero, they leave room for infinity, whereas those who think themselves infinite, God leaves with their zero.”
Q. Do you pursue humility?
Fifth Word: “I thirst.”
3 Lessons:
1st: The need for zeal.
At the beginning of His public life on the hill of the Beatitudes, Our Lord preached the necessity of zeal: “Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after justice: for they shall have their fill” (Matt. 5:6). At the end of His public life on the hill of Calvary, He practiced that beatitude as there fell from His lips the cry of apostleship: “I thirst” (John 19:28). The world cannot understand either this Beatitude or this word, for the world by its nature is seated in indifference. It is very fond of talking about religion but dislikes doing anything about it. It dismisses zeal and intense love of God with the sneer of “mysticism,” and regards religion as something incidental to human life, like poetry (2). Such is the indifference of the world — a fear of being identified wholeheartedly with the God for whom we were made.
Christ’s whole mission in life was one of zeal, a hunger, and a thirst for the justice of God, which He perhaps best expressed in words of fire: “I am come to cast fire on the earth: and what will I, but that it be kindled? And I have a baptism wherewith I am to be baptized: and how am I straitened until it be accomplished!” (Luke 12:49–50). It was not a thirst for earthly waters, for the earth and its oceans were His. And when they offered Him vinegar and gall as a sedative for His sufferings, He refused it. It was therefore not a physical, but a spiritual thirst that troubled Him — the thirst for the beatitude of justice — an insatiable thirst for the souls of men.
We must thirst for justice and be on fire for the kingdom of God. And why? Because everything that is good diffuses itself. The sun is good, and it diffuses itself in light and heat; the flower is good, and it diffuses itself in perfume; the animal is good, and it diffuses itself in the generation of its kind; man is good, and he diffuses himself in the communication of thought. A Christian is good, and must therefore diffuse his Christianity, throw sparks from the flame of His love, enkindle fires in the inflammable hearts of men and speak of his Lover because He is Love, for “out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh” (Matt. 12:34).
Strong love makes strong actions, and the measure of our zeal in bringing souls to the feet of Christ is the measure of our love of Him. Converting souls to Christ, then, is based not on the pride of propaganda, but on a desire for perfection. An apostle desires to bring men and women to Our Lord, not for the same reason a businessman wishes to increase his trade. The businessman advertises to increase his profits; the Christian propagandizes to increase the happiness of others. He wants to bring souls to Our Lord for the same reason he wants to see the sun shine, the flowers bloom, and lambs grow into sheep — because it is their perfection and therefore their happiness. If a pencil is made for writing, we do not want to see it used for digging; if a bird is made for flying, we do not want to see it change places with the mole; if a soul is made for the fullness of life, we do not want to see it clip its wings and wallow in hatred, half-truths, and marred loveliness. We want to see it united with its perfection, which is the life and truth and love and beauty of God. That is why a Christian soul is apostolic — it loves perfection, wholeness, completeness, happiness: God. And therefore it wants everyone to be Godlike and Godward.
Q. How zealous are you to bring souls to Christ?
2nd: Mortify bodily hunger and thirst, and cultivate a spiritual hunger and thirst.
The development of character depends on which hunger and thirst we cultivate. To diet or to fast — that is the problem. To lose a double chin in order to be more beautiful in the eyes of creatures or to lose it in order to keep the body tamed and ever obedient to the spiritual demands of the soul — that is the question. Human worth can be judged by human desires. Tell me your hungers and your thirsts, and I will tell you what you are. Do you hunger for money more than for mercy, for riches more than for virtue, and for power more than for service? Then you are selfish, pampered, and proud. Do you thirst for the wine of everlasting life more than for pleasure, and for the poor more than for the favor of the rich, and for souls more than for the first places at table? Then you are a humble Christian.
Q. What do you hunger and thirst for?
3rd: Temperance.
Our needs are limited. Our wants are unlimited. The virtue of temperance helps us to restrain our inordinate appetites and desires. It has for its object the regulation of the sensible appetites by reason. The two strongest appetites in man are eating and drinking, which sustain his individual life, and the sexual act, which propagates his social nature. Excesses in these appetites are the sources of the two sins of gluttony and lust. Temperance is the virtue that moderates them for the sake of the soul.
The basis of the Catholic secret of temperance and discipline is exchange. All life is founded on exchange: “What exchange shall a man give?” We must choose, then, between God and mammon, flesh and spirit. “No man can serve two masters” (Matt. 6:24). If we want to save our soul for eternity, we must discipline our body in time. And we do this not with sadness but with gladness after the example of Him “who having joy set before him endured the Cross” (Heb. 12:2).
For those who wish to cultivate the virtue of temperance and to be self-possessed, these two specific recommendations are made. First, each day practice at least three trivial mortifications. Second, the magnitude of the mortification is not as important as the love of God for which it is done. Great sacrifices without love are worthless for the soul; nor because they are great does it follow they were done with love; it is the motive that matters — do them out of love of God.
Q. Do you have the virtue of temperance?
6th Word: “It is Finished.”
3 Lessons:
1st: Peace comes after war.
What is finished? War is finished! The war against sin! The war against evil! The war against God! The work of atonement, which is at-one-ment with God, was completed. He has finished his Father’s decade of the Sorrowful Mysteries, and the glorious ones were now about to begin. The last farthing was paid. The treaty of peace was signed: “Blessed are the peacemakers.” And now that He has made peace, He could cry in triumph: “It is finished.” It was not just an armistice; it was victory; it was a consummation — something done that could not be undone — peace with God. Our Lord brought the sword — we might say, He even made war, war against war, war against selfishness, war against sin, war against godlessness. And if His war against evil brought Him to the Cross, then His followers who preach His peace must also expect to be crucified. Yes, if He had come down, there would have been peace; but a false peace! Our Lord stayed on the Cross until it was finished. He would not compromise His divinity. He would not compromise obedience to His Father’s will. He would not minimize the horror of sin. We too must beware of a false peace.
Q. Do you seek the true peace that only Christ can give or the false peace of the world?
2nd: Suffering has a purpose.
“Bodily suffering, mental anguish, bitter disappointment, the false judgment of justice, the betrayal of true friendship, the court’s perversion of honesty, and the violent separation from a mother’s love — all these He took upon Himself knowingly, freely, deliberately, and purposely. Then after three hours of Crucifixion, surveying all the prophecies made about Him in Old Testament days, and the prophecies He had made of Himself, and seeing them all fulfilled and the last stitch drawn on the tapestry of His life and the pattern completed, He uttered His sixth word — a word of triumph: “It is finished” (John 19:30). That cry meant: This is a planned universe. Suffering fits into it. Otherwise He would have refused it. The Cross fits into it. Otherwise He would not have embraced it. The crown of thorns fits into it. Otherwise He would not have worn it. Nothing was accidental; everything was ordered. His Father’s business was completed. The plan was finished (3).
In other words, unless there is a Good Friday in our lives, there will never be an Easter Sunday. Unless we die to this world, we shall not live in the next. Unless there is the crown of thorns, there will never be the halo of light. Unless there is the Cross, there will never be an empty tomb. Unless we lose our life, we shall not find it. Unless we are crucified with Christ, we shall never rise with Christ. Such is the plan, and on our choice depends eternal issues. Our attitude toward the inescapable cross immortalizes us, either for gain or loss (3).
Q. What is your attitude towards your crosses in life?
3rd: Fight against sloth.
“Sloth is a malady of the will that causes us to neglect our duties. Sloth may be physical or spiritual. It is physical when it shows itself in laziness, procrastination, idleness, softness, indifference, and nonchalance. It is spiritual when it shows itself in an indifference to character betterment, a distaste for the spiritual, a hurried crowding of devotions, lukewarmness (cf. Rev 3:16), and failure to cultivate new virtue… There is no hope for the spiritually slothful in these injunctions. Our Lord is the die; we must be stamped by it. He is the pattern; we must be remodeled to it. The Cross is the condition; we must be nailed to it. Our Lord loved His Cross so much that He keeps its scars even in His glory. He who had won victory over death kept the record of its wounds. If so precious to Him, they cannot be meaningless for us. In their preservation is the reminder that we too must be signed with those signs and sealed with those seals. On Judgment Day, He will say to each of us: “Show me your hands and feet. Where are your scars of victory? Have you fought no battles for truth? Have you won no wars for goodness? Have you made no enemy of evil?” If we can prove we have been His warriors and show the scars on our apostolic hands, we shall enjoy the peace of victory. But woe unto us who come down from the Calvary of this earthly pilgrimage with hands unscarred and white!” (4)
Q. Do you fight against sloth by doing God’s will daily?
7th Word: “Father, into Thy Hands I commend My Spirit.”
3 Lessons:
1st: Christ is the Prodigal Son.
“The prodigal son is returning to His Father’s house, for is not Christ the prodigal? Thirty-three years ago He left His Father’s eternal mansion and went off into the foreign country of this world. Then He began spending Himself and being spent; dispensing with an infinite prodigality the divine riches of power and wisdom, and bestowing with a heavenly liberality the divine gifts of pardon and mercy. In this last hour, His whole substance is wasted among sinners, for He is giving the last drop of His precious blood for the redemption of the world. There is nothing to feed upon except the husks of human sneers, and the vinegar and gall of bitter human ingratitude. He now prepares to take the road back to His Father’s house, and when, yet some distance away, He sees the face of His Heavenly Father, He breaks out into the last and perfect prayer from the pulpit of the Cross: “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.”
Q. Have you experienced Christ in your life as the Prodigal Son, going to the extremes of love to bring you back Home to the Father?
2nd: Comfort after mourning.
At the beginning of His public life on the hill of the Beatitudes, Our Lord preached: “Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted” (Matt. 5:5). At the end of His public life on the hill of Calvary, He found that blessed comfort: “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit” (Luke 23:46)… Shall we place our joys in time or in eternity, for we cannot have them in both. Shall we laugh on earth, or laugh in heaven, for we cannot laugh in both. Shall we mourn before we die or after we die, for we cannot mourn in both. We cannot have our reward both in heaven and on earth. That is why we believe one of the most tragic words in the life of Our Lord is the word He will say to the worldly at the end of time: “You have already had your reward.”
Which of the two roads, then, shall we take: the royal road of the Cross, which leads to the Resurrection and eternal life, or the road of selfishness, which leads to eternal death?
The first road is filled with thorns, but if we traverse it far enough, we find it ends in a bed of roses; the other road is filled with roses, but if we traverse it far enough, it ends in a bed of thorns.
Think not, then, that the beatitude of mourning means the enthronement of sorrow, for it ends in the triumphant flight into the Father’s embrace. All of you, therefore, who for months and years have lain crucified on beds of pain, remember that an hour will come when you will be taken down from your cross, and the Savior shall look upon your hands and feet and sides to find there the imprint of His wounds, which will be your passport to eternal joy; for being made like Him in His death, you shall be made like Him in His glory.
3rd: The purpose of life.
The root of all our trouble is that freedom for God and in God has been interpreted as freedom from God. Freedom is ours to give away. Each of us reveals what we believe to be the purpose of life by the way we use that freedom.
For those who would know the supreme purpose of freedom, turn to the life of Our Lord and Our Lady. The first word Our Lord is recorded as speaking in Scripture is at the age of twelve: “I must be about my father’s business” (Luke 2:49). During His public life, He reaffirmed His obedience to His Father: “I do always the things that please him” (John 8:29). Now on the Cross, when He goes out to meet death and freely surrenders His life, His last words are: “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit” (Luke 23:46). The last words of other men are spoken in whispers, but He spoke these words in a loud voice. Death, therefore, did not come to Him; He went to death. No one took His life away; He laid it down of Himself. He was strong enough to live, but He died by an act of will. This was not an emphasis on dying, but an affirmation of uninterrupted divine life. It was the beginning of His return to the glory which He had with the Father before the foundations of the world were laid… “I commend my spirit”: Surrender! Consecration. Life is a cycle. We come from God, and we go back again to God. Hence the purpose of living is to do God’s will.
Now face the problem squarely: What do you do with your freedom? You can do three things with it: 1. Keep it for your selfish desires. 2. Break it up into tiny little areas of trivial allegiance or passing fancies. 3. Surrender it to God.
1: If you keep freedom only for yourself, then because it is arbitrary and without standards, you will find it deteriorating into a defiant self-affirmation. Once all things become allowable, simply because you desire them, you become the slave of your choices. If your self-will decides to drink as much as you please, you soon find not only that you are no longer free not to drink, but that you belong to drink and not drink to you. Boundless liberty is boundless tyranny. This is what Our Lord meant when he said: “Whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin” (John 8:34).
2: The second way out is to become a dilettante, by using your freedom like a hummingbird, hovering first over this flower, then over that, but living for none and dying without any. You desire nothing with all your heart because your heart is broken into a thousand pieces. You thus become divided against yourself; a civil war wages within you, because you swim in contradictory currents. You change your likes and desires when dissatisfied, but you never change yourself…. No wonder such people often say: “I must pull myself together.” Thus do they confess that they are like broken mirrors, each reflecting a different image. In essence, this is debauchery, or the inability to choose one among many attractions; the soul is diffused, multiple, or “legion,” as Satan called himself (Mark 5:9).
3: Finally, you can use your freedom as Christ did on the Cross, by surrendering His Spirit to the Father, and as Mary bade us at Cana, by doing His will in all things. This is perfect freedom: the displacement of self as the center of motivation, and the fixation of our choices, decisions, and actions on Divine Love. “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”
Q. How do you use your freedom?
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