Father, forgive us

Luke 23: 34a -- "Jesus said, 'Father, forgive them, for they don't know what they're doing.' "

His arms are stretched to the point of stabbing pain with every breath. His chest is like a car tire, banged up, beaten down,bruised and leaking air. Jesus is noble to the end, noble beyond comprehension, but everyone human faces that point of no return, that moment when the pain is simply too much to bear any longer. And when the end is moments away, he does the most inexplicable thing of the long, terrible day: he asks his Heavenly Father to forgive, well, everyone there, everyone including you and I. He slowly, as I imagine the scene, takes a deep, deep gulp of tainted oxygen and forces the words out so that everyone near the death device we call the cross could hear. It takes unimaginable strength simply to talk.

"Father, forgive them," he speaks -- talking through parched, damaged lips, as loudly as a dying, ravaged, bleeding man can. "Father, forgive them," he says with breath another one of those pearls of great price. "Father, forgive them," he says with pain-produced tears washing his dirty, bloody face.

After being arrested, scourged, beaten, spit on and mocked, and after his back was flayed open like a fish, after being suspended on a splintering wooden cross, after having all, ALL his clothes taken from him, after he looks down from that instrument of death, that scourge of thieves, that cursed tree, with sad eyes, he looks at the people around the area who have gathered to gawk, to mock, to make fun of and he asks the Father to forgive whom? Pontius Pilate, the Roman soldiers, the Pharisees, the angry mob, whom? Forgive whom? For what? For his death, for rejecting and crucifying Him? For their sin?

With a heart that is broken not from the terrible, terrific, tumultuous beating but from being rejected by the very people he came to save, he asks his Father to forgive US, mankind, all of us, of our sin. To forgive as if we were family, forgive as if we deserved it, forgive as if there was one sliver of goodness in a people who would painfully kill their own GOD, their own SAVIOR, their own GOOD SHEPHERD. Just think of the depravity of that for a moment.

The early century flash mob might be yelling and cursing our Lord, but in the theology of the atonement, it is our nails they drove into his hands, our thorny crown they pushed into his forehead. Crucified because we would rather have things our way, crucified because we are sinners who have and will always fall short. And still Jesus asks that we be forgiven. It boggles our minds, or it should. It tramples our hearts, or it should.

Jesus slips the most unbelievable of phrases into history: Father, forgive them, so that every person born, before and after those incredible words, before and after that cry from the cross, be given the most amazing of gifts. It is as if the word awesome was invented on the spot to describe a dying God who asks for forgiveness of his own killers.

The world, those who believe and receive, was instantly forgiven, flash-frozen in time ... forgiveness  that would transcend centuries and generations of humans who would never see the Old Rugged Cross but would feel it eternally was lavished as if God was re-creating Eden in a mega-moment.

In the plains of Africa and the sand of the Middle East, forgiven.
In the mountains of Asia and the rippled tundra of the Arctic, forgiven.
In the peace of the mild-high city and the anger of Wall Street, forgiven.
At the foot of the cross and in the heights of space and the length of time, forgiven. All forgiven

Whether we understand it or whether we know it. Forgiven.

There is a wonderful moment, a wonderful phrase in the parable of the Prodigal Son. When the son has done about all the badness -- as it were -- one could throw into one tantrum of prodigal living, the Bible says, "He came to his senses." Another translation reads, "he came to himself."

One moment he's falling apart, like fat Elvis in a white jumpsuit, the next he suddenly understands, he suddenly knows what a fool he has been. He knows and in that knowledge, he changes.

“Know yourself,” the ancient philosophers admonish us, for in knowing yourself is the beginning of wisdom. To which the Psalmist responds, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” The beginning of wisdom is to come to our senses and know the fearful truth about ourselves, that we have wandered and wasted our days in a distant country far from home. We seek forgiveness then because we know what we do, or did.

Forgive them, for they know not what they are doing, Jesus asks. And when we come to know what we are doing, what then? The answer, the wonderful, glorious answer is, Jesus still asks the Father to forgive us.

I can picture him walking from the garden tomb as in Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. Holes in his hands. Blood washed away somehow. Smiling because his prayers have been answered.

He is prepared for the coming days and nights before he ascends to the throne room.

He prays, "Father, forgive them, for they now know what they did." And God does, once and for eternity.

Oh, what beauty there is in forgiveness, what joy, what peace, what grace. Jesus, keep me near that cross.