And Jesus said, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."
Luke 23:34
As the brightness of the
day the Lord had made gave way to the dark afternoon that would seek
to unmake its Maker, I have strong suspicion an unseen throng of
angels watched nearby with inferno eyes and bated breath. For eons
untold, they had been the burning flames of God, shrouded in light
and mystery, fierce to wield their arsenal in the interests of the
kingdom. I suppose the cherubim were there who with flaring blade
shielded Eden for Adam's posterity's own good. I imagine the pair
was present who'd stricken blind the ruffians of Sodom and called sulphurous vengeance on the Cities of the Plain. Perhaps so was the
one who was poised to smite all Jerusalem in the days of David's sin,
and the one who bled the life from an Assyrian army in Hezekiah's
reign. And surely waiting o'er the hills in silent fury were those
who'd long ago roamed Egypt – for did not the psalmist sing, “He
let loose on them his burning anger, wrath, indignation, and
distress, a company of destroying angels”
(Psalm 78:49)? If ever there were a day for a company of destroying
angels to yearn for one word for leave to right what was wrong, this
dark hour was it!
Because
before the inferno eyes of any angel observers, the earth below saw
the most audacious of crimes. For there, in the streets of the holy
city and outside its forlorn gates, the representatives of all Adam's
race dared to look their Maker in the face – he from whom seraphim
shielded fiery eyes – and denounce him, deny him, mock him, strip
him bare, auction off his goods, beat him bloody, whip him like a
mongrel, drive spikes through his flesh, call him an evildoer and
unfit to live, and enthrone him in a seat of torture to amuse all
worms with hands and feet who cheered his killers and jeered his holy
heart. The Maker of all had fallen into the grasp of satanic hate in
the hearts of Adam's offspring, and if ever angels awaited eagerly
orders to make war on earth, to avenge their High King's agony and
shame against the ungrateful beasts of mud and breath, this dark hour
was it!
What
the angels so keenly must have seen that day, from a celestial
vantage point removed from the fray, was the enormity of human evil.
How could any creature be so twisted as to hate its Benefactor? How
could any creature be so twisted as to stab its Healer, betray its
Life-giver, mock its Truth, curse its Glory, murder its God? But
there they were. Pharisee and Sadducee and Herodian, allied against
a common enemy. Jew and Gentile, oppressed and oppressor, united in
a common cause. The representative consent of an ultimately
unanimous human race: that God must die. And in their declaration
with whips and thorns, nails and wood, that God is on the wrong side
of our laws, they laid bare the real inner logic of sin.
To
sin is to miss the target for which God made us. God made us to live
by faith, hope, and love – to trust him fully; to concur and
participate in his style of rule; to display his character of love in
every direction, in every context; to wield his delegated powers so
as to beautify a world of goodness and truth; to hope for, and work
toward, the full attainment of Adam's mission over every square
millimeter of the universe; and thereby to be royal priests linking
creation to Creator in a common paradise. To this end of perfect
faith, hope, and love, God placed us in such a station and equipped
us with immense power and authority. And to the extent we wield that
power and authority in ways that miss that goal, or even struggle
against it, we therefore 'sin' – falling into the clutches of
lurking shadows and whispering wisps we were meant to chase away.
Of
course, that's exactly what we did. We forfeited our birthright for
less than a mess of pottage. God gave us power and authority to join
him in expanding and enjoy a good and true and beautiful world, and
we took that power and authority and pledged its service toward a
feebler and duller and uglier world. With us splintered into a
trillion agendas, with us neglecting beauty and goodness and truth,
with us absent from our posts or even wielding power to destroy and
degrade, the world is in clear disrepair. And the more the world
around us and within us is in evident disrepair, the more prone we
are to complain against
the God who gave it to us.
We
protest all that is wrong with the world. The prejudice, the
violence, the tragedy, the sickness and predation and inequality and
brokenness, and every other complaint you can imagine. We yell at
God, we scream at God, we give God the cold shoulder. We invent lies
in his name, we wage war, we deny him and decry him. We reimagine
him, rewrite his guidance, redefine him, objectify him as one more
weapon in our arsenal. At the root of it all, screeching with a
trillion dissonant voices, we demand a trillion unbroken worlds to
replace both the perfection we scorned and the disaster we authored.
All the while, we've lain and ever do lie in wait. If we couldn't
build a tower to drag him down, we'd wait 'til he came within reach –
then we'd show him what's what.
So
when God descends to meet us face-to-face, to bring us a remedy, we
place him on trial. We accuse the Lawmaker of being the chief
lawbreaker. We charge the Faithful One with neglect. We complain
that Heaven's Health has made us sick, and we must vomit him out of
his creation. We find that this Jesus, this human face of God, is
guilty of daring to disrupt our disorder. And so we sentence the
Life to death, even death on the cross. And in our perpetual sin is
the seed of “crucifying the Son of God afresh”
(Hebrews 6:16).
We
knew not what we did. We knew not what we did, because we didn't
want to know, didn't want to see, could not bear to believe. But
isn't that how it is for every sin, in the end? For if we really
grasped, really understood, really saw what it is we were doing, what
toxic fumes of hell we exhaled with every sinful word, what poison we
brewed with every envious look, what darkness dances at our
fingertips and footsteps as we wield royalty unto rebellion and
priesthood unto apostasy – how could we see anything but eternal
horror in the mirror? Of course we know not what we do. Our godless
minds are blinded, and to bring all things into full light and clear
sight is to enter the Last Judgment.
That
is what our sin really is. It's trendy today to imagine that God
should just ignore it – should merely give it all a pass with a
wave of his hand, should pat sin on the head and let it off its
leash, should chuckle and shrug his shoulders, should dismiss and
overlook it. But to dismiss and overlook sin, any sin, would be for
God to declare that it ultimately doesn't matter – that it makes no
difference in the fabric of the cosmos, that it has no reverberations
throughout the world he has made, that it introduces no effect into
the life he wants to share with us. But if our actions were so
inconsequential, then what we actually are and what we actually do
wouldn't matter. If our sin is to be accounted an overlookable
thing, God must declare that we are irrelevant. And that he cannot
do – for he has handed us far too much power and authority for that
to be true. Sin cannot be overlooked – it can only be forgiven,
which is a far different thing, and one with steep costs.
Faced
with sin at its most extreme, its most wretched ugliness, its most
audacious and bitter and cruel, the God placed on trial could have
given avenging angels the word they awaited. Instead, he acquiesced
to the sentence consequent to the wrongful verdict. In the moment of
his greatest agony and deepest dishonor, this crucified God chose to
pray for,
and not against,
his very own executioners. God the Son asked God the Father to
accept this as the cost of forgiveness, and announced publicly from
his splinter-ridden throne that even the most purely sinful act in
all of human history could be overcome with a costly pardon.
When
Jesus uttered those words, he changed everything. He redefined what
was happening. He transmuted the exemplary sin, the defining failure
of Adam's race, from our
injustice into his
intercession. And if he can turn that great injustice into an
intercession, he can do the same in any hour, any instant. Faced
with the heaviest or lightest failure of your life, faced with every
time you've resisted beauty and goodness and truth, every time you
have lacked faith or hope or love, he is ready to look you in the eye
and step in for you. Itchy angel trigger-fingers grow still, and the
cost of God's just forgiveness is achieved, when the Father hears
these words prayed for you: “They know not what they do... Forgive
her... Forgive him... Father, forgive them.”
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