By Fr. Victor Feltes
In Jack’s final months, I regularly encountered him in his room at Dove Nursing Home. I always found his wife, Mary, there at his side. Like our Blessed Mother Mary or St. Mary Magdalene at the Cross, she faithfully supported Jack through his Passion. He was grateful to receive Holy Anointing and Last Rites, grateful for the consolation of prayers and blessings, and most especially grateful for the precious gift of Jesus in the Holy Eucharist I brought him. Jack was peaceful, prayerful, and well-prepared to die, ready to commend his spirit to God.
His wife Mary tells me that on Jack’s final Friday before God took him to himself, they were praying the Rosary together. Jack was too weak by then to speak very much, but he would join in the first words of the Rosary’s greatest prayer: “Our Father… Our Father… Our Father.” The “Our Father” is known as “The Lord’s Prayer” because it is how our Lord Jesus Christ taught his disciples how to pray. Jesus’ prayer models what he wishes us to desire and to ask for.
One Friday afternoon outside Jerusalem, while darkness covered the whole land, Jesus hung dying on his Cross. Before breathing his last breath, Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit!” He prays to God his Father, who is now our Father too. Jesus desires that God’s name would be hallowed; that is, known as holy and loved by all.
Though Jesus is both King of the Jews and the King of Kings, he serves and dies to help the reign of God’s Kingdom come. As Jesus sees and suffers the consequences of our sins, he longs that his Father’s will would be done on earth as it is in heaven. Christ offers his Body on the Cross as he did at the Last Supper. He once declared, “the Bread that I will give is my Flesh for the life of the world.” He gives this Bread to his Church daily at every Holy Mass.
Jesus sacrifices himself to forgive us our trespasses hoping and insisting that we would likewise forgive those who trespass against us. Jesus wants us reconciled vertically to God and horizontally to each other, uniting heaven and earth and East and West in the likeness of the Cross. Jesus faces temptation to save us from temptation. He endures this world’s evil deliver us from evil. So you see, the Our Father prayer Jesus urges us to pray, reflects the great blessings the Lord wills for us.
St. Paul proclaims that “we who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death.” And “if we have grown into union with him through a death like his, we shall also be united with him in the resurrection.” It is right that we should offer prayers for Jack’s soul, that he may be perfectly pure to stand before our holy God with all the saints and angels in heaven. Yet we have a great and calm confidence for Jack, that he who was united to Jesus and devoted to our Father will share in Christ’s resurrection to glory. Amen.
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