The Seven Last Words

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Wisdom from the Cross

How Jesus' Seven Last Words Teach Us How to Live (and Die) Well

Holy Week can feel familiar until you slow down and listen to what Jesus actually says while he’s dying. Those final phrases from the cross, known as the Seven Last Words of Christ, are not random last breaths. They’re a compressed guide to forgiveness, trust, love, and what a good life looks like when everything is stripped away.

We sit down with writer and editor Casey Chalk, author of a short but densely packed book from Sophia Institute Press, to translate two thousand years of Christian reflection into modern language without flattening the mystery. We talk about why the Seven Last Words appear across all four Gospels, how thinkers like Aquinas, Bonaventure, and Augustine read them, and why these sayings can be a surprising entry point for Catholics, Protestants, and curious listeners who aren’t sure what they believe.

Along the way, we wrestle with the line that troubles nearly everyone: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Casey connects it to Psalm 22 and to the lived experience of the silence of God. 

If this conversation helps you see Good Friday, Easter, and your own hard seasons with clearer eyes, subscribe, share the show, and leave a review so more people can find it.

Buy the book 

https://sophiainstitute.com/

any questions for Casey Chalk.  https://www.caseychalk.com/

Transcript

Holy Week Greeting

Michele McAloon 0:01

Hello, you're listening to Crossword, where cultural clues lead to the truth of the word. And my name is Michele McAloon. To find out more about this podcast, you can go to bookclues.com. It's the website supporting me and this podcast. Yesterday was Palm Sunday, the celebration of Christ coming into Jerusalem to kick off Holy Week. Thursday is the washing of the feet and the Last Supper. Friday is the crucifixion of Christ. Saturday is the Easter vigil. And Sunday, glorious Sunday is the resurrection of Jesus Christ. I hope in all these celebrations that you're with your family and you are enjoying wonderful springtime weather while you're doing it. Hopefully you're remembering the sacrifices that people that love you have made for you to make your life better and give you strength to sacrifice for others. In many ways, this is what the message of Easter truly is about. Anyway, I wish you the best of holidays and happy listening. God bless. And it's by an author that we've had on before, Mr. Casey Chalk. Hi, Casey. How are you?

Casey Chalk 1:58

Hi, Michele. Thank you so much for having me on. It's a real pleasure to be with you again.

Michele McAloon 2:02

Casey Chalk serves as an editor or regular contributor for many publications, including the New Oxford Review, the Federalist Crisis Magazine, and Religion and Liberty Online. He is the author of The Obscurity of Scripture, Disputing Sola Scriptura and the Protestant Notion of Bible Perspicuity. That's a good word. And The Persecuted, which you were on with us before, True Stories of Courageous Christians Living Their Faith in Muslim Lands. He holds bachelor's degrees in history and teaching from the University of Virginia and a master's degree in theology from the Notre Dame Graduate School of Theology at Christendom College. Casey lives with his wife and six children in his native Northern Virginia. Okay. Casey, in a world that has gone crazy, this book probably could not have better timing. So let's begin with. What are the seven last words of Christ? And not what are they and how should we look at them? And I think what's really, really important is give us a context in a historical timeline of Christ's life in this holy week that we're going into that we're celebrating.

Casey Chalk 3:18

Sure. So the seven last words of Christ are not actually seven last literal words. A lot of folks, when I told them I was writing a book on this, they were trying to count on their hands some of the phrases they were familiar with from Jesus speaking on the cross. The church over the last 2,000 years has referred to the seven last words of Christ as the seven uh last phrases that he said on the cross. These are found not in a single gospel, but across the four gospels of the New Testament. And they are a rich uh treasure of spiritual and moral insights that Christians across a variety of traditions have uh studied and contemplated and prayed over for many generations. And a lot of the most brilliant minds of Christianity have written sermons and books on the seven last words of Christ. So this book draws upon the wealth of all of that wisdom. So we're talking about people like Thomas Aquinas, Church Fathers, Bonaventure, and even some more recent famous Christians of the 20th century, such as Fulton Sheen and Richard John Newhouse. So the seven last words, I, you know, I like I said, I'm not, I'm by no means the first person to reflect on them. But my goal here in this book is to try and correlate all of the brilliant reflections that the church has written and preached on regarding these words over 2,000 years, trying to synthesize that that wisdom to try to make them new and present to a 21st century reader. So that's more or less the objective of what I'm doing here.

Michele McAloon 5:08

And Casey does a really good job of doing this because, you know, people like St. Bonaventure, people like St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Augustine, these may not be readily accessible for someone who is not used to reading some deep theology. Now, I think that they're accessible to anyone, but you have to do a little bit of practice in that kind of reading. But Casey takes all of this wisdom and really puts it in a very modern day vernacular and presents it in many cases with experiences in your own life. And these are not outside of ordinary experiences that people have in their daily lives. And like I said, you do a really good job of doing that. Audience, if you're still with us, if this hasn't completely scared you off, I really suggest this book. It is a great introduction to Christianity and really everything that Christianity stands for does come up in the last seven phrases of Jesus Christ. It's a short book, it's well written, and it's definitely worth the read. Tell us a little bit about the timeline that we're looking at. If someone is maybe secular or maybe atheist or agnostic or Jewish out there, what period are we talking about now in Christian history?

First Word Father Forgive Them

Casey Chalk 6:29

So this is the early first century. Jesus is a poor Jew who grows up in the, you know, what is today Israel, Palestine, what was then part of the Roman Empire. But this is kind of a backwater province of the Roman Empire. There are Roman soldiers. It's governed by a Roman procurator, but there is also a local king who's more or less kind of been installed by the Romans named Herod. So both of those characters appear in the last 24, 48 hours of Jesus' life, but you know, Herod and Herod Antipas and Pontius Pilate. Seven last words. I think it's really important what you said, Michelle, that they really represent not just the last words of a great moral teacher, someone who many of us, your listeners, probably, you know, recognize as God and worship, but they're also a summation of his entire teaching. And that is a tradition that we have across Christian history. Bonaventure, for example, is writing the Middle Ages. He says that the seven last words are a summa of his doctrine and discipline. There's another medieval monk named Arnold of Bonneval who says that the seven last words recapitulate the whole essence of his teaching. If you're trying to understand what Christianity is at its core, the seven last words is actually a very kind of surprising place that you can unwrap some of that core kernel of what constitutes true Christian doctrine and what it also means to live a Christian life. Because that's another thing that many people have reflected on with the seven last words, is that obviously, you know, if you believe that Jesus is a great man, a great moral teacher, if you believe he's God, then yes, of course, his death represents a great model or template for contemplating our own death. But church teachers throughout history have argued that it also represents kind of a summation of the good life, of what a good life looks like. And that was, I think, one of the main objectives I had with this book was to show that people probably a lot of times don't really want to think about their own death. They think of it as kind of a morbid subject. But thinking about your own death is actually a means of clarifying and helping us think about what a good life looks like. And I think we see that pretty demonstrably with what Jesus is doing on the cross.

Michele McAloon 8:50

Absolutely. You begin with, well, no, you didn't begin. Christ began with the first phrase, Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. You do a really good job because of each of these chapters, you bring out a story. Tell us, begin with the story of Maria Gorietti.

Casey Chalk 9:08

Maria Goretti, yes. What I do in each of these chapters is, it, like you said, Michelle, it's it's more than just kind of like an intense theological reflection. I'm trying to connect the seven last words to the entire history of Christianity and saints who themselves have modeled their life and death off of Christ, and as well, some of the great works of the Western literary canon. So each chapter also ends with uh connecting it to a story from Shakespeare or Graham Green or any number of other prominent Western writers. But yes, the Maria Gretti, I think, is a fantastic exemplar for what forgiveness looks like. So the first of the seven last words, Jesus says, Father, forgive them, they know not what they do. And, you know, within the Christian understanding, it has a number of different levels of interpretation. So there's like a literal understanding of, well, Jesus, of course, is talking about the very people who have unjustly convicted him of a crime that he has not committed and have mocked him and derided him as he's hanging on the cross, suffering his last moments on earth. He's forgiving them, and that is of itself a pretty remarkable thing, right? He had done nothing wrong. He did not deserve the fate that had befell him. And so for him to forgive both the Jewish religious leaders who had handed him over to the Romans to crucify him, for him to forgive the Romans who had put those nails in his hands, for him to forgive even his own disciples who had abandoned him in the moment when he needed a friend the most, who had run away because of their own fear of potentially being tried and executed with him. That's incredible of itself that he would say that and desire forgiveness for all of them. But more broadly, he's also offering this forgiveness to everyone, to everyone who has who has done wrong and sinned. And where this connects, Michelle, with what you said about Maria Gretti. So Maria Gretti, her story, she was an Italian peasant whose family had come upon hard times and was basically living with another Italian family. Well, there was a young man, Alessandro, who was a teenager, and he was sexually attracted to Maria and was trying to persuade her to sleep with him, and she refused his advances, but he over time eventually just decided he wanted he wanted her and sexually assaulted her or tried to sexually assault her. He failed. And as she refused, he attempted to kill her and uh stabbed her a number of times. And even as she is suffering this, what's remarkable about Maria Greg's story, of course, she wanted to, you know, preserve her virginity. She had no interest in him. But even then, she's telling Alessandro, you know, you need to stop this because it's going to damage your soul. And that's just remarkable. Obviously, she she wants to protect herself, but she's also concerned about him. And in that sense, that very much does resonate with what Jesus is doing on the cross, that Jesus recognizes he should not be up here in the sense that he's been convicted of a crime he hasn't done, but he's still forgiving the people who have done him wrong. And Maria Gretti evinces that same quality of overflowing mercy and forgiveness. And she ultimately dies from the wounds that she suffered from this man. But even as she's dying, she is praying for him. And I mean, for a long time, this guy was unrepentant of the crime that he had committed. He was convicted in an Italian court, he was imprisoned. It took a number of years, but I can't remember the exact number of years, maybe five, seven years into his prison term. He had a change of heart. He had a spiritual experience, and he ultimately was won over by the incredible testimony of Maria and repented of the crime that he had done. He did serve a number of more years, but he ultimately was released before his term was over on good behavior, and immediately went and begged forgiveness from Maria's mother and extended family. They offered it to him, and he ultimately entered a religious order and had a very quiet and uh peaceful moral rest of his life, which is just a remarkable testimony to the power of forgiveness.

Michele McAloon 13:14

It is, and the power of forgiveness in our own personal lives, and you bring out your own personal examples of where you've chosen to forgive and or maybe chosen not to forgive. And it is I always think that forgiveness and I mean true forgiveness, it's about you and yourself and the other person, and it's about growing through that forgiveness because for because revenge and grudges, it's it's deadly. They it's not good for the human being. And you even show some scientific examples of where they've done research that forgiveness is actually good for a human being.

Casey Chalk 13:52

Yeah, that's exactly right. There is a lot of research that's been shown that demonstrates that people who hold on to grudges, that it actually, it yes, it impacts their psychological well-being and emotional well-being, but it even manifests itself physically. And the ability to forgive people really does kind of have this restorative effect upon our inner personality in a way that is really beneficial. And I think just that just goes to show how important it is that there is kind of this other quality to the human experience besides just the physical. Yeah, like you said, forgiveness is not easy by any means. You know, sometimes people commit slights against us and, you know, just little things, and we go, okay, well, I guess I can get over that and I for can forgive them. But yeah, family members, friends, coworkers, people say and do things that which is tremendously difficult to get over. And especially when the person doesn't ask for forgiveness, doesn't even recognize that they did anything wrong. That's really hard. But, you know, as I argue in the book, it even in those cases, engendering a spirit of forgiveness, a willingness to forgive those people really harms us and uh and ultimately harms other people too, because we kind of draw other people into that bitterness uh and that resentment that we're experiencing. So I talk about, you know, for example, in my own life, people that I've had a really hard time forgiving, especially when they haven't asked for it, is just going through this practice. And I've gotten this from psychologists, you know, that I studied for this book, is just going into your room, saying the person's name, saying what they did to you, and saying, I forgive you. You know, that we don't have to wait for them. I've found even that process to be incredibly restorative and helpful for me in terms of just letting that bitterness go.

Why God Feels Silent

Michele McAloon 15:30

It is. I tell you, this book is very helpful. I know for me personally, is thinking about are there people in my life I do need to forgive? And probably there's people in my life that I need to ask their forgiveness, right? It is, it's it's good, it's very thought-provoking. Casey, let's talk about the big one. And I get this, I get asked this one all the time, and I bet you know which one it is. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? And the silence of God. That one, that's a struggle. That one's a real struggle, and I think that's a struggle for both Christians and non-Christians.

If God Is Good Why Suffer

Casey Chalk 16:07

Yeah, Michelle, I think actually I think your summary is absolutely true from and resonates with my own experience as well. I think for a long time I didn't like this verse because it was confusing. How could if you are a Christian and you believe that Jesus is God, then how could he in any sense believe or say that God had forsaken him? And that's the case for a lot of interpreters over the centuries, have more or less viewed this verse as just some sort of like complicated and confusing puzzle to solve. Well, thankfully, there is also a long-standing tradition of interpretation which makes a lot of sense out of this verse, and I think in some respects, makes makes it one of the most beautiful things, certainly within the Bible, but I would say probably just within literature more broadly. The first thing that people need to understand is that Jesus is actually quoting from the Old Testament. He's quoting Psalm 22. In that Psalm, it is a psalm written by somebody who has experienced an incredible amount of suffering and pain and feelings of abandonment and rejection and fear that plays out over the course of that psalm. But the psalm ultimately ends on a note of confidence. The psalmist basically says, re-communicates his trust in God, his belief that all things are going to work out, that there is a purpose behind the suffering that he's experiencing, that he's going to get on the other side of this travesty that he's experiencing. If we connect that quotation to Psalm 22, we realize that Jesus is actually kind of playing out Psalm 22, which is more or less the full experience of humanity. We all have these kinds of experiences in our lives where we feel like we're going, we're just going through hell. We're going through something terrible, whether it's our own health scare or difficulties in our workplace or with our families, any number of things, we have those feelings of abandonment. We have those feelings of being alone and then no one's on our side. And we wonder, are we ever going to get out of it? This saying from Jesus on the cross, his ability to unite his suffering and experience with our own, right? So we can never really say, although a lot of skeptics of religion will say, well, you know, God, you know, does all these things and he's just distant and he doesn't really have any connection to our personal experience. He can't understand us. No, no, he really can. I mean, if if Jesus is God and Jesus is who he claims to be, then yeah, I mean, he's undergone the full panoply of human experiences, including those feelings of betrayal and abandonment and loneliness. He experienced it all, but he retained that hope and confidence that God would take care of him and preserve him through that experience. So, in that sense, I think it's actually one of the most beautiful and powerful things in the entirety of the Bible because it's so human. It so deeply connects with the worst experiences that we have suffered in our lives. And I so I find that beautiful.

Michele McAloon 19:11

Casey, I'm gonna ask you a question. And I get this is one that I get asked all the time. If God is so good, why does he let us suffer? Why do our prayers go unanswered? Why is God silent in the face of human suffering? And this is probably the number one question that I get.

Casey Chalk 19:33

I think it's difficult to answer in one sense because none of us are God and we don't have access to his full understanding of everything that he's doing in time and space. If someone comes to us and says, like, hey, Ike, I've got a terminal cancer diagnosis, how is God gonna make any good out of this? Like, well, I I don't I don't know. I'm not, I'm not him. I can't speak to what he has in mind. But I think what we can speak to is the fact that we all know that the times in our life where we experience suffering, we overcome that suffering, we work through that suffering. I think most of us would agree, like, yeah, like that is kind of like how I became more of the person I really wanted to be. That's how I grew in virtue. That's how I developed as a person, right? And we can take that from like the most, the the smallest kinds of suffering to like, you know, the the kid who really just really doesn't want to do his homework. He does not want to sit down and memorize Spanish verbs. Yeah, that's that's in a sense, that's a suffering. It's a suffering, right? But then it's like, yeah, but then I learned these, and then when I went when studied abroad in Latin America, wow, I could speak the language, right? So we appreciate that. And then it goes all the way to like having really debilitating health issues or anything else. We realize, wow, like the fact that I was able to suffer through that and learn to cope and kind of grow up, as C.S. Lewis would say, those are the times where we I think we we can recognize that, okay, even though I can't like make sense out of all this, I can't say like this is the exact, precise lesson I'm supposed to learn from this suffering, we can at least know, okay, there is this template by which we experience some kind of harm and pain, and yet there is an opportunity to grow and learn from it. And I think if if we keep that in mind, it can make sense out of suffering, whether it's something small or even something terrible like the loss of a family member or friend.

Suffering That Grows Empathy

Michele McAloon 21:23

You absolutely see that. And if you're willing to see it, that you understand that the hard times in your life bring you to where you are at that moment. You become more fully you in the hard times. People ask me why it's that way. I said, Well, you know what? Adam ate the apple. What else can we say? It's our fallen condition that we have to, we have to struggle with ourselves. We have to struggle with our lives to become more perfect, to become closer to the divine, to closer to divinity. And I think you gave a great explanation. One of the things is in Also you talk about, and this is a theme to your book, sort of suffering to sanctify the world. How how does our suffering make the world better? And how did, you know, the the suffering of Christ, especially when we can we unite that suffering to Christ? Does it bring us to a different place?

Using Novels To Explain Faith

Casey Chalk 22:20

Yeah, I think suffering is really transformative. And again, like, you know, we're we're talking about the seven less words of of Christ, but these are a lot of these are things which there's plenty of evidence and research that's been done in secular science that confirms this, this idea that suffering, the experience of suffering, it is really transformative for us in the sense that deepens our ability to have empathy for other people, right? You know, I remember when I was young and in my 20s and doing anything I wanted to do athletically, whatever, and I would hear these older men and women talk about, oh, you know, I got these pains and it's really hard to do all these various things. And I just kind of thought, yeah, you're just getting old, okay, whatever. I don't really care. But now, now that I'm getting older and having those things, I I recognize that there, that I can have sympathy for other people who are experiencing the same kinds of issues that we have as we enter into middle age and older age, right? So any kind of suffering that we're experiencing is an opportunity for us to appreciate the pain of others, right? I mean, and a lot of ways that we do this is actually just it's through literature, for example, right? When we sit down and we read the story of another person who went underwent some terrible trial, that engenders in us a deeper appreciation for what's good and beautiful and how to overcome those trials. So, yes, I think suffering is tremendously helpful in order to sanctify the world in that. It helps us to become better people, it helps us to grow in virtue, but it also enables us to get outside of ourselves and appreciate the circumstances that other people are in. And ultimately makes us then much more forgiving, much more merciful, much more understanding because we we recognize that, yeah, there's a lot of pain out there, and we need to have a gentle hand with people because uh we don't oftentimes know the full story of you know what's going on in their own life.

Michele McAloon 24:01

No, we don't. We we s we see through the glass darkly, right? And you know what one of the good things about this book too, it's a great cultural survey because you tie Graham Greene's 1940 novel of, I mean, the power and the glory. And folks, if you haven't read this, you don't even have to be Christian for it just to be an awesome book. I'm sure I'm sure it was a Pulitzer Prize or a Nobel Prize winner in 1940. And it is a great book. Actually, Casey does a really good job of several books of the Vipers Tangle, which is great, and a couple of of tying them to these phrases. How did you come upon doing that?

Casey Chalk 24:40

Well, I wanted to just make, like I said, uh these seven last words as accessible to people as possible. And I thought that if we only looked at them from what theologians and professional Christian scholars have said about them, well, there would be a little bit of interest in that, I'm sure, and some people would find that useful. But I really wanted to make this as accessible and interesting as possible. And I thought, of course, you know, great stories, great stories are a way for people to connect with lofty ideas. And so I thought, why not just look for whatever theme defines that last word? Let's think of a story from, you know, the canon of Western literature that best kind of encapsulates that. With each of these seven last words, you know, we talked about forgiveness, the first one, father, forgive them. They know not what they do, right? So looking for a story that connects to that. There's another, I use King Lear from Shakespeare to talk about inheritance, because I think that's what a theme that kind of very much defines when Jesus tells John, his closest disciple, and he's speaking to Mary, his mother as well, woman, behold your son, and then son, behold your mother. So I connect that to the idea of inheritance. And yeah, King Lear is a fantastic example of poorly administering one's inheritance. So uh that was that it was kind of the thought process with using those various uh anecdotes from literature.

Michele McAloon 26:02

One of the mysteries that I find in kind of our Protestant Catholic divide, of course, comes to the Holy Mother. And you talk about Christ's last words, his direction to his best friend to about his mother. He had very specific instructions about what he wanted to happen to his mother, and his mother was the one that he is the one person that he had to care for, that he was responsible for before he died. What is that phrase? I think it's the fifth one.

unknown 26:32

No.

Casey Chalk 26:33

Woman behold your son.

Michele McAloon 26:35

Yeah.

Casey Chalk 26:35

Yeah, that's the the third. Yep. Right. Oh, the third one, okay. Yeah, woman behold your son.

Michele McAloon 26:39

And explain that one a little bit, because I think ho the holy mother is it's so funny because it's so clear to Catholics and such a mystery to everybody else.

Why Christianity Still Matters

Casey Chalk 26:48

So Yeah, so I mean, I think when I was a Protestant seminary student, I interpreted their verse one way, and in basically in terms of its immediate practicality, which is still really impressive. You know, Jesus is he's dying on the cross. And for those who don't have any background in the what it actually meant to be killed by being crucified, of course, the pain of having these massive iron spikes go into your hands and feet was terrible, but that's not what killed them. Someone who is crucified dies by asphyxiation. They eventually just run out of breath. And so for Jesus to say anything from the cross is pretty remarkable because more or less, it took a huge amount of energy and will just to muster to say these words, and that the words that he would say would be such beautiful reflections and typically oriented towards other people, loving other people, right? There's none of this like I'm I curse you or anything like that, right? They are all words of transcendent beauty. And that's definitely the case with this one, right? So Jesus is, at least according to the Catholic tradition, uh Protestants sometimes interpret this differently. He's the only son of Mary. She's going to be a widow. Joseph, her husband, is already dead. You know, widows today in the 21st century certainly can be vulnerable depending on where you are in the world. But first century Palestine, a widow, I mean, there is, unless there's an extended family network immediately nearby, a widow is in deep trouble because there's no work for that woman, there's no care for her, there's no social security or anything like that, no social safety net. I mean, her very life would be threatened by the loss of her only son. So at a very practical level, by Jesus telling his best friend and disciple John to care for her and take her into uh his home is a means of providing for his mother. But then at a more spiritual level, at least within a Catholic understanding of this, is he's also giving John, his best friend, his mother, who the Catholic Church believes is more or less the perfect exemplar of Christian discipleship and faith. She models what it means to be a Christian. So by giving John his mother, he's more or less giving John like, this is the best thing I've got. Jesus is an itinerant preacher. He doesn't have any money, he doesn't have any wealth or property, anything like that. But he has something that's worth far more, namely his mother. And he gives Mary to John. And John, you might say literarily, in a literary or theological sense, representing the church means that all of us as Christians then enjoy that access to Mary to serve as an exemplar for uh what the Christian faith looks like in practice, but also someone who can pray and advocate for us in our own struggles.

Michele McAloon 29:35

It's amazing. It's absolutely amazing. I tell you this folks, this book's amazing. It's a hundred, I'd say 155 of reading pages, and it is so packed with knowledge. And if you're wondering why I should be Christian, why should I even care about this? You put a great quote in this book by a guy named Father Wranger, who I'm not familiar with. I I actually haven't run across him. And you write, We are participants in this drama. Although exactly how we do not know. We have not seen the entire sweep of our lives, but where our lives are written one line at a time. And I I I just love this. We are part of the drama of life and our lives are not done until they are done, and then we go into eternity. And guys, Christianity, I can't tell you how much it opens up your life, your thought, your imagination, just your relationships. Give it a try. That's all I have to say. It just, it's it's a miracle. And the richness of this small book that Casey Chalk has written just shows how much Christianity does enrich just normal, everyday human life. So, Casey, I want to thank you so much for being on this. It's put out by Sophia Institute Press. Do you have a website, Casey?

Casey Chalk 30:59

Just my name, Caseychalk.com. So folks can definitely contact me there if they have questions or just want to reach out. I write for lots of publications, both religious and secular. So if you just Google my name, you'll see any of my most recent writing.

Michele McAloon 31:13

Okay. Thank you so much for taking time out of your schedule to talk to us today.

Casey Chalk 31:18

Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me on the show.