Unknowing

Luke 23:32-34

September 13, 2020 • Mount Pleasant UMC

To prepare for this message, I went to my bookshelf, as I usually do, and scanned through the titles there to see if there might be anything helpful, books I should consult as we look at this prayer of forgiveness. I thought that surely, since forgiveness is so important in Christian theology, there would be several books I’ve read on forgiveness. Maybe way too many to look at this week, but I could at least skim through the best of the best. I found exactly two. Two books on forgiveness in my library—one by a pastor and one by a Christian musician. I honestly was surprised, but I bet your bookshelf isn’t much different. For all our talk about forgiveness and all our focus on how important it is—and how much we like to be forgiven—we honestly don’t talk or think about it that much. We have books on living the successful Christian life (whatever that is), on how to be a CEO like Jesus was (or was he?), how to diet like Daniel did (or did he?), and even on things like grief and loss. But forgiveness—that’s too difficult a topic for us to invest much time in. It seems we assume we are forgiven and don’t think much about offering it to others.

And yet, when Jesus was nearing the end of his life, forgiveness was one of the main things on his mind. We know this because it was something he prayed about as he was crucified. This morning, we’re returning to our series on “The Lord’s Prayers,” looking at those times in the Gospels when we get to listen in on Jesus’ prayer life. Two weeks ago, we sat with Jesus in Gethsemane and listened to him pray a difficult prayer, asking to be able to avoid the cross but at the same time, surrendering himself to the will of his heavenly Father. Since that prayer, Jesus has been arrested, put through a mock trial, dragged before the Roman governor, beaten within an inch of his life, and made to carry the instrument of his death through the streets of Jerusalem to the place of execution. Because of the massive blood loss, Jesus stumbled on the way to Calvary and the Roman soldiers made Simon from Cyrene carry the cross in his place. But what must be done here on the top of Skull Hill can’t be done by anyone other than Jesus himself. And so his surrender to the will of his Father continues.

There are very few details in the Gospels as to how crucifixion worked; the reason, most people think, is that pretty much everyone in the first century world already knew what a crucifixion was like. They had either seen one or knew someone who had seen one. It was one of the most horrific ways to die ever invented, and while the Romans hadn’t come up with crucifixion, they had perfected it. They were masters of their craft. So Jesus would have been beaten nearly to death so that his back was raw and bloody—painful to say the least. Then he would have carried the cross piece—not the whole cross like you usually see in the movies and the paintings—just the horizontal piece. The vertical pieces were left at the execution site. But just the crossbeam itself would have weighed over a hundred pounds. And it was a slight uphill climb. Already beaten, already suffering from blood loss, it’s no wonder Jesus collapsed under the weight. When they arrived at “the place of the Skull” (23:33), Jesus and the two other men with him are crucified. As a side note, let me say that while Luke calls these two other men “criminals,” Mark and Matthew call them “revolutionaries.” They were probably terrorists or insurrectionists, since crucifixion was not a punishment for petty theft (Bock, IVPNTC: Luke, pg. 373). You had to be pretty bad, maybe violent, to be sentenced to crucifixion.

So these three men would have had their arms were stretched out on the crossbeam, probably as far as they could be stretched, and they would have been pinned with spikes through the wrists. Then their feet were attached with spikes on the vertical beam and the whole thing was then lifted up and dropped into a hole. Crucifixion was death by suffocation and pain. The nails didn’t kill the victim; the nails held them in place so that it was difficult for them to move around to be able to breathe or find relief. It was torture. The word “excruciating” literally means “out of the cross.” It’s perhaps the worst pain imaginable. Honestly, I don’t know if we can even imagine the pain Jesus went through at Calvary.

The timing and the location were part of the punishment, by the way. It wasn’t just that they chose a random day and a random place. No, the day was chosen because it was the time of the Passover festival; you remember I said a couple of weeks ago that this was the time when Jerusalem’s population swelled by maybe as much as three times. It was part of Rome’s strategy to perform executions at times “when the crowds were larger, [because it] was thought to send a wider warning against defying Roman power” (Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible, pg. 1797). There’s a implied message here on Calvary: cross us and you might end up just like these men. (Doing it at Passover also irked the religious leaders, which Rome loved to do.) And, if you’re going to get your message out, you had to do these things where people could see them. Calvary, Skull Hill, was a public place. I was to show you one possible site for Calvary that’s in the Holy Land today; it’s not the one with the weight of history behind it. That hill has been covered up by the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. This one is at the Garden Tomb, and this picture is from 1995, my first trip to Israel, and you can pretty clearly see the outline of the skull in the side of the hill. But what I really want you to notice are the busses parked below. Skull Hill is a public bus stop, still today. (In fact, the vibrations from the busses have damaged the hill so that, when I was last there in 2017, you can’t really make out the skull shape anymore.) Can you imagine getting on the bus and the driver asks where you’re going and you say, “Calvary. Skull Hill”? But the point is this: the original Calvary was just like this, a public place where a lot of people would pass by. They would see what was happening on the hill and they would be reminded not to cross Rome. Don’t make Rome mad or this could be you.

If they lingered as they passed by, though, they might have also heard words coming from the men on the crosses. There were two things you usually expected to hear from crucified men (and they were not mutually exclusive). One option was that the condemned man, with nothing left to lose, might confess his sins. He might actually admit to a crime he had denied up to this point. Another option was to curse and yell insults at the people who had crucified you; we know from a bit later in this text that at least one of the criminals did this. He even began insulting Jesus—because Jesus was not responding in either of the “acceptable” two ways. Rather than confessing or insulting, Jesus was praying. And, more than that, he was praying for those who were killing him: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” (23:34). How about this: Jesus had no sins to confess, so he is confessing the sins of his murderers (CBSB 1797; cf. Wright, Luke for Everyone, pg. 284)!

We struggle with Jesus’ prayer here—or, at least I struggle with Jesus’ prayer here. Maybe you don’t. Maybe you have forgiveness all figured out and if so, I want you to teach me. Because the honest truth is this: forgiveness is hard and it’s not something most of us practice very often or very well. I think my struggle comes because I think forgiveness is about me. I tend to believe it’s about me summoning up enough courage or energy or strength or whatever to forgive the person who has hurt me. But that’s not what Jesus does here. Jesus doesn’t turn to the soldiers and say, “I forgive you.” Jesus prays. Jesus talks to the Father about the soldiers, not the other way around. In other words, forgiveness begins with God, not with me. Forgiveness means we ask God first because ultimately any sin or offense or hurt is against God more than it’s against me or you. I think of King David, back in the Old Testament, when he slept with Bethsheba, then had her husband killed when they found out she was pregnant. After he married her, they thought no one would ever find out. But God knew. And when God sent a preacher to straighten David out, David did not go to Bathsheba or the people of Israel. He didn’t issue a press release or write a book about his experiences. He went straight to God: “Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love…Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight…” (Psalm 51:1, 4). Well, wait a minute, we want to say. David sinned plenty against Uriah, and Bethsheba for that matter. And it’s not that that’s unimportant; it’s just that every sin is ultimately against God, the one who made David and Uriah and Bathsheba and the rest of us. Forgiveness begins with God; praying with Jesus causes us to start there.

You see, when we harbor unforgiveness in our hearts, it sets us apart from God. Of all the things he could have emphasized in his model prayer for us, Jesus chooses forgiveness. We’ll pray these words in a few minutes: “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us” (Matthew 6:12). And then, in case we missed it, he comes back to the topic after he gives us the prayer. I’ve said it before, but these are still words I wish Jesus hadn’t said: “If you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins” (Matthew 6:14-15). Forgiveness is so important because “unforgiveness creates a barrier not only in our relationship with other people but in our relationship with God” (Walt, Right Here Right Now, Apple Books pg. 269). Forgiveness begins with God; without his work, we can’t hope to ever really forgive.

So Jesus prays: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” (23:34). He’s talking to God and, here’s the other side of that, he’s not talking to the soldiers, to the ones who are crucifying him. We have no idea if they heard him pray this prayer. I suppose it’s possible that, at some point in the coming years, one or more of them read Luke’s Gospel and learned of the prayer. Can you imagine what that would do to your heart? “I nailed him to the cross, I put him there, and he prayed that I would be forgiven?” But we don’t know if that happened or not, and the point is this: it’s not important if the other person knows that we forgave them because, again, forgiveness is first and foremost about God and secondly it’s about healing our own soul. Here’s what we often get wrong: we think forgiveness is not complete unless we go to the person and say, “I have forgiven you.” We get forgiveness confused with reconciliation; they are two different things. Both are important, maybe even equally so, but different nevertheless. Generally, forgiveness precedes reconciliation; it may even be the first step toward reconciliation. But forgiveness requires us to deal with God first before we deal with other person. Forgiveness conditions our hearts to be able to reconcile with the other person. But let me also say reconciliation is not required for forgiveness to somehow be “complete.” There are times where it would not be safe to try to make things “right” with the other person. There are instances of abuse or other sorts of danger where trying to reconcile is not the healthy option. We need wise advisors, faithful friends and perhaps even a professional counselor to help us navigate those waters.

So forgiveness is not the same as reconciliation, and it’s also not about forgetting. Let’s remove that ridiculous phrase (“forgive and forget”) from our vocabulary. We can’t do that; Scripture says God can, but it does not say we’re expected to. God chooses not to remember, but it’s hard for us to forget, and that’s not the goal anyway. Forgiveness is not about forgetting what happened to us; it is about making “the willful decision to not retaliate against the offender” (Walt 270). Lewis Smedes, who has written a lot about this, puts it this way: “Forgiving does not erase the bitter past. A healed memory is not a deleted memory. Instead, forgiving what we cannot forget creates a new way to remember. We change the memory of our past into a hope for our future” (qtd. in West, Forgiveness, pg. 133). We make a willful decision to remember differently and not to retaliate, as much as we might want to, and even as much as we might think it is justified. And that makes me wonder what power practicing forgiveness might have in our current national discussion about race and racial injustice. I might not be listening to all the right sources, but I hear a lot of talk around the word “reconciliation,” especially in Christian circles, and I wonder if we’re not trying to start at the end of the process. Reconciliation, I think, will take a lot longer, and it’s not going to happen until we truly learn to forgive each other, face to face. There is harm and injustice aplenty, but what if we started on level ground by agreeing not to retaliate against each other? I believe this was the particular genius of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Really, what he did was not so amazing or inventive. It was simply done in the spirit of Jesus. Don’t resist. Don’t strike back. Respond peacefully—and forgive. There were days even King didn’t want to continue down that path, but every fiber of his being knew it was the only way. Reconciliation wasn’t possible until forgiveness had taken place. Nelson Mandela did the same thing in South Africa. When apartheid ended and every so-called “sensible” person said there would be a revolution, Mandela instead founded the Truth and Reconciliation Commission so that the stories could be told and the truth could win out. They didn’t forget all the horrors of apartheid, but they forgave. Do we have the will to do so? When we hold onto unforgiveness, it’s like drinking poison and expecting it to kill the other person. It won’t kill them; it will kill you. I don’t know; I don’t have any magical answers to our current struggles and challenges. But I am convinced to the core of my being that the answer, the real transforming answer, is not going to be found in a lab or at a negotiating table or at a ballot box. As Chuck Colson once said, “Salvation is not going to come on Air Force One” because, in the end, the heart of the matter is a matter of the heart.

On May 11, 2002, a drunk driver named Eric ran into and killed Meagan and her friend Lisa, and the pain and loss felt by all families was indescribable. Meagan’s mother, Renee, said she entered a dark place that was very difficult to escape from. She wanted to wake up from the nightmare, go back in time and fix it all, but she knew she couldn’t. Renee says she was full to overflowing with anger, with rage. During the trial, Eric (at the advice of his lawyers) showed little remorse for his actions, until the last day, the day of the sentencing. Against the instruction of his legal counsel, Eric stood and looked at the families, and he burst into tears. Standing in a prison jumpsuit and handcuffs, he said, “I would give my own life if it would bring back these girls, but it won’t…and I’m so sorry.” Something broke within Renee, and she says that is the moment when healing began in her life, when forgiveness took place. In that moment, God showed Renee that forgiving Eric was the best way to honor Meagan and ensure that her legacy would live on. Their family and Lisa’s family even came together to ask for Eric’s prison sentence to be reduced, a request the judge granted. Renee says this: “Today Eric is a free man. But he’s not the only one who is free. I’ve been set free from the burden I carried for so long, the burden of bitterness” (West 3-5; 168-172).

So Jesus prays, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” (23:34). Do you think the Father answered that prayer? We’re not told, but I do believe he did. And why do I believe that? Because I know he answered that prayer for you and me. It wasn’t just the soldiers who put Jesus on the cross. Certainly it was their hammers that were physically nailing Jesus to the wooden beams, but that wasn’t really why he went to the cross. Jesus gave his life because of love. He gave his life because he knew that you and I and everyone else in the world would sin, would mess up, would distance ourselves from God (and not in a socially distant way—a spiritually distant way). So Jesus gives his life as a sacrifice that, in some way that is hard for us to grasp completely, enables our sin to be forgiven. In one way, not only was Jesus praying in that moment for the soldiers, I believe he was also praying for you and for me and for everyone yet to come. “Father, forgive him, for Dennis does not know what he is doing.” Try putting your name in there: “Father, forgive _______, for _______ does not know what they are doing.” Father, forgive us, for so very often we do not know what we are doing.

But he gave us a reminder, a practice we can come back to again and again, to remember what he did in order to forgive us. In fact, Jesus said “as often as you do this” (cf. 1 Corinthians 11:25), which I think means we’re supposed to do it often. When I was growing up, we did it about four times a year; I’m thankful for the opportunity these days to take part in this reminder at least once a month. We call it holy communion—the bread, his body; the cup, his blood. Bread and cup that somehow allows us to commune with the one who gave everything he had for our forgiveness. And if he is willing to do that to make a way for us to be forgiven, how can we not do whatever it takes to forgive those who have hurt us, even if they don’t know what they are doing? As we come to the table this morning, let’s come as people who are forgiven and forgiving. Let us come thankful that we can be both. Will you pray with me as we prepare our hearts for holy communion?