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

[A meditation for Good Friday, 1994]

I stand here today in fear and trembling before this word of the Lord. Probably every one of us has been through some life‑changing, personality‑shattering trauma or betrayal, at the hands of someone who brought us into the world, chose us as a mate, promised to be our pastor. We know that in recovery we go through stages. We also know that we can get badly stuck. Chris and I have been married for over 31 years; for nearly half that time we have been trying to deal with something like this, shattering to us and our children. The tests get harder, so this one came, not from unbelievers, but in the form of spiritual abuse, cutting us to the heart. There has been some recovery, particularly since a wise pastor told us that none of us goes to church to be skinned alive (the guilty sense of spiritual failure is one of the worst aspects of such an experience), and I really thought that I could begin to say something on the First Word. Three things had been real landmarks in my recovery: first, realising that the Lord knew what it was like and was right there in it with us; secondly, understanding that DECIDING to forgive was the key, and for the rest I could simply say “Lord, you do it in me, because I can’t”, then trust, however much feelings of having forgiven might lag behind, that He had done it; and praying this prayer of Our Lord’s, “Father, forgive”. Then two days after I had agreed to speak we were both sideswiped by something which reopened the whole mess.

I think that some of us, especially the ones schooled to obedience, can go wrong right at the start just by letting ourselves be exhorted, or exhorting ourselves, to forgive before the hurt has really registered. So we cover up a festering wound. Sometimes we imagine ways in which we asked for this treatment. We can forget that we were never promised a rose‑garden, and ask how this can happen to a child of God. We can spend years lacerating ourselves for still having no feelings of having forgiven perfectly. Or, while keeping clear of crude revenge, we enjoy the pleasures of resentment, of which Lewis says “If anyone says he does not know those pleasures, he is either a liar or a saint”. We can choose, far from keeping short accounts, to let not one, but many, suns go down upon our wrath. We can insist that there must be sorrow expressed before we will forgive; that’s a killer when the person has deceased: the devil can then have us writhe in unforgiveness for ever. Every day we can be choosing, not the habit of forgiveness, without which no relationships can be sustained, but that of resentment, so that we become sour old people whose lifelong memories add up to one putrid mass of accumulated hatreds. Standard behaviour is to complain of injustice (It’s not suffering that hurts, so much as suffering which has no correspondence with desert); seldom indeed do we reflect what would happen to us if God GAVE us justice. To quote Lewis again, this time speaking of us as seen from the infernal point of view:--

‘Make his mind flit to and fro between an expression like “the body of Christ” and the actual faces in the next pew...Your patient, thanks to Our Father below, is a fool...Work hard...on the disappointment...which is certainly coming to the patient...All you...have to do is to keep out of his mind the question “If I, being what I am, can consider that I am in some sense a Christian, why should the different vices of those people in the next pew prove that their religion is mere hypocrisy and convention?” You may ask whether it is possible to prevent such an obvious thought from occurring even to a human mind. It is, Wormwood, it is! Handle him properly and it simply won’t come into his head.’ [The Screwtape Letters pp. 16 ff.]

There is nothing good or beautiful about a cross. I will not tell you of the physical horrors of crucifixion, except to say that it normally took at least a week; the victim died in extreme pain, not of shock or loss of blood, but of hunger, thirst and exposure. If Jesus was so quick, it was partly because He was already exhausted and will have lost a lot of blood from the scourging, a punishment which was frequently fatal. In His cross we see the collision between human wickedness and cruelty in their most complete form and complete innocence, and it is on this dissonance that Scripture focuses. He says “Father”. Long ago He has formed the habit of taking all anger, pain and insult to God. He does not doubt His sonship or that He is loved. “Father, forgive.” He is facing squarely that He has been hurt. He wastes no time on His rights, on reproaches. He wastes no words on His own forgiving, as though His Father’s anger — and God is “angry with sinners every day” — and forgiveness mattered infinitely more. He is in no doubt that in all sin GOD is the one (sometimes the only one) offended. He cares that no‑one should be forsaken by God. “Father, forgive them...”: not just the poor bloody Roman infantry, doing their job; or the Governor, saving his; or the clergy, saving their position; or the believers, saving their skins; or Judas, saving for a rainy day; or ourselves. “...for they know not what they do.” Really? No consciences? None of us aim to bring about the judicial murder of God, but is this what He is saying? Hardly. Behind and beneath the divine anger is the divine pity for our mess, misery, and blindness, our bondage to the Prince of darkness. This is how the one wholly normal human being, Who is our God, regarded it and us.

No, Jesus did not hang on His cross so that we should hang onto our resentments. This, our weakest point, is a large part of the point of our redemption. There really is nothing new about Christian ethics, if we subtract the commands to forgive, bless, love and pray for those who have hurt us. This is one of the sure ways that all our evangelism will come with power: if we can forgive. We have to learn to do it right where we can’t change it. We need not flagellate ourselves as spiritual cowards if, whatever Holocaust we are survivors of, we don’t make a family friend of the S.S. guard, or long to spend our holidays touring the gas‑chambers. But we ARE obliged to regard the person concerned with unwavering love and goodwill. And it is irrelevant how badly we, I, have been injured. It was to raise us to such a life that Jesus died.

‘Drop, drop slow tears,

And bathe those beauteous feet

Which brought from Heaven

The news and Prince of Peace:

Cease not, wet eyes,

His mercy to entreat;

To cry for vengeance

Sin doth never cease.

In your deep floods

Drown all my faults and fears;

Nor let His eye

See sin but through my tears.’ [A Litany, Phineas Fletcher]