‘Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing’
Scriptures:
Psalm 32:1-7
Luke 23:31-38
What I’d like to do during these last four Sundays of Lent is to take four of the familiar Seven Last Words of Christ as a guide for our Lenten journey together. My thought in doing this is that these seven words (well, actually, they’re really phrases, as you know), besides being Christ’s legacy to us, help to describe the basic human condition. Through these Seven Last Words Christ was able to identify himself with our everyday lives in a meaningful and unforgettable way. We’ll explore more about what that identification means for us as we go along.
First, though, here’s a refresher course in what The Seven Last Words of Christ are. This is one minister’s interpretation, Ben H. Swett from Bethany Christian Church, using the traditional order and the traditional language:
1) "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they
do." (Luke 23:34)
Soldiers have just driven nails through his hands and feet and hoisted him up
by those nails. He does not fear those who kill his body; he pities them and
prays for them. If they knew how much this hurts, they could not do it to
anyone. They are unwitting instruments of the higher purpose that brings him here.
2) "My God, my God, why have you forsaken
me?" (Matthew 27:46)
But physical torment takes its toll. He suddenly discovers that he cannot hear
the still, small voice; he has lost his two-way communication with God. His
lifeline is not working, so he must face the narrow gate of death alone.
3) He said to his mother, "Woman, behold
your son!" Then he said to the disciple, "Behold your mother!"
(John 19:26-27)
Not quite alone. He looks down. Which hurts worse: the pain of being crucified,
or the pain of a mother watching her son be crucified, or the pain of a boy
whose beloved teacher hangs bleeding before his eyes? He understands their pain
in the midst of his own, and tells them to care for each other.
4) "I thirst!" (John 19:28)
Time passes slowly. His spring of living water runs dry. He reaches the end of
his strength. This is the moment the Tempter has been waiting for: through the
voices of cynical men, Satan tries again, as he did in the wilderness: "If
you are the Christ, prove it! Save yourself and impress the people."
5) "Truly, I say to you, today you will be
with me in Paradise." (Luke 23:43)
But a dying thief says, "Jesus, remember me when you come into your
kingdom." What the cynical voices suggest is not the way to prove he is
the Christ. His kingdom is not of this world. He ignores them and reassures the
thief.
6) "It is finished!" (John 19:30)
He has defeated the Tempter again. Despite the agony, he has rejected
temptation and cared for those around him. His temporary duty on earth is
complete. He has shown the way God wants us to live. He has demonstrated the
fact that faith and hope and love cannot be destroyed by anything we can say or
do.
7) "Father, into thy hands I commit my
spirit." (Luke 23:46)
Like a trusting child, he turns to the Father and takes the next step. He has
bound himself by love, to both God and the human race. Soon he will begin his
long-term ministry by demonstrating the fact that human beings survive physical
death. Then he will continue to draw to himself, and thus to heaven, everyone
he can ... for as long as it takes ... until whosoever will has come.
Now, I’m not going to deal with these phrases in precisely this order; nor am I going to try to deal with all seven (which means that we’ll have some left over to work with in another Lenten season!). But I do want to start with the traditional First Word: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” – or as the more updated, easier on our ears New Revised Standard Version of the Bible has it: “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing”. The first word that Jesus speaks to us from the cross is a word of forgiveness. The primary characteristic of the Christian faith, therefore, is to be able to forgive; it is the word that most needed to be spoken. This word from the cross puts the lie to those forms of Christianity that are based on guilt – the “hellfire and brimstone”, the “God will get you if you don’t watch out”, the “no good deed goes unpunished” varieties of Christianity – which, to my mind, are bastardizations of the faith.
I know that I dealt with forgiveness from this pulpit just a little more than a month ago. But it seems to me that we can never emphasize it enough – both because it is so central to our faith and because it is so hard to hear. In part this is because guilt is such a complex phenomenon – there’s a part of each one of us that gets a secret little thrill whenever we do something that we know ought to make us feel guilty. (As a sidebar, this is part of the dynamic behind giving something up for Lent – after Easter we can go right back to the behavior and enjoy that tiny sense of guilt for having done so – which is why I suggested in the Carillon column that it would be better to give of yourself during Lent instead of giving up some frivolous thing.)
Another dynamic that makes the fact of forgiveness so hard to hear is that somewhere deep inside we often find that we do not want to be forgiven; to be forgiven means that we are no longer in control of the situation. Here’s how Bill Stringfellow, an Episcopal lay theologian and lawyer, describes this strange phenomenon in his book Free in Obedience (I’ll quote him as he actually wrote it, although he was writing without using inclusive language): “Many men hate the Cross because it means a salvation not of their own choosing or making, but rather of God’s grace and his mercy. Men hate the Cross because it means a salvation which is unearned, underserved, unmerited. Men would much prefer God to punish them than to forgive them because that would mean that God is dependent upon men and needed their obedience to be their God. Then God would be in fact no different from an idol of race, nation, family, or whatever, and a man would feel justified either by his obedience to the idol or by the punishment of his disobedience.” In other words, if we truly accept the cross and all that it means for us, then we will come to realize that we must rely solely on God’s mercy and grace and not on any control that we might want to exercise over our world and our own condition.
There’s a second human factor in our psychology that keeps us from fully accepting God’s forgiveness: forgiveness, it would seem, is not as effective as punishment. We see this in the small child who knowingly does something wrong and then expects to be punished. But if the parent just says, “I forgive you”, according to most child psychology books anyway, the child would be left confused. From a Christian perspective the parent might be exactly right, but in terms of helping the child conform to society’s expectations the parent may be distorting the child’s personality by not punishing him or her. It is the exceptionally wise parent who can appropriately punish and communicate a sense of forgiveness at the same time.
And a third human psychological factor that keeps us from accepting God’s forgiveness is that we cannot quite imagine an unmerited forgiveness. Somehow…somehow…we feel that we have to earn forgiveness through our repentant actions. This may be the case at the human level – when you or I have wronged someone, it is our honest repentance that is a very important first step in bringing us back into right relationship. But with God grace abounds! (That’s why we sing of “Amazing Grace”.)
C.S. Lewis, the author of The Chronicles of Narnia, has another wonderful little fanciful book called The Great Divorce, which is about the divorce between heaven and hell and the characteristics of those who inhabit each realm. One of the characters is a kind of cloying mother who is in hell but journeys to heaven in the expectation of seeing her son – but only on her own terms, for she says, “I should not dream of staying if I’m expected to meet Robert. I am ready to forgive him, of course. But anything more is quite impossible.” Her heavenly companion asks, “But if you have forgiven him, surely…..” The mother interrupts, “I forgive him as a Christian. But there are some things one can never forget.” Do you recognize anyone here? Isn’t this an all-too-human response? Because so often we cannot forgive or believe ourselves to be forgiven until we see some evidence of real repentance, we think that the same must be true of God. But Jesus did not say, “Father, forgive them, after they have seen the error of their ways and have done something to deserve your forgiveness.” The irony of C.S. Lewis’s mother is that even though she is the one who thinks that she ought to forgive although she can’t forget imagined injustices done to her, she is the one who is in hell! We are invited to forgive as God forgives: without prior conditions.
But are there really no prior conditions? The last part of Jesus’ phrase, “…for they do not know what they are doing,” almost makes it appear as if ignorance is the qualification for forgiveness. There’s a sense in which this is the case, for frequently we don’t see how what we are doing is being harmful. We find rationalizations. We invent excuses. “Everyone else is doing it.” “I’m not really hurting anybody.” “You’ve got to look out for Number 1.” I was thinking about this last week when Sushama was talking about the minister who invited her to speak and then when she arrived said, “I didn’t realize you were black when I extended the invitation.” What a strange and basically hurtful remark – and the minister was probably completely unaware that she was saying anything hurtful. This is a lot like what good, sincere, liberal-thinking people used to say back-in-the-day: “Some of my best friends are…..” – until it became evident that this was such a demeaning form of trying to show relationship. With such statements we place ourselves there at the foot of the cross, among those about whom Jesus is saying, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”
It is into this well of ignorance that forgiveness comes. Human psychology, as I said before, when it knows it has done something wrong desires punishment. But now God, through Christ is saying: Do you really know what it is that you are doing wrong? Do you not see that you need my forgiveness and not my punishment for your false and foolish attitudes of unawareness? Do you not trust me enough to realize that my forgiveness can reach out to even the darkest corners of your ignorance?
Our Lenten journey, begun in ignorance, now has heard the first word – a word which frees us from our guilt. A guilt-ridden psyche is like a cancer on the soul, which eats away at our sense of well-being. What Jesus desires of us (as we will see when we continue on through the Seven Last Words) is that we be fully human – that each of us is and becomes a whole person, psychologically healthy and spiritually attuned. In order for us to respond to the God whom Jesus knew as Father, Jesus knew that we would have to hear the word of forgiveness. At first, we may be as surprised as those at the foot of the cross, for this word shattered all their expectations about God’s action and human response. No longer could they expect simple retribution. No longer could they ease their guilty consciences with gifts to the temple. No longer could they be unforgiving of a neighbor and still believe that they were acting in a God-like way. No, the word was clear: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” Despite all expectations, God has come crashing through human ignorance and will to offer an unconditional forgiveness. Can we do anything other than fall to our knees in awe before such a gift?
Amen.
Next week I’ll be looking at the word: “Woman, here is your son. Here is your mother.” As you can probably anticipate it’ll be about relationships. Tune in next week.
Dave Pomeroy
First Congregational Church, UCC
Las Vegas, NV
March 12, 2006