Elvis Presley’s last recorded public words came at the end of a press conference. He was about to leave but the entertainer turned back to the microphone to say one last thing “hope I didn’t bore you folks””.
Gen John Segwick was the highest ranked US solider killed in the American Civil war. He had just finished exhorting his men by saying that the enemy couldn’t hit the broadside of a barn at this range, when he was shot just below his left eye, a perfect shot by a confederate sniper. Convicted killer James French on his way to the electric chair stopped and quipped to the gathered press “here is your headline “French fries”.
Famous last words and leading into Easter this year we are going to be working our way through Jesus last words on the cross. trust me… they are more edifying than the other ones. Jesus words as he is suffering and dying. There are seven sayings. We are calling the series “new life in dying words”. And before we look at Jesus saying “Father forgive them they know not what they do”.
I want to make some introductory remarks about the series.
The first is that we do not have a definitive chronological order of when each saying occurred in the six hours of Jesus crucifixion. None of the saying occur in all four gospels. Modern biographies may have wished to capture all the things that a person said at that significant time in their lives, in the right order, however the gospel writers are using the sources they have, both eye witness and oral history. Matthew Mark and Luke are similar and John seems quite different. For example you can imaging Jesus words to John about caring for his mother Mary being etched in John’s mind and maybe not overheard by many other people. The gospel writers also approach Jesus life with different audiences and issues in mind, the gospels are theological and occasional in nature. But through the four of them we get a pretty full picture of what happened at the cross.
There is a traditional order in which the sayings are placed and we will be following that traditional order as much as possible. Because we are trialing a different way of preaching this year, where one of our preaching team will preach on the same saying at each of our three sites, over a three week period you may get them in a different order. Because we record the message at Central and it is put online as the official version we will be following the traditional order most closely there.
You may well ask why spend so much time seven weeks on Jesus words from the cross.. Surely it is more important to focus on Jesus teaching. Adam Hamilton in his book Last words gives three reasons why these words are significant and important. The first is the sheer effort that Jesus would have gone through to say them. Crucifixion is a slow death by asphyxiation. He would have had to pull himself up on to the nail through his feet to get the breath to speak, so they were important to him. Secondly, Jesus came to reveal God, he was God’s word made flesh, and it is at this time when the word made flesh is experience the worst of our humanity, suffering and death that we want to hear what is said. Finally, the gospel writers thought it was important enough that they recorded them for us.
Hamilton says “each saying tells us something important about Jesus… Together they offer a powerful and moving picture of what was on the heart and mind of Jesus at his death”. Because of that I believe they reveal to us the very heart and nature of God, they speak to the very heart of the gospel, Christ’s good news for the world, and they speak to us about what is at the heart of the human condition.
So with that in mind let’s turn to look at Jesus saying recorded in Luke 23;34 “father forgive them they know not what they do.”
Jesus first saying on the cross is a prayer. It is his response to his rejection by his people, the injustice he has faced the brutality of his treatment the indignities thrown at him on all sides, the being condemned to and in the horrific reality of a slow torturous death. For three years he had spoken and taught the people, now we overhear what is intimate communication within the trinity. At the heart of the Godhead. ‘Father forgive them, they know not what they do”.
I was involved in instigating and running ‘going further’ which was a weeklong national Presbyterian retreat for young adults. One year we had Australian theologian Jason Goroncy as the key note speaker. He was a lecturer at KCML (Knox Centre for Ministry and leadership). Jason spoke about that fact that it was not in creation that we see God’s goodness, not with natural disasters and a like, nor in God sovereignly moving in history, through the rise and fall of empires, that it is ultimately only at the cross that God’s goodness is revealed. I really struggled with that. I often reflect on that and in looking at this first saying of Jesus father forgive I think we start to catch the truth of it. We see the depth of God’s love, his response to the issues of sin and evil in the world Father forgive… that is the heart of God in Christ. The revelation of the goodness of God.
\
Here in this Prayer, we see what William Willmon calls God’s eternal search to love us. We see a God who responses with grace and love towards us. It is only God who can forgive and here in this heart to heart within the trinity, between God the father and god the Son we see that expressed in God’s pre-emptive forgiveness. God is aware that because of the problem of our sin that the starting point for relationship is forgiveness. Normally as humans we would want people to be aware of what they had done wrong, feel contrition and remorse before forgiveness is offered, but the goodness of God is shown here, that even in our ignorance God offers forgiveness first. Even though we had rejected God in Christ God died to restore relationship with us by making forgiveness possible.
‘father forgive them, they know not what they do” is at the heart of the gospel at the heart of what is happening at the cross. We first have to ask who the them are who Jesus is offering forgiveness to. The immediate context is that Jesus has been crucified by Roman soldiers who sit down and gamble for his clothes as he is praying this prayer. Jesus offers forgiveness to them, they know not what they do. You can imagine it is another day in the occupation force for them. The innocence and identity of the person on the cross is of no consequence. WE are still within living memory of the soldiers who used the defence “ I was just following orders” to hide the worst of inhumanity in the holocaust. The them is the crowd who stood and scorned and mocked, ignorant of the truth of their words “he could save others”. The them extends to the Jewish religious leaders, whose motivation was that it is better than one man die for the people than the whole nation perish, injustice clothed in political expediency. Them extends to Pilate who though he found no fault in Jesus gave in to political pressure, to the crowd, ordinary people swept up in the situation who were easily incited to cry crucify him crucify him. And when you hear all that it is easy to see that the tem extends beyond the those who were there to the whole of humanity. A truth that is encapsulated in that old spiritual ‘were you there when they crucified My Lord’. There we are lost in our ignorance, we had all gone our own way, done what we should not do, and left undone the good God called us to do, we are in need of God’s forgiveness. A forgiveness prayed for by Jesus on the cross, and offered through his death.
There are many theories of the atonement, ways of explaining and understanding how Jesus death on the cross made our forgiveness possible. One helpful image comes from Leviticus 16 that we had as our Old Testament reading. Where on Yon Kupper, the Jewish day of atonement, a sacrifice is made for the forgiveness of sins, the priest offering the sacrifice asking God to forgive the people, then a Goat is bought into the tent and the priest lays hands on it, symbolically putting the sins of the people on that Goat, where we get our English word scapegoat from, it is then released into the wilderness and the symbolism is the sins of the people are forgiven and are seen no more. In Jesus prayer Father forgive and his sacrifice we see him doing the role of priest the sacrifice for forgiveness and the scapegoat. He asks God to forgive offers his life for our sin, and taking our sin upon himself to the grave and it is no more.
Jesus prayer father forgive shows us that first and foremost our forgiveness starts with God. It is God’s doing in Christ, it is through nothing that we are or are able to do that can put us right with God. It is God who forgives, who opens the door for us to enter back into relationship. We do not deserve this, we cannot earn this, nor can we do this for ourselves. God has done it for us in Christ, and we must receive the gift of forgiveness he offers, as we acknowledge our need for that forgiveness and acknowledge Jesus as God’s Son.
The third thing that Jesus saying does is speak to the very heart of our human condition. As humans we find it hard to forgive. In praying father forgive Jesus gives us the example of how we to should live. We are supposed to over hear this prayer and it models forgiveness in the most difficult of situation. Jesus could teach on forgiving your brother not seven times but seventy times seven, but here we see it in action.
I remember TV presenter Paul Holmes being speechless on one show, something that did not happen that often, when he was interviewing a Tongan Methodist minister whose two grandchildren had been killed by a young Samoan without a licence who had stolen a car, rounded a corner too fast, mounted the curb and hit the little children pinning them to a power pole. It was at a time of high tension between the two island groups in south Auckland. The Tongan man had said that the families had gathered and reconciliation and the young man was forgiven. It was as if it had never happened. He and his family was going to go to the court and plead on the young man’s behalf. When we hear of such costly forgiveness we glimpse the divine. It is a reflection of ‘father forgive’.
Catholic scholar, James Martin, speaks of a friend Jeanne, whose sister and her small child had been murdered. The killer was in prison, he had expressed no remorse or any inkling that he was aware of the pain and hurt he had inflicted. Jeanne, knew for her to be healed she needed to forgive so she forgave him, and wrote a letter to him telling him that she had done so. The response was a letter in return where the killer expressed his remorse and grief at what he had done and the pain he had caused to the family. Forgiveness opened up the relationship and allowed for change and transformation. Just like the pre-emptive ‘father forgive’.
On a more day to day level, you can’t be married for a long time or be in a long term friendship with out having to forgive. There was that wonderful old cartoon series featuring two naked children, which really shows how old they are and one of them said Love is never having to say I’m sorry. But I’m sorry love is made richer and realer as we ask for and give forgiveness to each other.
It is hard and it sounds very hollow to tell people particularly survivors of such things as abuse that they should forgive, in Jesus however we see that forgiveness freely given and offered. In his death we see the costly price he was willing to pay for our forgiveness. I the Lord ’s Prayer Jesus taught us to pray ‘forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us’. We can think of this as some sort of condition to God’s forgiveness for us, in a reflection on the lord’s prayer by Adrian Plass he speaks of a friend who he was telling about someone who had slighted him in public many times who he would not forgive and was told “so you are going to have problems having your sins forgiven?’. But it’s not that we earn God’s forgiveness by forgiving it is when we see know the greatness of God’s forgiveness and see the example he shows with this saying on the cross that we are willing to give forgiveness. Even if we know they know exactly what they did. Forgiveness opens the possibility for relationship.
Forgiveness is important.
Hudson Smith is a renound scholar on world religions and in a lecture he gave he talked about the most notable features of each religion. With Islam it was Prayer, with the Jewish faith it was family and with the Christian faith it was forgiveness…. In Jesus first say on the cross we see that In Father forgive them they know not what they do, Jesus reveals to us the goodness and grace that is at the heart of God, he shows us the heart of the gospel, that God deals with the problem of sin that separates us from God and from each other, and shows us the way to be reconciled.
No comments:
Post a Comment