"Father forgive them" [Palm Sunday reflection]

For Holy Week, the Brothers wanted to offer some reflections from a famous series of reflections called “The Seven Last Words of Christ". They are the seven last statements that Jesus made from the cross, as all the different gospel writers report on. 

I've been asked to give a brief reflection on the first word, the first statement that Jesus says from the cross: “Father, forgive them for they do not know what they are doing.” 

I'd like to start with the end of that statement first, “what they are doing”. There are three groups of people, at least three, that are around the cross and in this time of passion for the Lord.

One is His disciples, and what are they doing? They have abandoned him, they have betrayed him, they have run away in His time of greatest need. Only Mary Jesus' mother, John, and Mary Magdalene actually follow Jesus all the way to the cross, and so in His greatest hour of need, those closest to him, His friends and His disciples, abandoned him. 

Then there's the religious leaders, and what were they doing at this time? They were forcing the hand of Pilot, the Roman Governor, to kill this innocent man, based really on fake charges of sedition against Roman rule. What was really going on was politics, was power, was jealousy, was narrow-mindedness in the things of God and so that's what they were doing. 

Then you have the Roman soldiers who were just carrying out orders. Jesus was a “criminal”, Hewas a religious fanatic. They were simply ordered to kill this man according to the most horrible way imaginable—crucifixion—incredibly painful. But not just painful, incredibly shameful because what the religious leaders and the Romans wanted to do was to utterly obliterate this kind of a person in public so that no one would really carry on their mission any longer or believe in the things that they had said. And so that's what these three groups of people were doing. 

But what was Jesus doing? Jesus was doing the complete opposite. Utterly, utterly remarkable in human history, as He was being tortured and mocked and shamed and abandoned, as He was experiencing the weight of all the history of sin, He was actually praying for the ones who were torturing Him and killing Him and shaming him.... “Father, forgive them for they do not know what they do.” He was actually forgiving them. 

I tried to think of a way that we can relate to this. Imagine somebody comes up to you in surprise and starts assaulting you, starts choking you, and is literally choking you to death. And as that is happening, you have this incredible grace to forgive them.

For most of us, maybe all of us, this is just impossible. All of us in these moments would be trying to fight for our lives, we would be completely focused on ourselves, our own anxiety, our own pain, our own struggle for survival.  We would not be thinking of anyone else besides ourselves and our survival. Yet the Lord is thinking about those who are killing Him and more. 

But there was another group of people there and that's us. We were there spiritually in our sinfulness, we were right there at the foot of the cross.

Unlike those first century people around the cross, we can not claim that we did not know what we were doing because two thousand years after the death and Resurrection in victory and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, in the life of the church, we very much do know who Jesus is. Jesus is the Son of God, we know this. Jesus died for us, we know this. He has given us His Holy Spirit and shared with us His very life, He is with us always. We know all these things and yet we have still offended him. And again, we all make mistakes and the Lord understands that. But we all know too that we don’t just make mistakes, we don't just stumble sometimes and weakness, but we actually choose sins that we know will hurt us, will hurt other people and have deeply offended the Lord and cause the need for His crucifixion. 

Where sin abounds grace abounds all the more and as much as those people right around the Lord who are directly killing Him needed His forgiveness, maybe in some ways all the more, we need the Lord's forgiveness because we continue to sin and we know what we're doing.

But praise be Jesus Christ that He says to us also, “Father, forgive them even if they do know what they're doing.”

The last thing I'd like to mention about this first word is Jesus doesn't say “I forgive them,” but He asked His Father to forgive us. Why would He do that? Because His Father was suffering incredibly in offering His Son this way. It was the Father's heart that was crushed, broken, unimaginable that He would allow His son to die in this way. So Jesus recognizing the pain of His Father, the incredible sacrifice of His Father, He actually asked the Father to forgive us for causing such pain, brokenness, and sorrow to His Father. 

So may this first word bring us soberness about our sin that we know what we do, but yet hope even with this, the Lord from the cross speaks this timeless word that covers all of history and all of our least to our greatest sins, “Father, forgive them.” Amen.

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