"The Unfairness of Forgiveness"

“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.”