Jesus’ first word on the cross was a word of “prayer”. It was a prayer for the pardon of the ones who hated and persecuted Him. During His three and half years of preaching, Jesus taught men to love their enemies. He practiced what He preached. All His life He revealed the divine nature of the Father Himself and showed all His life long that the Father was in Him.
This prayer was not merely for His Enemies. But it was a prayer for the undeserving souls like you and me. The people who persecuted Jesus did not deserve this prayer. Likewise, we, the undeserving ones are not worthy of His forgiveness or mercy. It’s His amazing grace that has saved our wretched lives and it still does. “Father, forgive them”. What does this saying remind us? It reminds us of the undeserving forgiveness we receive each day and of God’s unfailing love.
“If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness”
1 John 1:9
Jesus’ throne of mercy is always
open for you. He understands your weaknesses. He will understand it all, if we
are ready to come to hide our guilty head in His bosom. Never be putting limits
to His divine mercy. There is no bigger sin that He cannot forgive.
“Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need”
Hebrews 4:16
We have been offered grace and peace through His word and act of forgiveness. We have been redeemed by His life-blood poured out and made partakers in Christ Himself. Now what are we supposed to do? Remain in Christ. Make every effort to grow in Faith as we are partakers of His divine nature.
“For this very reason, make every effort to add to your faith goodness; and to goodness, knowledge; and to knowledge, self-control; and to self-control, perseverance; and to perseverance, godliness; and to godliness, mutual affection; and to mutual affection, love”
2 Peter 1:5-7
But if we give no thought to the way of life we live, we neglect the word of forgiveness. Even today the son of God intercedes on your behalf. Examine where you are in Christ today. Do what you ought to do to get back in track with Jesus. He has given you Himself as a sacrifice. He died in your place.
-Blessed Christian.
At the Last Supper and on the way to the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus discoursed long and lovingly with His Apostles. During His Sacred Passion, however, He spoke rarely and briefly. Indeed, it may well be that the silences of Jesus during His Passion were as eloquent and impressive as His words. During the three hours that He was nailed to the cross, Jesus interrupted long periods of silence by speaking seven times.
These utterances are known as His Seven Last Words. We are fortunate that there were those beneath the cross who could recall and record for posterity these last words of Jesus, as they were a fitting climax to His public ministry.
The First Word
The first word of Jesus from the cross was almost certainly: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” St. Luke alone records it (23:34). There can be no doubt that this passage is authentic. It is verified not only by a sound manuscript tradition but also by the example of many early martyrs who imitated Christ’s forgiveness of His enemies.
It is difficult to determine the exact time at which Christ’s first word from the cross was spoken. Some think it was while the soldiers were nailing Him to the cross. One reason for this is that St. Luke relates the incident immediately after stating that they crucified Christ.
Another is that our Lord uses the present tense — “what they are doing” — in His prayer. Neither reason is conclusive.
The Evangelists are notably indifferent to exact chronological order. And it is unlikely that Christ referred to the soldiers nailing Him to the cross. It was too obvious that they did not know what they were doing. They were carrying out orders; they were fulfilling a duty imposed on them by proper authority. As pagans or Samaritans, it is unlikely that they had come in contact with Christ before.
Different Words
We think that this first of the Seven Last Words was spoken just after Jesus had been raised on the cross and as He looked out over that sea of hostile faces turned up at Him. Christ’s words must have had an electrifying effect. These people had seen many criminals crucified. They had seen them resist their executioners and attempt to escape. They had heard them howl and scream with pain. They had listened to them curse their tormentors and snarl at them in impotent rage as they spat at them.
What a different scene met their eyes on Calvary! Throughout His sufferings, Jesus maintained a majestic calm. On the way to Calvary, He had forgotten His own sufferings to warn the daughters of Jerusalem of the evils that would befall their city. On the cross, He raised his eyes to heaven and in a firm and self-assured tone addressed God as “Father.” He did not pray for Himself; He did not ask to be taken from the cross or to be delivered from His sufferings. He prayed for those who had brought Him to this pass. He prayed to God, His Father, that they should be forgiven, and He even added an excuse for them: “They do not know what they are doing.”
Jesus had taught forgiveness. “Love your enemies,” He had said. “Do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who persecute and calumniate you” (Matt. 5:44). On Calvary, He added to His verbal teaching the power of His example.
Who Did He Pray For?
For whom did Jesus pray? He prayed for those who were responsible for His condemnation and crucifixion. Surely in the front rank of these were the leaders of the Jews — the chief priests, Scribes, and ancients. It was their duty to recognize Christ’s claim to be the Messiah and Son of God, to examine His credentials, and to accept and proclaim Him as such. Yet they opposed Jesus throughout His public ministry. On many occasions they had plotted to put Him to death. They had finally laid hands on Him, condemned Him before their own tribunal, and brought about His execution by threatening the Roman procurator with a denunciation to the emperor.
They had acted out of hatred and envy and malice. They were guilty and needed forgiveness. Yet even for them Christ could plead ignorance. It was a culpable ignorance; they could and should have known better. But at least they did not have a full and immediate awareness of the enormity of what they were doing. Speaking of the crucifixion of Christ to the Jews in the Temple area but a short time later, St. Peter said: “I know that you acted in ignorance, as did also your rulers” (Acts 3:17; cf. Acts 13:27; 1 Cor. 2:8).
To a lesser extent and in varying degrees, the Jewish people who had joined their leaders in persecuting Christ shared their guilt. Many had heard Christ’s teachings and had witnessed His miracles. Some may even have been cured by Him. They permitted themselves to be led astray to such an extent that they had helped put pressure on Pilate to secure Christ’s condemnation.
Christ had said earlier: “If I had not come and spoken to them, they would have no sin. But now they have no excuse for their sin. . . . If I had not done among them works such as no one else has done, they would have no sin” (John 15:22, 24). Leaders and led alike shared in the sin, but for the led particularly, ignorance, though culpable, was an extenuating circumstance, and on the cross Christ recalled it in His prayer to the Father for forgiveness of His enemies.
Christ’s prayer must have included Pontius Pilate, too, as he had played an unjust part in Christ’s condemnation and execution. On three separate occasions he declared Christ innocent, but when faced with the threat of denunciation to the emperor, he capitulated and condemned Him to death. Pilate acted unjustly and against his conscience. Nevertheless, Christ’s plea of ignorance would apply to him too, as he did not recognize Jesus as the Messiah and the Son of God. He quite evidently admired Jesus and respected Him; he even had a vague superstitious fear, from his wife’s dream and from references to Christ’s claim to be the Son of God. We can be sure, however, that he did not appreciate the awful implications of the unjust sentence he passed on our Lord.
For All Sinners
Jesus was God as well as man. On the cross, He was
offering a sacrifice for the sins of mankind. In a very definite sense all sinners
had, therefore, a part in nailing Jesus to the cross. It is not too much, then,
to say that Jesus’ prayer extended to all sinners. And of sinners, too, it can
be said that “they do not know what they are doing,” because they do not have a
full realization of the malice of sin. If they did, they would not sin.
Jesus’ prayer took effect almost immediately.
It must have made a tremendous impression on all people of goodwill who heard it. A short time later, one of the robbers crucified alongside Him confessed belief in Him. At the moment of Christ’s death, others were converted, partly, no doubt, because of the marvels that occurred at that time. The centurion in charge of the crucifixion declared Jesus to be a just man. The people who had come out of curiosity began to beat their breasts as a sign of repentance (Luke 23:48). Later, large numbers of the people became Christians (Acts 2:41; 4:4), among them many priests (Acts 6:7) and Pharisees (Acts 15:5).
✠
This article is adapted from a chapter in Fr. Gorman’s The Last Hours of Jesus: From Gethsemane to Golgotha. It is available from Sophia Institute Press.
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In the so-called first word from the cross Jesus says:
Father forgive them, for they don’t know what they’re doing.
While many early manuscripts omit this quote, Jesus’ words parallel Stephen’s in Acts 7:60 when the latter was also executed. Do you hear how radical these words are? In the time between an evening meal and his crucifixion Jesus had suffered much at the hands of his oppressors. Betrayed by a kiss of a well-loved disciple he was brought before the Sanhedrin and beaten. Dragged before Pilate and Herod, mocked and flogged, he was sentenced by the will of the crowd to death on a cross. The one man who supposedly had the power of life or death over him, washed his hands of the affair. The flogging had left his flesh hanging in ribbons; he collapsed under the weight of his own cross. Now naked, nailed and raised up on a cross as a crowd jeers, he offers his first word:
Forgiveness.
Forgiveness? This strains credulity! But Jesus wasn’t an ordinary sufferer of injustice. He was the Incarnate God and this cross, a symbol of shame and Roman power would be his instrument of salvation and reconciliation. More than forgiveness being just his first expression from the cross, it was Divine forgiveness that brought him to the cross and nailed him there. Costly as it was, the forgiveness of God is Christ on his cross.
But who is Jesus forgiving by these words? All those whose part in this drama nailed him there:
- the Jews put him there. Centuries of antisemitism obscure the fact that the authors of the New Testament all would self describe themselves as Jews and saw continuity between Israel’s Messianic hope and the cross of Christ. But the Jewish leaders and the Jewish people who had gathered in Jerusalem that Passover played their part in Jesus’ death. It was the Jewish leaders who had Jesus arrested in the garden, accusing him of blasphemy and turning him over to Rome to be executed. It was the crowds who shouted, “Crucify him!” sending Jesus to his death. Without Jesus’ arrest and the crowds sealing his fate, Jesus would not have died. Not like this.
But there is no excuse for centuries of injustice towards the Jews for crucifying Jesus (i.e. the pattern of antisemitic rage in the wake of European ‘passion plays’). The first word from Jesus for his people is forgiveness. Father forgive them for they do not know what they are doing. In Jesus’ final moments his thoughts were not of vengeance or righting injustice. But with arms extended in love, nailed to a cross, he spoke only of forgiveness.
- Pilate put him there. A governor whose cruelty was well known, sometimes gets a free pass from Christians for his part in Jesus’s death. After all, wasn’t he only guilty of pressure from the crowd? Is not his only crime cowardice in condemning an innocent man? He washed his hands, but that didn’t make them clean. When a representative of the State absolves himself, may the reader be suspicious! If Jesus was ‘King of the Jews’ than Caesar was not. When the crowds shout “We have no King but Caesar! (John 19:15)” Pilate is forced to choose between his fidelity to justice and good order and his faithfulness to his emperor. He allied himself with the power of Rome. Of course Jesus himself didn’t put the brunt of the injustice on Pilate, but his captors, “The one who has handed me over too you is guilty of the greater sin(John 19:11b).” But the crucifixion could not have happened without the willing complicty of Pilate in ordering Jesus’ execution.
As he hung on the cross, bearing the punishment of failed revolutionaries and subversives, Jesus forgave. Forgive them Father for they do not know what they are doing. Among those forgiven for their part was Pilate, a Roman governor too invested in the Roman power structure to display much character or courage in the face of a crowd.
- The Romans did it. Those who carried out Pilate’s charge, did it with zeal and enthusiasm. It was they that dressed him in purple, beat and whipped him, divided his clothes, placed a crown of thorns on his head and subjected him to cruelty and taunts even as they devised his bitter end. Some nameless pagan soldier took the hand of God and nailed to a tree, killing an innocent man who had poured out his life in love for his people. Jesus had healed, set people free from demonic oppression, taught the way of love and virtue and this is where it got him.
For these, for all of these: Forgive them Father for they do not know what they are doing.
- We did it. You did it. I did it. Jesus died on the cross so that he may save us from ourselves, our sin, our sad attempts to be our own God. Each of us have gone our own way, rejecting God and his offer of life and freedom. We were dead in our trespasses and sins. God in his mercy, because of his great love saved us through Christ and his cross. You may not have arrested Jesus, pronounced sentence and driven the nails, but Jesus died because of you. He died for you. In a costly display of divine Love he showed us in a visceral way what forgiveness looks like. Father Forgive them for they know not what they do.
As we behold the crucified Christ we see God’s love and mercy poured out for us. If the son has set us free we are free indeed. Fully forgiven living in him!
matichuk
I am a pastor, husband, father, instigator, pray-er, hoper, writer, trouble-maker, peacemaker, and friend. Who are you?
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“Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.”
-Luke 23:34
Father, forgive them….
Forgive—really? This is Jesus’ first word? I could think of many other words that he might and should have uttered rather than this. Yet, his first word is so telling and is so who he is. Jesus made numerous references to forgiveness in his ministry, including his word to Peter that one should forgive 70 times 70. And throughout Jesus’ ministry, aims to stay below the radar, not calling attention to himself and never asking for anything for himself. So, these words on the cross, though they certainly wouldn’t be mine, show Jesus at his truest self…forgiving those who might not even acknowledge that they have done something wrong.
Who are the others that he puts first? Them who? The crowd that shouted “Crucify him”? The soldiers who cast lots for his clothing? Pilate, the one who crucified Jesus? The ones who are next to him on the cross? Could it be all of them? Might it be us?
Many throughout history surely think so. Martin Luther describes our guilt and participation in the crucifixion by saying that “We carry the very nails in our pockets.” Rembrandt being so moved by his role in the crucifixion painted his own face as the one who crucified Jesus.
I love the old spiritual, “Were You There?” It is a song that I look forward to singing every Good Friday, but it isn’t one that tells much about the story. It is, however, a song that gets you feeling and experiencing the story of the crucifixion. It is a song that acknowledges that while we were not there in crowd watching the details unfold, we were in fact there, What happened on the cross that day, happened because us and for each us.
Were you there when they crucified my Lord?
Were you there when they crucified my Lord?
Oh, sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble.
Were you there when they crucified my Lord?
Were you there when they nailed him to the tree?
Were you there when they nailed him to the tree?
Oh, sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble.
Were you there when they nailed him to the tree?
Were you there when they laid him in the tomb?
Were you there when they laid him in the tomb?
Oh, sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble.
Were you there when they laid him in the tomb?
Were you there when God raised him from the tomb?
Were you there when God raised him from the tomb?
Oh, sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble.
Were you there when God raised him from the tomb?
It does make me tremble to think that Jesus put me first that he used the first of his words to ask God to forgive us. Even from there on the cross, he hadn’t lost hope in humanity.
What in these first words makes you tremble?
“Forgiveness and reconciliation are not cheap, they are costly. Forgiveness is not to condone or minimize the awfulness of an atrocity or wrong. It is to recognize its ghastliness but to choose to acknowledge the essential humanity of the perpetrator and to give that perpetrator the possibility of making a new beginning. Forgiveness is an act of much hope and not despair. It is to hope in the essential goodness of people and to have faith in their potential to change. It is to bet on that possibility. Forgiveness, is not opposed to justice, especially if it is not punitive justice, but restorative justice, justice that does not seek primarily to punish the perpetrator, to hit out, but looks to heal a breach, to restore a social equilibrium that the atrocity or misdeed has disturbed. Ultimately there is no future without forgiveness.” – Desmond Tutu
Published by revjenn
A wife, mother, and Presbyterian pastor.
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Published
April 17, 2011April 18, 2011
“FATHER, FORGIVE THEM FOR THEY DON’T KNOW WHAT THEY’RE DOING”
Luke 23:34
While Jesus was crucified on the cross, between two criminals, he saw different people. He sees those who mocked, tortured, scourged, and those who nailed him on the cross. He then realized that all of these are all out of envy that the high priests put Jesus on his hands. But as we can notice, was Jesus thinking about the Apostles who deserted him? Was he also thinking of Peter who denied him 3 times? and those people who praised him as he enter Jerusalem and now demanded for his crucifixion?
Forgiveness? Really? This is the first word that came out of Jesus’ mouth? But let’s realize that this is the “point of the cross”, the salvation from our sins. Jesus died so that we might be forgiven for our sins and that we might be reconciled to God for eternity.
But the forgiveness that was given from God through Christ Jesus is not just for those who “don’t know what they’re doing”, it is also offered to those who “know that they’re doing wrong”. It’s God’s mercy! After all, God still chooses to forget our sins, not because we can make excuses or try hard to make up, but because we have a God of amazing grace and His mercies that are new every morning.
As we meditate on the word, “Father, forgive them,” may we understand that the forgiveness is also for us through Christ. In 1 John 1:9, “But if we confess our sins to him, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all wickedness”. Jesus died on the Cross for us, to cleanse us from every single wickedness. We are forgiven, and now we are united with the Father as his beloved children. All of our concerns and our needs will be provided upon his throne of grace. We are assured that God “has removed our sins as far from us as the east is from the west”.
Until His last hour on earth, He still preaches forgiveness. How?
- Lord’s prayer: “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us” (Matthew 6:12)
- When Peter asked Jesus, “How many times should we forgive someone?” then Jesus answered “70 times 7” (Matthew 18:21-22)
- The sinful woman who anointed him in the home of Simon the Pharisee (Luke 7:37-48)
- The adulteress caught in the act and about to be stoned (John 8:1-11) and a lot more stories about forgiveness.
During the Last Supper, Jesus tells his disciples to drink of the cup: “Drink of it, all of you; for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the “forgiveness of sins” (Matthew 26:27-28). And His first act is to commission his disciples to forgive: “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” (John 20:22-23)
I would like to leave these questions to you as we continue meditate today:
- Do you fully believe that you are forgiven from your sins?
- Do you confess your sins before God to acquire freedom of forgiveness?
- Do you want to experience the forgiveness of God in you today?
*I rendered this message as 1st Part (of 7 Parts) during the commemoration of the “Seven Last Words of Jesus Christ on the Cross” at Choong Shin Morning Star United Methodist Church, Lawy, Capas, Tarlac, Philippines. March 30, 2018 at 8:00am.
**Photo credits to unsplash.com