24. The Word of Forgiveness
“Father, Forgive Them.”
1. The Word of Forgiveness
“AND WHEN THEY were come to the place, which is called Calvary, there they crucified him, and the malefactors, one on the right hand, and the other on the left. Then said Jesus, Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”
Jesus has been acquitted by the highest tribunal in the land, yet He is now being impaled on a cross, the most shameful punishment to which a criminal could be subjected. He has been seized by rude hands, stripped and laid on its rough beams. The Roman soldiers callously drive the spikes through His quivering flesh and raise aloft the instrument of torture. While they are still engaged in their grim task, the lips of the victim are seen to move. But that is by no means uncommon. David Smith tells us that “it was usual for the victims of that dread doom, frenzied with pain, to shriek, entreat, spit at, and curse the spectators.”
But what is He saying! Is it some word of righteous indignation because He knew His own innocence? Is he hurling maledictions at His torturers? Is He pleading for mercy? No, none of these. He is praying.
For whom does He pray? For Himself? Again, no. We are privileged to listen in to those gracious words of intercession. Had Isaiah not prophesied that the coming Messiah would make “intercession for the transgressors” (Isaiah 53:12)? This is what He is doing as the pain-racked words come from His lips, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34).
The consistent habit of a lifetime persisted even in the hour of death. His first word was a word of prayer. His hands can no longer perform acts of love for friend or enemy. His feet can no more carry Him on errands of mercy. But one form of ministry, and the highest, it still open to Him. He can still pray.
Father—the Invocation
How natural and appropriate it is that this should be the first word to fall from His lips. The sufferings He was enduring could not prevent Him from holding fast to His Sonship. The indignities and injustices surrounding His arrest and trial have in no degree shaken His faith in the love and approval of His Father, adverse though the evidence appeared to be. “If ever the hand of the Creator seemed to be withdrawn from the helm of the universe, it was when He who was the embodiment of moral beauty and worth, had to die a shameful death as a malefactor.”
But in the face of all, His faith survived the test. Break His mortal body they may, but they cannot break His communion with His Father. Although the dread cup does not pass from Him, He is still able to say, “Even so, Father: for so it seemed good in thy sight” (Matthew 11:26).
Forgive Them—the Petition
In the manifesto of His Kingdom, our Lord had said, “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you” (Matthew 5:44). Now He is putting His own precept into practice, leaving an inspiring example of the way in which trouble can be turned into treasure.
The time element of this petition is significant. “Then said Jesus …” or as Rotherham has it, “Then Jesus kept saying, Father, forgive them….” When? When man’s enmity and hatred for God and holiness reached its climax in the rejection and crucifixion of His Son! When under the guise of sanctity and religion the religious leaders of the day perpetrated the most outrageous crime of all time! When the incarnate Creator was being pitilessly hounded out of the world He had created! When human evil and perfidy had reached its nadir—then Jesus uttered this word of compassionate intercession.
In such an hour as this the holiest of men, conscious of their sinfulness, would have prayed, “Father, forgive me.” But Jesus did not do so. There was no consciousness of guilt in Him that called for forgiveness. He prayed, “Father, forgive them.”
During His ministry Jesus had claimed that as Son of Man He had “power on earth to forgive sins.” Why, then, does He now call on His Father to exercise this prerogative instead of exercising it Himself, as He had done when He said to the palsied man, “Thy sins be forgiven thee”? The answer is that on the cross He was taking the place of sinful men and expiating their guilt. They could be forgiven because He was standing in their place as their representative. He had “power on earth to forgive sins” (Matthew 9:6), but now He is “lifted up from the earth” (John 12:32). He is no longer in the place of authority, but of condemnation, numbered with the transgressors, yet making intercession for them.
Here is seen love triumphant over evil. Jesus might justly have left His murderers to their doom, or visited them with condign judgment on the spot. Instead, His heart overflowed its banks in a prayer that must have caused the amazed angels to burst into doxology as He prayed for His persecutors.
More is implied in this petition than appears on the surface, for implicit in it was the idea of substitution. What Jesus’ prayer really meant was, “Father forgive them and condemn Me,” for nothing less than that could secure forgiveness. The word “forgive” has the meaning of “remit, dismiss,” but the divine dictum is, “Without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins” (Hebrews 9:22, RSV). With the words of this petition, “He covered the heads of His murderers with the shield of His love, to secure them from the storm of the wrath of God.”
“Forgive them.” To whom did our Lord intend His prayer to apply? There are varying views. A. T. Robertson applies it to the Romans; E. H. Plummer to the Jews; A. Watson to both Jews and Gentiles; and W. W. How, to all mankind. Is it too much to think that His petition included not only those around the cross, but also the world of sinful men? Surely not, for are we not all implicated in the death of Christ? Was it not the sin of the world that nailed Him to the cross? At the very moment of His prayer He was dying that the sins of all men might be expiated.
For They Know Not What They Do—the Plea
It seems as though He was trying to find some extenuating circumstance that might lessen their guilt. His sense of justice was unimpaired by His agony, and He apportioned degrees of guilt. This plea limits His “forgive them,” so that Judas and Pilate and some of the religious leaders are excluded from the benefits of His intercession. Unlike the majority, they had not acted in ignorance. Judas and Pilate knew what they were doing. They had both weighed Jesus’ claims and had acted deliberately. But to the minds of many of the Jews, blinded by hatred, Jesus was no more than a blasphemous impostor. He therefore pled that their action was due to ignorance not of the fact of their crime, but of its enormity.
In keeping with our Lord’s plea, Peter later said to his own kinsmen, “I wot that through ignorance ye did it, as did also your rulers” (Acts 3:17). Paul, too, conceded that “had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory” (1 Corinthians 2:8). But their ignorance did not excuse their infamy, or Christ would not have needed to pray, “Forgive them.” Even those who did not know needed forgiveness. “Ignorance may mitigate the criminality of sin, but it never exonerates it. Their ignorance did not make their sin excusable, but it meant that they themselves were forgivable.”
“We must beware of supposing,” wrote Bishop J. C. Ryle, “that ignorance is not blameworthy, and that ignorant persons deserve to be forgiven for their sins. At this rate ignorance would be a desirable thing. All spiritual ignorance is more or less culpable. It is part of man’s sin that He does not know better than he does. On the other hand we cannot fail to observe in Scripture that sins of ignorance are less sinful before God than sins of knowledge, and that no case is so apparently hopeless as that of the man who sins willfully against the light.”
The sacrificial system of the Old Testament and the New Testament commentary on it make it clear that in God’s sight atonement is just as necessary for sins of ignorance as for sins of willfulness. God never scales down His demands to the level of our ignorance. In grace He does have compassion on the ignorant, as Paul himself testified: “I obtained mercy, because I did it ignorantly in unbelief” (1 Timothy 1:13).
So far as the Jews were concerned, theirs was culpable ignorance, for had they not been entrusted with the oracles of God that so clearly identified the Messiah? In the unique life of the Son of Man, they could, if they would, have recognized their own Messiah, of whom the Father had testified, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased” (Matthew 3:17).
The Answer
Our Lord has never offered a prayer that went unanswered. “I knew that thou hearest me always,” He claimed (John 11:42). In this case the answer was not long delayed. Before His body had been committed to the tomb, the centurion in charge of the execution squad had confessed his faith in Christ’s deity. Many see in the three thousand converts on the Day of Pentecost (Acts 2:41) not so much the response to Peter’s eloquence as the answer to Jesus’ prayer. Not long afterwards, “a great company of the priests were obedient to the faith” (Acts 6:7), and doubtless among them some of the very priests who hurried Him to His death.
It may be objected that not all who participated in the crucifixion were forgiven. The answer is that in every act of forgiveness, two persons are involved. Forgiveness must be accepted as well as bestowed. The prayer of Christ made forgiveness available to every sinful man, but not all availed themselves of it.
The Example
It is instructive to note the uniqueness of our Lord here as everywhere else. Stephen, the first Christian martyr, noble though he was, falls far below the standard of his martyr-Lord. Stephen thought first of himself and only then of his enemies. “They stoned Stephen, calling upon God, and saying, Lord Jesus, receive my spirit. And he kneeled down, and cried with a loud voice, Lord, lay not this sin to their charge” (Acts 7:59–60).
On the contrary Jesus’ first prayer was, “Father, forgive them,” and as His final utterance, “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit” (Luke 23:46).
O come, let us adore Him
Christ the Lord.
Three men shared death upon a hill
But only one man died;
A thief and God Himself—Made rendezvous.
Three crosses still
Are borne up Calvary’s hill,
Where sin still lifts them high:
Upon the one, sag broken men
Who, cursing, die;
Another holds the praying thief,
Or those who, penitent as he,
Still find the Christ
Beside them on the tree.MIRIAM LEFEVRE CROUSE