Crescent Hill Baptist Church
Crescent Hill Baptist Church
Louisville, Kentucky
The Second Sunday in Lent
March 4, 2007
W. Gregory Pope
Tuning Your Ears At the Cross:
The Seven Last Words of Christ
FORGIVE
“Father, forgive them,
for they know not what they do”
Luke 23:32-34
Flannery O’Connor once remarked: “The man in the violent situation reveals those qualities least dispensable in his personality.”
These last utterances of Jesus in the violent situation of the cross reveal something essential about the character of Jesus, and perhaps none more so than the words we hear today: “Abba, Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
On the cross we see that Jesus died just as he lived. His was a life of indestructible integrity to the very end. He taught as he believed. He lived as he taught. As they drove nails in his hands he surely must have remembered that day he said, “Love your enemies and pray for those who harm you.” And so from the cross he prays, “Abba, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
He taught as he believed. He lived as he taught. He died as he lived. And with those words, “Father, forgive,” he forgives us all. What self-giving grace! What tender, heart-breaking love!
A woman shared her experience of what it was like to grow up on a farm and raise her own food. “The vegetables were fine,” she said. “It was the meat that was difficult.” Once, she said, when it was time to take a certain calf to the slaughterhouse, the baby calf became scared. So the father asked someone else to drive and he rode with the calf in the back of the trailer. By the time they got where they were going the father was in tears, because the calf had licked his arm the whole way.
Jesus dies out of love for the world. And we are all of us responsible. Like soldiers just obeying orders, like politicians trying to keep law and order, like religious leaders defending God, we institutionalize hatred and violence all in the name of truth and justice. Things haven’t changed since that dark day 2000 years ago. We drove Jesus to the slaughterhouse. And he licked our arms the whole way. “Abba, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
Those who were standing around the cross that day must have thought it funny, to hear a condemned man granting absolution. Who was he talking about? Who was he praying for exactly? The Romans? The religious leaders? The disciples who abandoned him? The soldiers with his blood drying under their fingernails? Was he talking about Caiaphas the high priest? Pilate? Judas?
Barbara Brown Taylor answers the question like this: He didn’t have quite enough breath in him to say. The important word was “forgive.” It meant that the violence was to stop with him. It meant that he didn’t want anyone punished for his death, especially those who had no clue what they were doing. While they pronounced him guilty, he maintained their innocence. He knew who was really on trial, and he wanted the case dropped.1
“Abba, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” They knew not what they were doing. They thought Jesus was an enemy of the state, one seeking to overthrow the Roman government. Some say he made himself out to be God, and went around forgiving sins. And only God can forgive sins. So they nailed him to a tree for blasphemy. They didn’t know they were killing the very embodiment of God’s love. They didn’t know the grace those open nail-pierced hands offered. They didn’t recognize divine blood flowing down that tree. They didn’t know what they were doing.
The evil we do, the harm we inflict, is often on a level beyond our knowing, or full knowing. Albert Speer, one of the leaders of the Third Reich, repented of his involvement in the Nazi regime. Part of the working out of his repentance was the writing of the book Inside the Third Reich. In a recent book entitled Albert Speer: His Battle With the Truth, the author says that for all his truth-telling Speer was never able to face the truth about how early he learned about the Final Solution against the Jews. The reason, she theorized, was that he could not admit the truth and live. His psyche could not bear the full truth.
This is true of countless individuals and nations. We cannot bear the full truth about ourselves. So we need this word from the cross more than we know. “God, forgive us not only the evil we know we have done but also the evil we will not let ourselves know.”2
Will Willimon points out how interesting it is the way Jesus unites ignorance and forgiveness! We often condition our forgiveness on the perpetrator knowing and admitting what he did was wrong. First, confession, genuine remorse and repentance, then forgiveness. Right? Not so with Jesus. Nobody at the cross asked to be forgiven. So Jesus begins with forgiveness.3
Because of the way Jesus faced his death, Jesus’ death has clearly had and continues to have remarkable transformative power in human lives all over the world throughout the centuries.
Forgiveness, the forgiveness of God toward us and our forgiveness of others, lies at the very center of our salvation and the saving of the world. Unconditional grace. Forgiveness before repentance. As difficult and as rare as it is in this broken human world, it does happen from time to time.
Not long after the death of Jesus, Stephen, the first Christian martyr, as he is being stoned to death, prayed, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.” He had tuned his ears at the cross of Jesus.
In South Africa the millions of black people who suffered horrific indignities under the awful policy of apartheid have made forgiving their enemies the key to rebuilding their nation. They have put aside their primitive right to revenge and embraced something more costly yet much more hopeful. Over 20,000 cases of torture, assassination, maiming, and other gross human rights violations were heard by South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and some 7000 perpetrators of these abuses appeared to ask forgiveness. Not a single case of private retribution has been recorded. Here is a nation trusting in the spirit of pardon and reconciliation.4
It makes you redefine what a Christian nation would look like if one ever should appear.
How long has it been since you prayed a really good prayer for Osama bin Laden?
There was a photograph taken about ten years ago of a Klan Rally in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I had read about the story a few years ago and found the picture on the internet this week. Some anti-Klan protestors were beating a Klan member wearing a Confederate flag. And in a remarkable act of courage and grace, Keisha Thomas, an eighteen-year-old African-American girl, was shielding the racist from those who were beating him, shielding him with her body. There he was, skin-headed, tattooed with what looked like racist words on his shirt. And there was Keisha, daughter of Christ, laying her body between the one who hates her and those trying to harm him. I wonder, was she praying too, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”?
What wondrous love it is from those that would shield and forgive those who do them harm. It is nothing short of the love of Christ. Rarely do we embody that kind of love. Rarely do we live that close to the heart of God. Rarely do we walk that faithfully the way of the cross.
If we claim to follow Jesus, we must believe that love, not force or revenge, is God’s mightiest weapon.
Carolyn Posey has been leading her Sunday School Class in a Companions in Christ study of “The Way of Forgiveness.” They concluded today. This past Wednesday night Carolyn shared a quote with me from Martin Luther King who said to the white people who would beat blacks, “You cannot make us suffer as much as we can love you.” When she told me that, I said to myself, “That is exactly what Jesus said with his life as he died on the cross: No matter how great the suffering you impose upon me it can never be greater than my love for you.” Grace greater than our sin. Marvelous, infinite, matchless grace.
Last fall we witnessed such powerful grace in the forgiveness of the Amish parents whose five school age girls were killed by a gunman as they sat in their classroom. The blood was barely dry on the floor of the West Nickel Mines School when those Amish parents sent words of forgiveness to the family of the one who had slain their children.
And it was clear their forgiveness was more than words. Fresh from the funerals where they buried their own children, grieving Amish families attended the burial of the 32-year-old non-Amish killer. Of the 75 in attendance, at least half were Amish. In addition to their graveside presence, the Amish helped to establish a fund for the assassin’s widow and three children. When asked why, one Amish midwife said, “It’s what Jesus would have us do.”
The Amish share our Anabaptists roots and take the life and teachings of Jesus very seriously, more seriously than many of us do. They have tuned their ears well at the cross of the suffering Jesus who while dying in agony offered a prayer of forgiveness for his killers.5
And then from a Jew almost 2000 years after Jesus who scribbled a prayer on a scrap piece of paper, someone most likely killed in the German death camp at Buchenwald. It went like this:
O Lord, when I shall come with glory in your kingdom, do not remember only the men of good will, remember also the men of evil. May they be remembered not only for their acts of cruelty in this camp, the evil they have done to us prisoners, but balance against their cruelty the fruits we have reaped under the stress and in the pain: the comradeship, the courage, the greatness of heart, the humility and patience which have been born in us and become part of our lives, because we have suffered at their hand . . . May the memory of us not be a nightmare to them when they stand in judgment. May all that we have suffered be acceptable to you as a ransom for them.
Sounds like the words of another Jew 2000 years earlier, hanging from a cross, praying, “Abba, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
This is the kind of love that is saving the world. Not military might. Not economic advantage. Not political power. But the self-giving love of the crucified Christ we are called to embody - that is what’s saving the world. Maybe one day we’ll learn before it’s too late.
How do we love and forgive like that? We can only love and forgive like that as Christ loves and forgives through us. We give ourselves to the way of Jesus and to the love of God. And we spend periods of time in a wilderness of sorts, like this season of Lent, tuning the ears of our hearts to the cross, listening to the words of the most gracious man who ever lived, as he teaches us how to live and how to die - without revenge, without hatred, but with a heart shaped by the Holy Spirit through scripture and daily prayer, through the confession of our own sin and our experience of God’s forgiveness.
It all begins with God’s love for us. We gaze upon the cross, our eyes fixed on the dying One, the Lord of life, and we listen as he offers words of forgiving grace. Here, through the life-giving cross and the table of grace, we can come home, home to the truth about ourselves and what we have done, home to the truth about what God has done to bridge the great divide. And we can know, or begin to know, why that awful, awe-filled Friday is called good. Come home to grace. Receive the gift of forgiveness and then like Jesus offer it to the world. Amen.
______________
1. Barbara Brown Taylor, Home By Another Way, Cowley, 1999, 86-89
2. I am indebted to H. Stephen Shoemaker for the Albert Speer reference and the prayer from a sermon preached at Myers Park Baptist Church, Charlotte, North Carolina
3. William Willimon, Thank God It’s Friday, Abingdon, 2006, 5-6, 10
4. Peter Storey, Listening at Golgatha, Upper Room Books, 2004, 22-23
5. Donald Kraybill, “Forgiveness Clause: The Amish Way,” The Christian Century, October 31, 2006
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CRESCENT HILL BAPTIST CHURCH
2800 Frankfort Avenue
Louisville, Kentucky 40206
(502) 896-4425
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