“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

 

Those were the first words from Jesus’ lips as He is nailed to the cross. What amazing and wondrous love is this that pardons the persecutor, that forgives the injurer even as the injury is being inflicted, that makes peace with the enemy while he still wields the hammer and the nails? Such a word of pardon the unbelieving world does not know nor speak. Only God’s Suffering Servant-Son can pray such a prayer and speak such a word, for He came to give His life as a ransom for the many.

 

Even as the hammer blows ring out on that hill just outside of Jerusalem’s walls, driving the nails through His sinless flesh, Jesus is heaven-bent on forgiveness. Many times He had taught His disciples to forgive those who sinned against them. And on one such occasion when Peter sought to limit that forgiveness to a “generous” seven times—seven times my brother sins against me; seven times I forgive him—Jesus raised that amount seventyfold: “I do not say to you seven times, but seventy times seven”. Thus, forgiveness is never optional for you or me as Christ’s disciple. 

 

Yet our sinful nature really wants nothing to do with forgiveness. We are quick to condemn, slow to forgive, long on holding grudges. We constantly seek our “pound of flesh,” to even the score of wrongs. We are natural-born bookkeepers of the wrongs committed against us. Our reflexes are not geared to letting go, which is what the word for “forgiveness” literally means in the Greek. Such unforgiveness hardens our hearts. The heart that was softened and opened to God’s forgiveness becomes calloused and calcified in its unforgiveness of others. That’s what makes it so spiritually toxic and debilitating. And it’s why Jesus was so hard-pressed to make forgiveness a key petition in His disciples’ life of prayer: “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”

 

There at the cross that day Jesus’ prayer wasn’t only for those who were hammering the nails into His hands and feet, but for you and me too. Jesus still pleads before His Father’s throne, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing”, holding forth His pierced hands that paid for all your sin. His gracious words are spoken against the background of our cruel hammer blows, mockery, and scorn of others: “Father, forgive them.” Jesus’ pardoning prayer reconciles; it makes whole again; it restores the enemy back to God. What Adam did, this new and greater Adam undoes by 

 

His wounds and prayer. God and man are reconciled, at one, at peace in Jesus. In His body He carries our sin; from His mouth He speaks the pardoning word that delivers our forgiveness. A forgiveness freely given by Jesus, to be freely received through faith, which is also to be freely distributed in His love to others through you. The same forgiveness that flows from the heart of Jesus, now flows through your forgiven heart, which is set free to forgive those who sin against you with the same priestly intercession, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

 

May this season of Lent cause you to ponder anew the tremendous depth of God’s love and forgiveness to you and to others.

Your Servant in Christ,

Pastor J. Kevin Wyckoff