Father, Forgive Them

 

Words from the Cross: Father, Forgive Them

Luke 23:32-38

 

Two other men, both criminals, were also led out with him to be executed. When they came to the place called the Skull, they crucified him there, along with the criminals — one on his right, the other on his left. Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” And they divided up his clothes by casting lots.

 

The people stood watching, and the rulers even sneered at him. They said, “He saved others; let him save himself if he is God’s Messiah, the Chosen One.”

 

The soldiers also came up and mocked him. They offered him wine vinegar and said, “If you are the king of the Jews, save yourself.”

 

There was a written notice above him, which read: this is the king of the jews.

 

It was the end of the longest day ever. Jesus had gathered with His disciples in the Upper Room to observe the Passover meal. And He shocked them all by washing their feet. The ultimate act of humility and servant leadership. Following the meal, He took His three best friends – Peter, James, and John – to the Garden of Gethsemane to pray. He just needed time with His Father.

 

He knew what was coming. He knew that His time was up. He knew that His time had come to die. The tension was so palpable, the stress so heavy, that He actually began to sweat drops of blood. He asked His Father to take the cup from Him, to take this pain away, but He yielded His will to that of His Father. 

 

Then Judas, one of His closest friends, with a band of Roman soldiers, entered the Garden and arrested Jesus. They brought Him to the courts, blindfolded Him, and struck Him over, and over, and over again, mocking Him all the while. They took Him then to Pontius Pilate, who didn’t have the courage to profess Jesus’ innocence, so Pilate took Jesus to the crowd, and the shouts of the people prevailed. Pilate sentenced Jesus to death by crucifixion. From there, the flogging began, likely 39 lashes, as 40 would have killed Him. His back was no longer even recognizable. 

 

The soldiers placed a crown of thorns onto His head, a purple robe around his shoulders, pointed to the cross and told Him to pick it up and carry it – well over 100 pounds for 650 yards – down the Via Dolorosa to the place they called Golgotha. His body screamed with pain with every excruciating step. He was exhausted. He was in agony. The Son of God, the King of Glory, couldn’t do it by Himself. He was so beaten, so worn, that He fell …three times…  A man named Simon from Cyrene came to His aid to help Him carry His cross. 

 

When they arrived at the place of the skull, they nailed His wrists and feet to the cross and raised Him. Before long, He was suffocating, unable to grasp breath. Each and every breath was a battle. 

 

Can you imagine just how hard it would have been to form a word and speak it? Yet seven times, Jesus mustered the strength to say seven different things. And if it took Him this much effort just to speak, how incredibly intentional and purposeful those statements must have been.

 

The four New Testament Gospels record these seven “words”, or sayings, from the crucified Jesus of Nazareth. And during these next Sundays of the season of Lent, we will be examining each of these phrases as we journey toward the empty tomb and Easter Sunday.

 

In the traditional order, the first saying is from the Gospel of Luke, which Steven read earlier: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” 

 

In Jesus’ time, crucifixion was not against the law. It was carried out by the law. It was an exceptionally gruesome method of torturing a person to death, carried out bythe government, and not in secret dungeons, but in public. They were placed on a busy roadside as a form of public announcement: “These miserable human beings that you see before you are not of the same species as the rest of us. They do not deserve to live.” The crowds understood that their role was to jeer, to mock, and to degrade those who had been designated unfit to live.

 

For Jews and Gentiles alike in those days, a crucified person was as low and despised as it was possible to be. As the Romans put it, such a person was “damnatio ad bestias”, meaning “condemned to the death of the beast.” 

 

It was deliberately intended to be obscene – and obscene is defined as “disgusting, repulsive, filthy, foul, abominable, loathsome.” It was purposefully designed to humiliate, to strip a person of human dignity. 

 

We don’t understand it because we’ve never seen anything like it. But the situation was different for everyone 2000 years ago in Israel. Everyone had seen crucified men along the roadsides of the Roman Empire. Everyone knew what it looked like, smelled like, sounded like – the horrific sight of naked men in agony, the sounds of their groans and labored breathing going on for hours, and in some cases, for days. 

 

I tell you these things not to make you uncomfortable… Well, no, I want you to feel uncomfortable. I want me to feel uncomfortable… because I need to be reminded what Jesus went through for me. What He went through for you. There was nothing religious, nothing uplifting, nothing inspiring about a crucifixion. No one at that time was wearing a cross around their neck, or feeling the warm and fuzzies when admiring a cross. 

 

I need a reminder that crucifixion is an enactment of the worst that we are, an embodiment of the most sadistic and inhumane impulses that lie within us as human beings. And the Son of God absorbed all that. He drew it into Himself. The mocking of Jesus, the spitting and the scorn, the “inversion of His kingship”, the “studious dethronement” with the crown of thorns and purple robe – all were part of a deliberate procedure of shaming, that unfolded in several stages, and ultimately culminated in crucifixion. In walking through Jesus’ last day, we are reminded of the absolute worst people can do.

And yet here we find Jesus. Exhausted. In agony. Shamed. Belittled. And what were Jesus’s first words from the Cross? He doesn’t pray for the good and the innocent. He prays for people doing terrible things. He prays for men who are committing brutal acts, and offers them to His Father’s mercy. It’s for His enemies that He prays, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” 

 

As I sat in many airports over the last few days, I read and re-read this passage. 

 

In light of everything going on in the world right now – an invasion, war, murder, merciless acts - I sat in awe, dumbfounded of how my Savior could forgive those inflicting excruciating pain upon Him. How did He do it? How could He possibly forgive? At first glance, I had the audacity to think, “Sure…wasn’t His whole ministry about forgiveness and reconciliation? He brought those on the margins to the center of God’s love! Of course, Jesus would, in His final moments, speak the words that comprise His mission and ministry. Of course, He would speak words of forgiveness.”

 

But then I remembered, Jesus is fully divine but also fully human. And me? Sadly, I’m too human on most days. Forgiveness is not often found in my first words; sometimes not even in my last words.

So, I took this statement piece-by-piece, and these were my three take-aways: 

 

First, Jesus prayed to His Father.

 

It seems Jesus was always in prayer, always taking time to withdraw from the world to draw strength from His Father. So, this was His instinctive response - to reach out to God. In His hardest moment, Jesus prayed. At the time of His greatest physical and emotional pain, Jesus called out to His Father. The Father whom He knew. The Father whom He loved. The Father who was present with Him in every moment. The Father whom He trusted to hear His cries. What if we made this our instinctive response, to first cry out to God, even in our most painful situations, in our valleys, in our lowest of lows? Jesus taught us that we can trust that when we call out to God, He will hear us. He will be present with us.

 

After He cried out to His Father, Jesus asked His Father to forgive. 

 

This fact is remarkable in itself. At the time of His most extreme ordeal, Jesus nevertheless found the courage to pray – not for Himself, but for others. I don’t know about you, but when I’m tired, when I’m exhausted, when I’m in pain, I’m not thinking about others. I have a self-centered, one-track mind, trying to shut the world out. Talking is the last thing I want to do, and forgiveness is the last thing on my mind. 

 

Jesus’s prayer for God to forgive His persecutors, in the same moment they were torturing Him, leaves an example for us. We are called to forgive others when they sin against us. Even when they don’t recognize their sin or ask for forgiveness, we’re instructed to show mercy to our enemies, just as Jesus showed mercy to His. 

 

Henri Nouwen wrote, “Forgiveness is the name of love practiced among people who love poorly. The hard truth is all people love poorly, and so we need to forgive and be forgiven every day, every hour increasingly. Forgiveness is the great work of love among the fellowship of the weak that is the human family.”

If we can’t practice forgiveness, then perhaps it’s not that we don’t practice love poorly… it’s that we don’t practice love at all. And so, we are reminded to practice. And perhaps that is the secret. We simply need to practice forgiveness as our first words, in order to learn to love – perhaps poorly at first, but more completely in time. Where to begin? A first step may be joining Jesus in His plea, His prayer, and His loving hope, by saying the words, “Father, forgive them….”

But my third lesson from this passage was the biggest lesson I learned this week - Jesus interceded for those “who knew not what they did?”

 

For whom, exactly, was He interceding? The Roman soldiers who were doing the immediate, hands-on deeds? Or maybe He was forgiving Caiaphas, the high priest and his kangaroo court? Maybe Pontius Pilate, who washed his hands of Him? Or maybe Judas, one of those closest to Him who betrayed Him? Or Peter, His #1 disciple, who had denied Him three times? Perhaps it was for the criminal to His right, who used His final breaths to mock Jesus? 

Maybe, just maybe, Jesus left the prayer open-ended on purpose – He wanted to invite everyone who heard these words to receive His forgiveness. 

 

When I was studying this passage, I found myself in Leviticus… as one does… And the book of Leviticus prescribes various religious sacrifices that should be made by people who have “unwittingly” broken the laws of God. Even if they “knew not” what they have done, they are judged guilty and must seek atonement 

 

The basic idea in the sacrificial rituals of Leviticus is that atonement, or forgiveness for sin, COSTS SOMETHING. Something valuable must be offered in restitution, usually an animal sacrifice, with a sense of awe at the shedding of blood, to represent this payment. This is what it means in Hebrews 9:22, which says, “Without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness of sins.” The blood represents the ultimate cost to the giver. 

 

Jesus went to the cross knowing what it would cost Him. But He went because He knew His mission was to fulfill God’s redemptive plan. He knew that His death, His sacrifice, would bring our forgiveness. And He considered us – He considered you, He considered me, He considered every human being - to be worth the cost. Jesus forgave those who tortured Him unjustly. But He also forgives us for the sin that put Him there. 

 

There is a suggestion here that human beings are in the grip of something they do not fully comprehend. The evil that lodges in the human heart is greater than we know. This means at least two things. It means that there is nothing that you or I could ever do, ever say, or ever be, that would be beyond the reach of Jesus’ prayers. Nothing at all. And it also means that no one else, no one at all, is beyond that reach. His prayer for the worst of the worst comes from a place beyond human understanding. 

 

For the apostle Paul, this is all due to the righteousness, the greatness, the decency, of God. Paul’s favorite word is “justification”, which means the same thing as “righteousness” - in Greek and in Hebrew. Paul says in Romans 4 that we are justified by the blood of Jesus. A better translation may be - we are being made righteous through Jesus’ death on the cross. This is more comprehensive and more revolutionary than forgiveness itself. 

 

In Romans chapter 5, Paul gives our memory verse of the week. This is the heart and soul of the Christian message, and what the death of Christ means for every human being: 

You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly… But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

 

And who are these ungodly people? Friends, that’s us. That’s you, and me, along with Abraham and Isaac, Moses and Joshua, Peter and Paul, Mary and Martha. There are elements of myself that are indefensible. There are elements of YOU that are undesirable. If we don’t understand our own defenselessness in the grip of sin and death, we can’t understand the magnitude of what Jesus did on the cross. 

 

But while we recognize ourselves as guilty and condemned, we can fully know at the same moment, we, ourselves, are the ones for whom Christ died - for He is the One who justifies the ungodly, the One who forgives, the One who will incorporate us into Himself and remake us after His own image in the company of all saints, rejoicing with the Father, who awaits us with arms flung wide open at His overflowing banquet in the Kingdom of Heaven. 

 

From that sphere of divine power, we can hear these words today as though they were spoken for the first time, as though they were being spoken at this very moment by the living Spirit, spoken to each one of us: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” 

 

And isn’t this, in fact, what we do when we remember and participate in the sacrament of Holy Communion. It’s right there in the liturgy that Carl read earlier – “Hear the Good News! Christ died for us, while we were yet sinners. That PROVES God’s love toward us. In the name of Jesus Christ, YOU are forgiven. Glory to God.” 

 

Amen.