The Last Words of Christ Life Words for the Church #1 Forgive them, Father Luke 23: 26-34 During the Lent and Easter, I want to focus these sermons on the gospel passages known as the seven last words of Christ. They are the seven phrases spoken by Jesus as he hung dying on Calvary s cross, as recorded in Mark, Luke and John s gospels. In exploring these potent messages of grace, let me suggest they are much more than famous last words. They are equally life words from our Lord for his church. They are words of command and truth for his followers. Gathered with his disciples the night of his arrest, Jesus girded himself with a towel and took the lowest, most abjectly humble role as a hireling, and washed the feet of his disciples. Afterwards, he said: Do you understand what I have done for you? You call me Teacher and Lord, and rightly so, for that is what I am. Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another s feet. I have set an example for you that you should do as I have done for you. I tell you the truth, no servant is greater than his master, nor is a messenger greater than the one who sent him. Now that you know these things, you will be blessed if you do them. In the same way, I believe the last words Jesus spoke from the cross were marching orders, foundational commands for the life, ministry and mission of his church, for as Jesus did and said, so are we, his followers, to live. Blessed we will be if we do them. The first of those words from the cross drive to the very heart of Jesus ministry. Father, forgive them, they know not what they do. One of the subtle yet significant lines in the parable of the prodigal son comes after the youngest brother has gone from living the high life to slopping the hogs and having to fight with them for something to eat. For a Jew to end up sharing a trough with hogs meant that they had truly sunk as low as it were possible for anyone to sink, they had sunk lower than low, they had damned and cut themselves off from God. But then, Jesus said, the young man came to himself. That is, he regained his senses. He came to see himself not only for the pitiable mess of a man that he was, but for the blind and headstrong fool he had been. Sorry for what he had done and for what he had become, he resolved to return home to seek forgiveness from the father he had wronged. The parable is a favourite, for it shows the vast, magnanimous and outrageous compassion of the father. Of course, Jesus told the story to depict God's amazing love for the repentant sinner, and how God yearns for the prodigal in all of us finally to come to our senses, and come home to him. But as powerful as the parable may be, it remains an incomplete picture of God's mercy if taken on its own. After all, it is always easier to forgive someone who is truly sorry for what they have done or said, for the hurts they have
caused, or the relationships they have damaged. In fact, is our reaction towards the older son not one of criticism for his unforgiving spirit? Do we not tend to rebuke the person who refuses to put anger and outrage aside, and instead chooses to remain possessed by the lust for vengeance, by self-righteous pride and cancerous grief? St. Francis identified an important truth when he prayed that it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, even as in giving that we receive. No heart can ever be healed of its pain, no mind can ever be freed of the cold dark shadow of remembered wounds, no soul can ever be lifted from the depths of grief to the light of God's peace until we forgive as we have been forgiven, and forgive those who have sinned against us. But still, earnest repentance on the part of the one who started the fight or created the problem or caused the outrage certainly makes forgiveness easier to extend. While the story of the prodigal reveals God's abundant love, we still do not see the true fullness of divine compassion or the wonder of God's searching and saving love, until we look at the truth of the parable through the lens of the cross, and God's love poured out in Jesus Christ. Father, forgive them, they do not know what they are doing, our Saviour prayed; meaning that unlike the forgiveness offered to the prodigal who had already awakened to his sin, Jesus extended his own word of pardon upon those who were still lost in the darkness of their jealous rage, blind hatred and cruel indifference. He prayed for the scribes, Pharisees and chief priests who had been so threatened by Jesus' preaching and the truth he evidenced that they sought to destroy him with trumped-up charges of his being an insurrectionist against the state and a blasphemer against God. Preferring darkness to light, choosing to protect their power and position rather than rejoice that good news was proclaimed to the poor and that signs of the kingdom were bursting forth wherever Jesus had gone, they stood at the base of the cross gleefully satisfied that they had become rid of a troublemaker, only to have him pray, Father, forgive them, they know not what they do. He prayed for his Roman butchers as well, for Pilate, who represented the power and vaunted justice of Roman law which could so easily succumb to the demands of the mob when it proved convenient or less troublesome. He prayed for Pilate in his cowardice and easy compromise, in his asking to know the truth while yet refusing to behold, in the face of the broken man before him, the very truth and face of God. He prayed for the soldiers who scourged him with the forty lashes, taunted him as a king and then paraded him through the city streets to Golgotha. He prayed for them as they enjoyed their cruel sport, like a cat torturing a mouse, as they vented their hatred for all Jews upon this one called king of the Jews. He prayed for them as they hammered the spikes through his hands, bound him to the cross and lifted him between two others branded as criminals, as they gambled for his clothing, content in the excuse to their conscience that they were only following orders. Father, forgive them, he prayed, and I expect his gaze settled upon his disciples who had so largely failed to comprehend who he was and what he was about during his ministry in Galilee, and then failed him in his hour of greatest
need. He prayed pardon upon them as they betrayed him, denied him, deserted him. He prayed for the fickle, blind crowds who one day welcomed with him palms and shouts of Hosanna and then scant days later shook their fists calling for him to be crucified. He prayed for them in their preferring a messiah who would deliver them from political slavery to Rome to the freedom he offered from fear and for eternal life. He prayed for them, wanting for bread for the stomach while refusing food for the soul, the bread of life. There, from the height of the cross, he offered what can only be called the most precious, world-transforming prayer the world has ever known. It was a prayer and a promise which says while we were yet sinners, God was in the world reconciling the world to himself. It was a plea for pardon in a moment of time but with eternal power and effect. Christ our great high priest made intercession for us. The innocent one, so cruelly crucified, extended the grace and pardon of heaven even to those who have sunk as low as they can sink, even to those who have still not come to their senses, even to those who have not begun to repent or seek the pardon that has already given. Everyone has their favourite lines of scripture, I expect, which have powerful meaning for them; lines that have helped them finally trust and believe, or passages that have provided uncommon challenge or unending comfort and hope. Such are these words of Jesus for me. For they remind me that above all, as he hung upon the cross, Jesus prayed for me, for you and for us all, in our sinfulness and blindness, in our not knowing what we are doing as well as in our doing what we all too well knew was wrong and evil, yet did nonetheless. He prayed forgiveness for us when we have been lost in our own cowardice or when we have too readily compromised and ignored the truth. He prayed forgiveness for us when we have been too complacent or comfortable in our faith, when we have too intently avoided God's challenge to our hearts or plea for our service. He prayed forgiveness when we have gambled with the future of our children's world, or turned our eyes away from the cries of suffering of our world's children. He prayed forgiveness upon us for all the times we have crucified Christ afresh in our cruelty or in our indifference, or in our faithlessness. He prayed and gave heaven's forgiveness upon that cross, once and for all, that while we may have been prodigal daughters or blind, selfish sons, or while, in sinning against others, we have in truth sinned against our Father in heaven and against him alone, we still need never fear to come home. We need never fear that our failings, cruelties or sins are beyond God's mercy. We need never fear that while we might condemn ourselves, God's most terrible judgment is never to drive us away, but only to drive us to face at last his far more awesome mercy. For who alone stands to judge us but Jesus Christ who died for us, and in and through whom nothing can ever separate us from the love and claim of God. Father, forgive them. Many times during his teaching ministry, Jesus had stressed that unless we forgive from our heart those who have wounded us, we will never be able to receive fully the forgiveness heaven has in abundance for us to receive. I understand his words to mean that it is nigh to impossible to pour grace into hearts that are so closed and resistant to giving grace. Like that final night when Jesus
washed his disciples feet, so from the cross, it is as if he was saying to us, to his church: Do you understand what I have done for you? If I, your Lord and Teacher, have forgiven you, you also must forgive one another. I have set an example for you that you should do as I have done for you. Blessed you will be if you do them. Edward Herbert long ago wrote that he who cannot forgive others breaks the bridge over which he must himself pass, for every man has need to be forgiven. Or as N. T. Wright posited: failure to forgive [isn t] a matter of failing to live up to a new bit of moral teaching. It is cutting off the branch you re sitting on. The only reason for being Kingdom people, for being Jesus people, is that forgiveness of sins is happening in your life. If you don t live forgiveness, you are denying the very basis of your own new existence in Christ. There are, of course, many important clarifications surrounding the challenge of forgiveness. Forgiveness is not excusing the wrong or minimizing its evil. It is not pretending the wrong did not happen, nor does forgiveness require us to continue to allow ourselves to be victimized by those who have neither repented nor done the long, slow, hard word of inner transformation by which the fruits of sincere repentance one day begin to prove themselves. The trouble, I find, in my own life is that I gravitate all too easily to all the excuses and arguments I can conjure as defences for not forgiving rather than for resolutely facing up to Jesus command and example to forgive for heaven s sake, for the kingdom s sake, for freedom s sake, for love s sake, and for Christ s sake. As he has done for me, so compassionately and courageously, so humbly and undeservedly, so mercifully and mightily, am I called to yield towards others. It s been said many times that the whole purpose and end of our discipleship is to become more and more like Jesus. While unquestionably a wonderful gift of grace, heaven is not the end goal for the Christian life. Jesus did not call us to follow him with only the self-centred purpose of our own salvation in mind; he called us to be transformed by the Holy Spirit in order, as C. S. Lewis put it, to become nothing less than little Christs to one another and to the world. Robert Mulholland calls it the process of being moulded into the image of Christ for the sake of others. St. Paul called our following after Christ the work of growing up into Jesus, and attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ. To follow Jesus, in his own words, is to be branches so engrafted into him, the living Vine, that we bear fruit in our lives that is nothing less than the very work Jesus did, and indeed, to do even greater things, through the power of his Spirit at work in us, as Christ lives in us. So where is that Christ-life in us to be seen more powerfully, convincingly, beautifully and dynamically, as we learn to be those forgiven people through whom heaven s mercy and forgiveness flows towards others with ever greater majesty, ever greater loveliness, ever greater bounty. As the Master has done, so the servants are to do. Let us pray: Lord, have daylight mercy on our midnight souls. Lord, we seek not merely the incredible grace of your forgiveness; we pray to be so transformed by that mercy,
that having been loved beyond measure, so shall we love. Having been swept into your arms as unworthy yet cherished prodigals, so may our hearts open with renewed and daring tenderness to all the prodigal, problem people in our lives. And hearing afresh your dying prayer over us for God s compassion and grace to be given us, may our lips and lives now echo forth such intercession for those who have wounded us. Lord may the life-giving gladness of your love and the freedom-bestowing power of your grace be reflected, spoken and lived through us. For the glory of your Name. Amen.