Here is a link to the mp3.
(1) Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they’re doing.
Forgiveness is almost a platitude. But how hard is it to forgive when we have really encountered evil? That is something only the victims of evil have a right to speak to. Their words are words to which the rest of us must listen, long and hard, before we utter our own.
There are some in this parish who have been on the receiving end of evil, who have known the suffering that comes from cruelty far more directly than I and all of us ever want to. They have spoken to me about how hard it is to say with the one they name as Lord, “Father, forgive them.”
Forgiveness is hard not because it is a denial of judgment, but because it is a response to judgment that says, I let go of my call for justice. You are guilty. You have wronged me. You are condemned not by my ill-will, but by your own actions.
AND, I refuse to call out for penalty or punishment. That is what forgiveness is.
And that is the first word from the cross.
It is fitting that the first word should be a word of forgiveness, for that is what the cross is all about—it is God’s hard medicine to cure the world’s sins, but mine. And yours.
In that word, we have God-in-Christ’s pronouncement of judgment on our situation. The world has gone wrong. The world has rejected God’s love. The entire human race, crystallized in the judgments of select Jewish and Roman leaders and the actions of the their lackeys, has passed its own judgment on the fullness of God’s presence dwelling among us. And we have decided to get rid of it at all costs.
It will not do to hear this first word applying to someone else. The Jews did it; the Romans did it; whatever. “Were you there when they crucified my Lord?” is the haunting question asked by the old spiritual song. The answer is given by B.B. King and Bono in the song, “When Love Comes to Town.”
I was there when they crucified my Lord
I held the scabbard when the soldier drew his sword
I threw the dice as they pierced his side,
But I’ve seen love conquer the great divide
I was there and so were you. We cannot look at others. We did this to the Son of God. His first word is a passing of judgment. And until we hear it as judgment, we cannot hear it as Gospel.
But it is Gospel, too.
Father forgive them. That is God’s own response to God’s own judgment. God’s own response to his determination that the world has rejected his reign, God’s own response to the fact that, in the words of the prophet, “each has turned to his or her own way,” is not to demand penalty punishment. It is to intercede for forgiveness.
Father forgive them. The first word, is first a word of judgment and then a word of grace. Both facets are true. And judgment and grace are spoken not simply for the soldiers “just following orders,” but for all of those who are taken up in their actions. They are spoken for Caiaphas and Annas and the Jewish leadership. They are spoken for Herod and Pilate. They are spoken for Peter and even for Judas. And they are spoken for me. And you.
(2) I assure you, today you will be with me in paradise.
“Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” It’s a rather feeble prayer, isn’t it? Pathetic, even. A gambler’s last hope, the last refuge of a thief, and a cynic’s final bulwark against despair. “Remember me.”
There is no repentance here—no I am sorry for my sins. There is no penitence—no if I could I would make restitution to those I have harmed. There is only this plea, “Remember me.”
What would the magistrate who had passed sentence say in response? No doubt, he would have said something like: “We will remember you. Or if not you in particular, at least that your actions brought about the appropriate punishment. And our memory will be a deterrent to others. We will remember that you died the death of a sinner. Because that is what you are.”
What would have this man’s victims have said had they any voice at all? “How can we ever forget you? You robbed us of our daily bread and left us hungry. You took from us the means to live and left us to die. For your own gain, you sent us into poverty and we have yet to recover. You destroyed our lives as surely as if you had simply killed us. We will never forget. Now die the death you deserve.”
He knows it, too. He said himself to his foul-mouthed accomplice, “we deserve to be here.”
What audacity! What insolence that, having recognized in Jesus an innocent man and perhaps much more, he should ask him to remember. “Remember me.”
And Jesus—the incarnate God, who wrote the law on the very fabric of the universe, who has declared himself again and again to be on the side of victims and against their oppressors—Jesus should have stood with the magistrate victim both and spoken with their voice. “I will remember you,” he should have said, “now, die in your sin.”
But he does not say that. “I assure you, today you will be with me in paradise.” To this thief! This criminal. This impenitent and unrepentant man. He receives God’s free gift of salvation there. In response to that prayer that is at once feeble and audacious.
Before we get too wrapped up in our offense, however, let us look at our prayers. They aren’t much more than the thief’s, are they?
We are, in the end, very comfortable in calling the fire of God’s judgment down on others while we stand a safe distance away. But we do not stand a safe distance away. All of us, the Scripture says, have gone after our own ways. All of us have done what was right in our eyes. And when we’re honest, the most we can manage is this thief’s “remember me.”
And Jesus’ answer to us is the same. “I assure you, today.” Our assurance lies not in ourselves. Our assurance lies not in what we have done, nor in what we have left undone. “I assure you, today.” Our assurance lies only in the goodness of he who pardoned the thief on the cross and who extends his pardon to all who trust in him.
All because of your goodness, Lord, in your love, remember me.
(3) Dear woman, here is your son.
She stood there. Watching. Seeing it all unfold even as she was wrapped tightly by cords of utter helplessness. She stood there. Weeping. The sword now passed through her own soul, too.
Jesus’ dreams were not hers for him. Jesus’ mission was not what she wanted it to be. Jesus was always, even as a child, at one step removed from her.
And she loved him. She loved him through fevers and skinned knees. She loved him when he left the family business to become an itnerant preacher. She loved him as she went with her children to find him and to restrain him when she didn’t understand his preaching.
She loved him at the wedding when she goaded him into continuing the party. She had no idea what had happened, but somehow he had managed to solve the problem. How had he gotten that wine? From whom? Where? No matter. He had solved the problem and she loved him.
She loved him now as, still not understanding, she saw his mission end in failure and he prepared to breathe his last.
And he looked at her. “Woman, behold your son!” It was not an invitation to look upon him one last time. It was the creation of a new family. From now on, Mary would become part of the family of the apostle whom Jesus loved. He entrusted her to him and him to her. And from that very hour, the Scriptures say, she was taken into his home.
“Woman behold your son.” With these words, Jesus creates, in death, new life, a new family. The family made up of his mother and his messengers. The family into which we have been incorporated by our baptism. That family is the Church.
That is the family that is created by the death of Jesus. A family created by word and water, a family sustained by bread and wine.
So it is that, through the Cross of Jesus, we live in the same house as Mary, as John, as Peter. We are part of the same family as angels and archangels and all of have served God in every age.
He is the ground and guarantor of our communion.
“Woman behold your son.”
With those words, Jesus relativizes ever other prior claim to loyalty, whether to family, to clan, to tribe, to nation. Those bonds—which are real enough—no longer can ever come before the bond of loyalty to the one who made a new family in his death and invited us into it by the waters of baptism.
Woman, behold your son.
In this new family, water is thicker than blood.
(4) My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?
“He descended into hell.” So we confess when we say the Apostles’ Creed, at least in the old language. Into Hell is better than to the dead, it seems to me. For it is more evocative.
“He descended to the dead” could be a simple gloss on the previous words. “He was crucifed, died and was buried.” It could be a metaphorical “really,” emphasising the reality of Jesus’ death.
The older language of the descent into hell reminds us that it this is no mere underlining of the previous sentence. He descended into hell. He descended into the realm of godforsakenness. He died, as the reformer John Calvin puts it, the one great death of the Sinner.
And that descent is captured in the heart-rending cry in which Jesus makes Psalm 22 his own. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
The descent into hell, then is real. It does not merely reaffirm the reality of Jesus’ death but names it as a peculiar kind of death. It is not the mere sundering of body from soul. Jesus’ death was his being undone by the wrath of God poured out against all sin; it was his surrendering fully to God’s enemies—the unholy trinity of sin, death and the devil; it was his taking on himself the dirt of the world’s sin, and feeling excluded from the love of his Father, which he had known from all eternity.
He who knew no sin, St. Paul wrote, became sin.
He descended into hell. My God, why have you forsaken me?
In 1988, Pope John Paul II explored the meaning of the cry with these words:
“In that experience, in that cry, in that ‘why’ addressed to heaven, Jesus also established a new manner of solidarity with us who are so often moved to raise our eyes and words to heaven to express our complaint and even desperation. . . .
“[Jesus’ human soul was reduced to a wasteland. He no longer felt the presence of the Father, but he underwent the tragic experience of the most complete desolation. . . . The external events seemed to manifest the absence of the Father who permitted the crucifixion of his Son . . . . That silence of God weighed on the dying Jesus as the heaviest pain of all. . . .”
And that cry continues to echo. It is the cry of human suffering that has now been taken into the very life and heart of God for the healing of the world, for the forgiveness of sinners, for the radical welcome that God now extends to you and me for the sake of his Son whom he did not, finally, abandon.
He descended into hell. He cried the opening words of the 22nd Psalm filling them with a despair that even the Psalmist did not know when he first penned them. My God, My God, why have you forsaken me? And with those words, he spoke for all God’s suffering and sin bound creation. He spoke those words also for God and as God, who has made the world’s suffering his own, that the world might enjoy his life and salvation.
(5) I thirst.
The SS seemed more preoccupied, more disturbed than usual. To hang a young boy in front of thousands of spectators was no light matter. The head of the camp read the verdict. All eyes were on the child. He was lividly pale, almost calm, biting his lips. The gallows threw its shadow over him. This time the camp executioner refused to act as executioner. Three SS replaced him.
The victims mounted together onto the chairs. The three necks were placed at the same moment within the nooses. “Long live Liberty!” cried the two adults. But the child was silent.
“Where is God? Where is He?” someone behind me asked.
At a sign from the head of the camp, the three chairs tipped over.
Total silence throughout the camp. On the horizon, the sun was setting. “Bare your heads!” yelled the head of the camp. His voice was raucous. We were weeping. “Cover your heads!”
Then the march past began. The two adults were no longer alive. But the third rope was still moving; being so light, the child was still alive…
For more than half an hour he stayed there, struggling between life and death, dying in slow agony under our eyes. And we had to look him full in the face. He was still alive when I passed in front of him. Behind me I heard the same man asking: “Where is God now?”
And I hear a voice within me answer him: “Were is he? Here He is – He is hanging here on this gallows. . . ” (Elie Wiesel, Night)
“I thirst.”
You might not see it. “I thirst,” is simple and straightforward enough on its own. But Jesus is still quoting the Scriptures he memorized as a child in synagogue in Nazareth.
This time, he is quoting Psalm 69: “they offer me sour wine for my thirst.”
It is a full expression of the agony endured by God the Son, the man, Jesus of Nazareth. And they are not his own words. They are the words of another. Another who was himself just like us.
“Tis mystery all! The immortal dies. Who can explore the strange design. In vain the firstborn seraph tries to plumb the depths of love divine.” So wrote the Anglican hymn-writer, Charles Wesley in the second stanza of And Can It Be.
Yes really, really dies. And really—really—suffers in the agony preceding death.
I thirst.
Two simple words taken from a Psalm in which the writer calls out to God to deliver him from cruel and uncaring enemies. Two words in which are capture the reality of the suffering of a human being.
This is no concept. No philosophical discussion of atonement. This is the suffering of a body broken and exposed; a body suspended between heaven and earth; a body dried out by sun and wind and torture.
This the real human suffering that God has made his own.
There is no comfort in the phrase God suffered for us. No relief, no sense of meaning given to our own suffering. It means nothing to me that God suffers as God. Because I’m not God. And I will never ever know or experience just what kind of suffering that is.
But human suffering? That I know.
None of us knows the suffering of another, mind you. And my own life has not known much. But I have suffered. And so have you. Many of you have suffered more than others, and more than I ever will.
We do not all suffer the same pain or to the same degree. But we all suffer. It is the one experience alongside birth and death that every human being will share in.
And another has taken that human experience and made it his own. And he has taken our own words to express it! I thirst.
That is not the cry of a God pretending to suffer. Hovering six inches over the cross of his sin; six inches over the gallows at Auschwitz.
I thirst.
That is not the cry of a God suffering in his own unique god-like way. Remote and removed and uninvolved with us
I thirst.
That is the cry of the God who suffers as a human. Who knows human suffering and dying because he has suffered and died as a human being. Who was there, as Elie Wiesel wrote, with that child on the gallows.
(6) It is finished.
It is finished. It might sound like an exhausted and desperate announcement. “I have nothing more to give.” Or “It’s finally over.” The last words of a broken man.
But in the Greek language of the New Testament, it is one single word of triumph. Tetelestai! It is accomplished.
Jesus mission was completed. There was nothing more left to do.
He had displayed the love of God to the full. He had displayed the wrath of God against all that would harm God’s good creation. He had engaged fully with the enemies of God, fighting them not with armies, whether of angels or men, but only with the Word of God. He had inaugurated the Kingdom of God.
And now, it is accomplished. God law has been upheld. God’s enemies have been defeated. God’s people have been drawn into fellowship with God and each other in a kingdom that will never pass away.
It is accomplished. His saving work is done.
In our own following of Jesus, there is to add to it. We do not bring in the promised kingdom with our works of mercy and justice. We do not heal the world of sin through our own mission and discipling work. We do not save ourselves through our asceticism, our own pursuit of holiness.
All of those things are important. None of them is what saves us.
In our own failure to follow Jesus, there is nothing that can take away from it. Our own participation—known and unknown—in systems of oppression and in justice. Our own thoroughly inadequate and sin-stained presentations of the life-giving Gospel of God. Our own inability to be holy enough.
All of those things are serious lapses. None of them can undo us.
Our works neither save nor damn.
Why?
Because his work is sufficient. And his work is accomplished. It is done.
Because his work is finished, none of us is ever finished—over. Done. Passed by. Hopeless.
Because his work is finished, we have fellowship with God and with each other. A fellowship bought by the precious blood of Jesus. By his life poured out on this Friday we call Good.
On this Friday, it was finished. And that means none of us is beyond hope.
(7) Father, I entrust my spirit into your hands.
Jesus is still, even now, praying the prayers of Israel. This time, it is Psalm 31. It is striking that at no point does Jesus depart from the faith of his ancestors. Even when in the depths of abandonment by God and brokenness in body, the words that were his were the words of Israel.
All the way through, Jesus acts not alone or on his own or apart from the faith of Israel. All the way through, the faithlessness of Israel, and with them, the whole human human race are heaped up on this one man, who stands with Adam and Abraham as a representative of us all.
All the way through, the faithfulness of Israel’s God is displayed here in the obedience of this one man that undoes the disobedience of Adam. That fulfils God’s promise to Abraham that his faith would father many nations.
All the way through, the prayers of Israel are taken by God’s one obedient covenant partner, and infused with a depth of meaning their original authors never knew.
All the way through the prayers of Israel are taken by God’s one obedient covenant partner and spoken with the meaning that their true author had intended from and for all eternity.
Father, I entrust my spirit into your hands.
The mission of Israel has been brought to its right and good end. The whole world is now to be blessed by the calling once given to Abraham.
And the blessings given to Israel are once again seen not as gifts to be kept from the world, but as gifts to be lavished upon the world.
This one Israelite has committed his spirit to his Father.
This one Israelite has committed his Father’s Spirit to us.
This one Israelite has tied us forever to our Jewish brothers and sisters in the faith of Israel. He has given us their prayers. He has prayed them for us. And he invites us to pray them, too. He committed his spirit to the hand of his Father so that in death, we might do the same.