“When
they came to the place that is called The Skull, they crucified Jesus there
with the criminals, one on his right and one on his left. Then Jesus said, ‘Father, forgive them, for
the do not know what they are doing.’”
Luke 23: 33-34
This year during Lent and Holy Week, I’m
preaching a sermon series on the Seven Last Words of Christ. Now I have to confess, here at the beginning,
that this first word from the cross is difficult for me to hear. “Father, forgive them?” How could Jesus say that? Look at what they’d done to him! These people that he wants to forgive had
arrested him, beaten him, taunted him. The
people who not long ago had followed him now were crying for his blood,
shouting, “Crucify him! Crucify
him!” And need I go into all that he
suffered—the flogging with a cat-o-nine-tails, the crown of thorns on his head,
the painful march down the road with the cross on his back, the torture of
nails piercing his flesh, the excruciating agony of hanging from the cross.
They didn’t
know what they had done?? How could
Jesus say that! How could they not know
what they had done! It was evil! It was brutal! It makes me angry to hear Jesus say
that. I want justice! I want vengeance! I want them to pay for what they did.
It may be particularly hard for us in
our culture to understand this first word from Jesus. Our culture esteems justice,
even aggrandizes vengeance. Think of all
the blockbuster action movies where the bad guys get what’s coming to them. Chuck Norris, Sylvester Stallone, “The
Rock.” Clint Eastwood saying, “Go ahead,
make my day.” Bruce Willis blowing up
the bad guys. And every movie where the
cop throws his badge down on his captain’s desk, and you know he’s about to go
take justice into his own hands.
It is so much a part of our culture
that at a recent presidential primary debate in South Carolina, when candidate Ron
Paul said, “I would say that maybe we ought to consider a Golden Rule in
foreign policy: don’t do to other
nations what we don’t want them to do to us”---when he said this, he was jeered
by the crowd. At the same debate, when
Newt Gingrich said, “Andrew Jackson had a pretty clear-cut idea about America’s
enemies. Kill them,” the crowd cheered (Christian Century, February 22, 2012, p.
9, reprinted from Chicago Tribune,
January 22, 2012).
A crowd in the heart of the Bible belt
jeered the Biblical Golden Rule, but cheered the idea of killing our enemies.
We want our enemies to pay. We want the bad guys to get what’s coming to
them. So when Jesus says, “Father,
forgive them, for they know not what they do,” that’s not what we want to
hear.
But then, do any of us really know what
we do when we sin? Do we have any idea
of the pain we cause our Lord? Our
capacity for self-deception is boundless.
I remember when I was a kid and my mom would tell me that I
had to clean my room before I could go out and play. One day I was in really big hurry, because my
friends were waiting on me outside. I
looked around the room and thought about how long it was going to take to put
away all that stuff, and a little light bulb went off over my head! The closet!
I ran around the room and snatched everything up—toys, games, dirty
clothes—and stuffed it all in the closet and pushed the door closed. Problem solved!
As grown ups, we may
think we can hide our sin like that, shoving it out of sight in the recesses of
our mind, hiding it from others so that on the surface, it seems as if we are
clean and pristine. But Jesus knows what
lurks behind the door.
Yes, we want the bad guys to get what’s
coming to them, until we suddenly realize that we are the bad guys.
We all should be grateful for Jesus’
words, “Father, Forgive them,” for he is speaking not just of those who beat
and mocked him, but of all of us, for we all hung him on the cross. We all have committed sins, and we cannot
absolve ourselves of our guilt. And so
out of his great love for us, God sent his Son, to pay the price that we could
not pay.
We do not know what we do. Each of us is as guilty as those who nailed
Jesus to the cross that day.
But the good
news for us is that despite what we think about who deserves what, God is not
fair. If he were fair, he would give us
the punishment we had coming to us. No,
God is not fair, but he is good, and he is amazingly generous. The good news is that grace is not fair,
because grace always gives us more than we deserve.
In this
season of Lent, let us give thanks for the boundless grace of our generous God,
who spares us from the punishment we deserve and instead gives us the gift of
salvation. In humility, let us give
thanks for Jesus’ gracious words from the cross, words spoken of each and every
one of us: “Father, forgive them, for
they know not what they do.”
