Good Friday: Forgiveness

Audio for this sermon here.

Please visit our website.

Good Friday
March 23, 2016
Luke
Father, Forgive them, they don’t know what they are doing.

Father, forgive them. They don’t know what they are doing.

It’s the first recorded word from the cross. The first of seven phrases the gospels record Jesus saying on this last night of life. The final whispers of a dying man. The last utterances of a Man of Sorrows.

Father, forgive them. They don’t know what they are doing.

Only Luke records Jesus saying this. And the earliest copyists must have debated whether to include it — since some of the earliest manuscripts leave it out. As the wee footnote in your study Bible indicates.

Father, forgive them. They don’t know what they are doing.

I can so easily get caught in my head. Two brief sentences. I pay enormous amounts of attention to who the “them” is. Forgive them. The soldiers? The ones who nail him to the cross?

They are simply doing their job. They are cogs in a wheel. They don’t know the language of the Jews, the cadence of Yahweh faith. Are they the “them”?

Or perhaps the gamblers — soldiers who crossed the line, who interfered with a crime scene, taking evidence that doesn’t belong to them.

Father, forgive them. They don’t know what they are doing.

It was only a few verses earlier when Peter the one known as The Rock, betrayed Jesus. Peter hadn’t known what he was doing until he was dumbstruck by the crowing cock.

Which makes me wonder, what did they not know? I remember reading some of the language from the SA Truth and Reconciliation commission years ago. Where Bishop Tutu asked, how was it that so many decent, well meaning white Christians in South Africa could not know about what apartheid was doing to the black citizens?

Would that be my defense I wonder?

I just didn’t know about the violence sweeping our streets. I just didn’t know our system had inequities.

I didn’t know what my habits of consumerism, were going to add up to.

I didn’t know how my coldness, my judgment were going to affect others down the line. I thought I was practicing tough love Jesus. I didn’t know!

Father, forgive them. They don’t know what they are doing.

But then the flip side too. What if they had known? Would that have made a difference? If they had known, isn’t their culpability higher?

Dear God Is there forgiveness for those of us who know?

****
 Like I say. It’s easy for me to go into my head and to miss the power of this moment. Father forgive them. The power of the verb “forgive” I’m in danger of missing the force of forgiveness.

Jesus lived in the same world we do. People then concluded what we sometimes conclude now: that there are some things so bad that they simply cannot be forgiven.

That’s why scholars believe this phrase was eliminated in the manuscripts — 2nd century scribes simply couldn’t stomach the idea that Jesus would want God to forgive his executioners.

Father, forgive them.

This is not just the utterance of a person scourged and humiliated. These are the words of an unqualified and unquestioning love — that needs nothing from the other. Justice will come, restoration will take work — but all that is after — mercy, love, forgiveness is the soil from which everything begins.

But once again I move to my head. What does forgiveness in a vengeful age look like? Brussels, San Bernardino, Paris, Ankara…what does Jesus’ words of forgiveness have to do with bloody body parts at airline counters, concert killings, bombs in neighborhood cafes? Does forgiveness have anything to say in our age of terror?

Two and a half years ago British aid worker, David Hines, was ambushed, kidnapped, held captive and forced to watch others being killed before he himself was beheaded by ISIS. The video was released to the world. David’s family including his brother Mike, living in a small village in Scotland was rocked to the core.

In the following week, a news crew spotted Mike talking with an elderly Muslim neighbor. Swarming like gnats they asked, “Why are you doing this?”

Even the old man inquired, “Why don’t you hate me?”

“My faith has no room for crimes of hate,“ Mike answered.

The brother of a beheaded humanitarian aid worker travels everywhere he can get an audience — mosques, schools, churches — to confess a message of unity, tolerance and understanding. i

Almost exactly one year ago a group of us from LaSalle gathered in a poorly lit hotel meeting room and listened to two fathers — a Israeli who had lost his daughter to an Palestinian bomber and a Palestinian who had lost his son to an Israeli sniper. There is only one power capable of creating a new future, they said: Forgiveness.

***
 Ah. This is it then. I can keep in my head what can only reside in my heart.

Forgiveness for you and me.

Forgiveness is a word that binds me. That pulls me in close — and whatever comfort it offers is at the same time a challenge. Forgive as you have been forgiven. Love as you have been loved. Forgiveness for the seeming unforgiveable.

On the cross hangs a God with one orientation to the world. Suspended between heaven and earth our God shows the only hope for humanity, the only way forward.

Father, forgive them. They don’t know what they are doing.

***

Father, Forgive us.

• by Rev. Laura S. Truax