First Word from the Cross: 'Father, Forgive Them...'

A Sermon originally preached on Good Friday 2013

There is something profoundly scandalous about this First Word from the Cross. Come to that, there’s something profoundly scandalous about the Cross itself, but the more we consider it, the more we see the scandal in this First Word. It is a reminder to us that we can’t have our cake and eat it too. Jesus either died for sinners (of whom I am the foremost) or else his death was meaningless and empty.

It doesn’t make sense that the first thing we hear Jesus say from the cross is a word of forgiveness to those who crucified him. In some ways, this is deeply offensive. We have been conditioned to believe that repentance is the first step towards forgiveness. How can you forgive someone who’s not sorry?

That’s one way we’ve been taught to think about forgiveness. It is almost as if it’s something that we earn when we stop doing something wrong, apologize to those whom we’ve hurt by our actions, and then ask for forgiveness. Deep down, we know that this isn’t quite the way it works. We know that in order for forgiveness to be real, it needs to be founded on something more than what we earn or deserve. It’s more than just a balancing of the accounting sheet that keeps track of right and wrong. It’s a canceling of debts, of who owes what, of who deserves what. The essence of forgiveness is that it ought to be undeserved.

What makes forgiveness such a blessing is that we don’t have to forgive people. Like I say, we understand that deep down, but it sometimes sticks in our throat. If I step on your foot in the movie theatre, you understand that I wasn’t trying to hurt you. This just happens when people are packed together in tight quarters, and someone needs to go to the bathroom, or to get more popcorn. What really hurts, though, is if I step on your foot and don’t apologize. Somehow it’s harder to forgive the person who hurts you and ignores your pain than the one who hurts you and immediately (or even eventually) feels sorry about it.

In an ideal world, though we’d want forgiveness to be lavish, and liberal, and extravagant, especially if it’s God’s forgiveness we’re talking about. As we watch Jesus suffer for the sins of the world, as we watch him collapse to the ground under the burden of sin in the garden of Gethsemane, we are forced to admit that we have contributed to that burden of sin. Our good intentions might help us to resist future temptations, but there is nothing we can do to undo our past failings. There is nothing we ourselves can do to lighten that burden, and there’s nothing we ourselves can do to deserve forgiveness. Of course we want God’s forgiveness to be lavish and liberal and extravagant. If it weren’t there’d be no hope for you and me!

When the notion of Jesus forgiving his persecutors doesn’t sit right with us, it’s because we still sometimes tend to see forgiveness from a selfish and self-interested perspective. Awful though his Passion may be, we want to see him die for our sins, because we know that by his death we are set right with God. We might not go so far as to say that we deserve to be forgiven, but we know what it’s like to be inside our own skin. We know what it’s like to be us, to bewail and lament our sins and to be be so repentant and aching for Jesus to forgive us.

We don’t know what it’s like to be the person hammering the nails into Jesus’s hands. We assume that he’s not feeling pretty repentant, or else he wouldn’t be doing this. But Jesus gives us a hint, when he says that ‘they know not what they do.’ They’re not repentant. They are unrepentantly trying to kill Jesus. The notion that even that could be forgiven is, quite simply, scandalous. And yet, if they did not crucify him, no one could be forgiven.

The forgiveness that Jesus brings is so lavish, so abundant, so overflowing, that he can’t hold it back.

Throughout his life, people came to Jesus with a lot of expectations. My son is tormented by a demon. Set him free. My little girl is sick. Come make her better. If you will, you can make me clean. Lord, help me. How astounding it is, though, when we see someone come to Jesus, and they receive something they didn’t ask for! When this happens, what they get is usually far more than they were expecting.

‘And they came, bringing to him a paralytic carried by four men. And when they could not get near him because of the crowd, they removed the roof above him; and when they had made an opening, they let down the pallet on which the paralytic lay. And when Jesus saw their faith...’ he did not say ‘Your faith has healed you and made you whole.’ What he said was ‘Your sins are forgiven.’

The forgiveness that Jesus brings is so lavish, so abundant, so overflowing, that he can’t hold it back. Jesus sees even beyond the visible need — our friend can’t walk — to the deeper, unspoken one — we all need forgiveness. When he stands in Capernaum as a miracle-worker, he grants forgiveness to the paralytic who didn’t ask for it, and the scribes are scandalized, saying ‘Where does this guy get off, presuming to forgive sins?! Who does he think he is?’ When he hangs on the cross at Calvary as the Saviour who will die for the sins of the world, he grants forgiveness to his persecutors, who didn’t even ask for it, and we are slightly scandalized, saying ‘Where does this guy get off, presuming to forgive even these people?’ Unless we are content to fall into the same trap as the scribes, and miss the point of what Jesus is doing, we need to get our heads around the fact that Jesus came to die for the sins of the whole world.

I used to say, like St. Paul, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, and I am the foremost of sinners. Every so often, I’d worry that people would take that the wrong way, as if I were hinting that I’ve got some particularly shameful skeletons in my closet. I’d vaguely worry that I was inadvertently fueling the gossip mills. But the truth is that I am the foremost of sinners.

My sins are particularly bad, not because of their own enormity, but because they’re mine. When I examine my conscience and recognize my own flaws and failings, and realize that Jesus has suffered because of these specific sins, it cuts like a knife. If I’m charitable, I can imagine any number of mitigating circumstances that might make your sins not quite so bad, but I know that I’ve got no excuse for my own. And if I can be forgiven, then anyone could be, even the angry mob that crucified Jesus.

Once again, we’ve stopped our ordinary lives to get caught up into the drama of Christ’s Passion. As we contemplate the events of Good Friday and Easter, it is as if we are peering into a very deep pool of water. The first thing we see is our own reflection, shimmering at the surface. But the deeper we look, the more we see, darker, deeper, harder to see clearly, but tantalizingly there, nonetheless. The Atonement is a mystery. The more we meditate upon it, the more we will understand, but we will never reach the point of fully comprehending what it means. And so we begin with the scandal of forgiveness to those who don’t deserve it, and realize that this means us as well.