The Seven Sayings of Christ: What He Spoke from the Cross
Short answer: The seven sayings of Christ are the seven recorded utterances of Jesus during his crucifixion, gathered from all four Gospels: the word of forgiveness in Luke 23:34, the promise to the dying criminal in Luke 23:43, the care for his mother in John 19:26-27, the cry of abandonment in Matthew 27:46 and Mark 15:34, the word of thirst in John 19:28, the declaration of completion in John 19:30, and the final surrender of his spirit in Luke 23:46. The primary passage for this study, Luke 23:32-43, supplies the first three: Jesus led out among criminals, speaking forgiveness over his executioners and paradise to a condemned man. These sayings are not a devotional formula but the actual words of the crucified Lord, each one anchored in its Gospel context and each one worthy of careful reading rather than sentimentality.
Why Seven Sayings, and Why the Number Is a Reading Tool, Not a Doctrine
The church has long spoken of the seven sayings of Christ because the four Gospel accounts, read side by side, preserve seven distinct utterances from the cross. Each Gospel writer selects differently. Luke alone records the prayer for forgiveness and the promise to the criminal. John alone records the words to his mother, the statement of thirst, and the word of completion. Matthew and Mark alone preserve the Aramaic cry of abandonment. None of the four writers claims to give a complete transcript. John tells us plainly that Jesus did many other things, and the Gospel records are theological portraits, not stenography.
This matters because it would be easy to build a teaching out of the number seven as though the count itself carried spiritual power. Nothing in the text does that work. The seven sayings are simply the words we have, and the fact that they are seven is a useful organising device for study, not a hidden code. The honest teacher says so. What we can say is that these seven utterances, spread across three hours of darkness and agony, show us the same Lord from several angles at once.
The value of reading them as a set is that no single Gospel gives the whole picture. Luke 23:32-43 opens the sequence with a man still speaking, still giving, still saving, even as he hangs between two criminals. Later sayings record exhaustion, thirst, darkness, and death. Read together, they keep us from choosing a favourite Jesus, either the calm teacher or the suffering victim. He is one person in all seven sayings, and the cross does not split him into parts.
So the number seven is a help, not a shrine. If a believer simply remembers three of these sayings clearly, he has gained more than someone who memorised all seven as a list and never felt their weight. The point of counting them is to make sure we do not skip any of them, especially the hard ones about abandonment and thirst, which are the easiest to pass over in silence because they do not fit a tidy picture.
The Context of Luke 23:32-43: Two Criminals, One Promise
Luke sets the scene in Luke 23:32, which says there were also others, two criminals, led with him to be put to death. The detail is deliberate. Jesus is not executed alone, as if his death were a private religious ceremony. He is numbered with lawbreakers, executed in the company of men the state had judged worthy of death. This fulfils the pattern of Isaiah, who spoke of the servant being numbered with transgressors, and it tells us something about how God chose to save the world: not by distancing himself from sinners, but by being counted among them.
Luke then records the first saying. Jesus prays for the men driving the nails, asking that they be forgiven because they do not know what they are doing. We should notice who is included in that prayer. It covers the soldiers who carried out the order, and by extension the whole chain of human hostility that put him there. The prayer is not a general statement of goodwill; it is an appeal to the Father on behalf of people who were actively doing him harm at that very moment. Forgiveness here is not a feeling. It is a request directed to God.
Then comes the mocking. The rulers scoff, the soldiers mock, and one of the criminals joins in, taunting him to save himself if he is the Christ. The other criminal rebukes his companion and makes a startling request: remember me when you come into your kingdom. He has no good works to offer, no baptism to point to, no religious standing. He has a dying man's hope that this dying man beside him is a king. His prayer is the simplest in the Bible, and it is answered immediately and completely.
Jesus replies with the second saying: today you will be with me in paradise. Not tomorrow, not after a period of purification, not on the far side of a long process. Today. The promise is personal, immediate, and located in the presence of Christ himself. This is the richest single sentence spoken from the cross about what happens to a believer at death, and it is spoken to a convicted criminal in his last hour.
The Word of Forgiveness: Praying for Those Who Crucify
The first saying sets a standard that no follower of Jesus can honestly claim to have mastered. A man being executed by a legal process he did not deserve, with nails through his hands and feet, asks God to pardon the men doing it. He does not demand justice, does not curse, does not call down fire. He prays. The prayer assumes that the Father is listening, that forgiveness is something God gives, and that those who wrong him are still within reach of mercy.
It is worth noting the qualification Jesus gives: they do not know what they are doing. That is not an excuse invented to soften the offence. It is a true statement about the soldiers, who were carrying out orders and had no idea who was on the cross. But ignorance does not make the act harmless, and Jesus does not say the deed does not matter. He asks for forgiveness anyway. The prayer treats mercy and truth as compatible, not as rivals.
For the reader, this saying is a mirror. Most of us have been wronged in smaller ways and found it hard to pray for the person responsible. Here is the Son of God, in the worst possible circumstances, doing exactly that. He does not wait for an apology, does not require the offenders to change first, and does not make his prayer conditional on their response. If we take this saying seriously, it reshapes how we handle the people who have hurt us, not by pretending the hurt is small, but by placing it in the hands of a Father who forgives.
Christians have sometimes turned this into a burden, as if failure to feel warm toward an abuser were itself a sin. That is a misreading. The prayer is a request to God, not a demand for instant emotional warmth. It is possible to ask God to forgive someone while still grieving, still setting boundaries, still telling the truth about what happened. The first saying does not erase justice. It entrusts judgment to God and refuses to let hatred take root in the one who prays.
The Promise to the Dying Criminal: Today You Will Be with Me
Luke 23:43 is the clearest statement in the Gospels about the immediate destiny of a believer at death. Jesus does not say the man will sleep until a distant resurrection, nor that he must first complete a period of penance. He says today. He does not say the man will be in a place called paradise in some general sense; he says with me. The promise is defined by Christ's own presence. Whatever else paradise is, it is where Jesus is, and to be there is to be with him.
The criminal's request was modest: remember me when you come into your kingdom. He asked for memory, and he received company. He asked for a future mention, and he received immediate fellowship. This is how Jesus answers prayer, not by giving less than we ask but by giving more than we dared to ask. The man had nothing to contribute to his own salvation. He could not be baptised, could not join a church, could not perform a single act of obedience. He simply asked, and he was saved.
Some readers worry that this account makes good works unnecessary. It does not. It shows that salvation is by grace through faith, and that the thief's faith was real even though his time ran out before his life could show fruit. Where there is time, faith produces obedience; where there is no time, faith alone is enough, because it was always faith that saved. The thief's repentance is genuine, and his courage in rebuking his companion at the point of death is itself a kind of fruit.
The pastoral comfort of this saying is enormous. It means that no one is too far gone, too late, too criminal, or too unreligious to be saved in the final hour. It also means that death for the believer is not a waiting room but an entrance into the presence of Christ. Christians differ over the details of what happens between death and resurrection, but this saying anchors the central hope: to be absent from the body is to be at home with the Lord.
The Word to His Mother: John 19:25-27 and the Cost of Love
John places the third saying at the foot of the cross, where Jesus' mother stands with her sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. Seeing his mother and the disciple he loved standing nearby, Jesus commends them to each other, giving his mother into the care of the beloved disciple and the disciple into the care of his mother. It is a domestic arrangement made in the middle of an execution. Even while dying, Jesus attends to the ordinary needs of the people he loves.
This saying shows that the cross does not cancel ordinary human responsibility. Jesus does not tell his mother to be spiritual and stop needing a son. He provides for her. If Mary had other sons, as some readings suggest, this provision would still honour the special bond between her and the disciple who remained faithful to the end. The point is not merely sentimental. It is a deliberate act of love that costs something and meets a real need.
The church has often drawn from this scene a picture of mutual care among believers. The beloved disciple takes Mary into his own home, and Mary receives him as family. That is a model for how Christians should treat one another, not as acquaintances who share a meeting, but as a household bound together by the dying words of Christ. Where family ties fail or distance separates, the church becomes the family that remains.
We should be careful not to overread the scene. Jesus does not here establish Mary as the mother of all Christians in a formal sense, nor does he create an office. What the text says is that he entrusted his mother to a particular disciple, and that disciple received her. The application is broader but must stay tethered to the text: love that endures to the end expresses itself in concrete care for real people with real needs.
The Cry of Abandonment: Psalm 22 and the Darkness
At the sixth hour, darkness came over the whole land until the ninth hour, and Jesus cried out with a loud voice, quoting the opening line of Psalm 22: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Matthew 27:46 and Mark 15:34 both preserve the Aramaic words. This is the darkest of the seven sayings, and it is the one that most tests our tidy theology. The Son of God, who had enjoyed unbroken fellowship with the Father from eternity, cries out that he has been forsaken.
Some teachers soften this by saying Jesus only felt forsaken, as though the cry were a misunderstanding on his part. That cannot be right. The words are his own, spoken to God, and they express real anguish. Yet we must not conclude that the Trinity was divided. The Father did not cease to be the Father, and the Son did not cease to be the Son. What Jesus experienced was the withdrawal of the conscious comfort of God's presence as he bore the sin of the world. The darkness over the land is the outward sign of that inner darkness.
Psalm 22 does not end in despair. It moves from lament to trust and finally to praise among the congregation. By quoting its first line, Jesus signals that he is praying the psalm, and the psalm's movement is part of the meaning. He is not simply expressing emotion; he is interpreting his suffering through Scripture, showing that even abandonment was foreseen and carried by the servant of the Lord. The cry is real, and it is also scriptural.
For believers, this saying means that Jesus knows the experience of feeling cut off from God. He has been where the depressed, the grieving, and the doubting stand. That does not answer every question about suffering, and we should not pretend it does. But it means that no one who cries out to God in darkness is speaking to a Saviour who cannot understand. He has prayed that prayer first, and he prayed it without sin.
Thirst, Completion, and the Surrender of His Spirit
John records the fifth saying as a fulfilment of Scripture: knowing that all things were now finished, and that the Scripture might be fulfilled, Jesus said he was thirsty. The thirst is physically real. Crucifixion produces agonising dehydration, and the statement is not a metaphor. But John frames it theologically. Jesus is not merely reacting to his body; he is completing what the Scriptures said about the Messiah's suffering, down to the smallest detail.
The sixth saying is one word in the Greek, often translated it is finished. It is not a cry of exhaustion but of accomplishment. The work the Father gave him to do, the obedience, the bearing of sin, the payment of the debt, is complete. Nothing remains to be added. This is why the Christian message is good news and not a burden: the saving work is not something we finish, it is something he finished. Our part is to receive it, not to complete it.
The seventh saying, recorded by Luke, is a prayer: Father, into your hands I commit my spirit. The Son dies the way he lived, entrusting himself to the Father. He is not taken by death against his will; he yields his spirit deliberately. John makes the same point when he says that Jesus bowed his head and gave up his spirit. The cross did not defeat him. He laid down his life, and he had authority to take it up again.
Taken together, these final three sayings move from bodily suffering to finished work to confident surrender. They teach us that salvation is accomplished, that death is not the end for the one who trusts Christ, and that the believer may die as Jesus did, committing his spirit into the hands of a faithful Father. The same mouth that forgave his enemies also committed itself to God.
Questions Christians Commonly Ask About the Seven Sayings
Readers often want to know whether the seven sayings happened in the order the Gospels record. The answer is that we cannot always be certain. Luke and John arrange material thematically as well as chronologically, and the darkness from the sixth to the ninth hour provides a framework. What we can say is that the sayings fall into three rough groups: words of ministry to others, a word of anguish, and words of completion and surrender. The order helps us follow the movement of the cross, but the exact sequence is not the main point.
Another common question is whether the seven sayings were all Jesus said. The Gospels do not claim to give a full record. John tells us at the end of his Gospel that there were many other things Jesus did, and by implication many other words. The seven sayings are the words the Spirit chose to preserve for the church. They are sufficient for what we need, even though they are not exhaustive of everything spoken on that day.
A third question concerns the criminal on the cross and whether he was truly saved. Jesus' promise settles it. The man's faith was weak and late, but it was real, and Christ received him. This should give hope to anyone who fears they have come to God too late, and it should check any pride in those who came early. Salvation has always been by grace through faith, whether the faith is exercised in childhood or in the final hour of a criminal's life.
Biblical fidelity check
The passage establishes certain things clearly. The seven sayings are recorded in the four Gospels and belong to the historical crucifixion. Luke 23:32-43 shows Jesus executed between two criminals, praying for his executioners, promising paradise to one who asked for mercy, and doing so on the same day. The text does not establish that the number seven is inspired as a number, nor does it give us a complete chronology of the crucifixion. It also does not tell us everything about the intermediate state, though the promise of being with Christ today is a strong anchor for hope.
A common misreading treats the cry of abandonment as proof that Jesus ceased to be divine or that the Trinity was broken. That is wrong because the same Gospels portray Jesus as the Son of God throughout the crucifixion, and the cry is a quotation of Psalm 22, a lament that moves toward trust. The text does not say the Father stopped being Father or the Son stopped being Son. It says Jesus experienced forsakenness as he bore sin. We should let the text say that much, and no more, and let the mystery remain where Scripture leaves it.
Other passages that speak to Luke 23:32-43
Several related studies help place this passage in a wider biblical frame. Isaiah's servant songs and the Psalms of lament give the background for the darkness and the cry. The Gospel of John supplies the sayings not found in Luke, and Hebrews explains the once-for-all nature of Christ's sacrifice. For practical Christian living in light of the cross, see Is investing in the stock market compatible with Christian faith? A Biblical Guide, for the believer's union with Christ see John 15:5 Meaning: Abiding in Christ the True Vine, and for two classic Wesleyan studies on genuine faith see Scriptural Christianity: A Bible Study from John Wesley’s Classic Sermon and The Almost Christian: A Bible Study from John Wesley’s Classic Sermon.
Frequently asked questions
What are the seven sayings of Christ in order?
The traditional order is: Father, forgive them (Luke 23:34); today you will be with me in paradise (Luke 23:43); the word to his mother and the beloved disciple (John 19:26-27); my God, my God, why have you forsaken me (Matthew 27:46; Mark 15:34); I am thirsty (John 19:28); it is finished (John 19:30); and Father, into your hands I commit my spirit (Luke 23:46). The exact sequence is difficult to fix precisely, but this order follows the flow of the crucifixion and is widely used.
Was the criminal on the cross really saved?
Yes. Jesus told him plainly that he would be with him in paradise that very day. The man had no good works, no baptism, and no religious standing, but he had genuine faith in Christ, and Christ received him. This account shows that salvation is by grace, not by achievement, and that no one who turns to Jesus is turned away, no matter how late the turning happens.
Why did Jesus cry out that he was forsaken?
Jesus was quoting the first line of Psalm 22, a lament that moves from anguish to trust and praise. The cry expresses the reality of his experience as he bore sin and felt the withdrawal of the Father's comforting presence. It does not mean the Trinity was divided or that Jesus stopped being the Son of God. It means he entered fully into human suffering and prayed the Scriptures from the cross.
