Forgiveness Makes Me Shudder . . . Then I Smile / Luke 23:33-43
Proper 29, Year C; Downsville Baptist Church; 25 November 2001
November 25th 2001, the last day of the church year. Next Sunday we begin a new year. Once again we begin anticipating the reception of God’s promise of Immanuel, that God will come to us and be with us. However, before we begin again, the final Sunday of this church year calls upon us to recognize Jesus Christ as our King. The irony of this morning’s passage is that it presents our king in a position we never expect to find a king.
Jesus Christ, our king, has been taken to the outskirts of Jerusalem. The valley of Gehenna is nearby where one can smell the stench of burning refuse and the nauseating human waste that the breeze from the Mediterranean brings to a nearby hill called Golgotha. This is the place of execution, the place where crosses are erected and criminals are put to death. There are shredded clothes and pieces of bone scattered about the hill, tossed to and fro by ravaging dogs that typically tore the bodies off of the crosses at Golgotha. Our king has been sentenced as a criminal and he hangs on a cross centered between two other crucifixes where other criminals are about to meet the end of their lives. At this point Jesus looks like a pitiful king, a defeated monarch who has seemingly lost his kingdom. Those who loved him are simply hoping he will die soon so that his misery and humiliation will be over. The king has no more loyal subjects. His enemies mock him. His cross timbered death chamber is surrounded by Roman soldiers who are throwing dice to decide who gets his clothes. Gentiles and Jews alike are attempting to outdo one another with their merciless jeers. One Pharisee elbows another and whispers, “He saved others. Why doesn’t he save himself if he is God’s anointed one?” The one who utters this remark is simply saying aloud what everybody else is thinking, “What good is a king who can heal leprosy and blindness, cast out demons, and raise people from the dead if he can’t even rescue himself from a cross and bring down his enemies once and for all?”
Jesus is not really a king in these people’s eyes, and we need to be honest with ourselves. If we had been present at that gruesome scene at Golgotha, we wouldn’t consider Jesus much of a king either. One of the favorite pranks of the soldiers was to take a stick with a sponge at the end supposedly soaked in good wine and offer it up as some relief to the suffering crucified ones. The funny part of the prank, or so they thought, was that when the dying man drank from the sponge, he would discover that his captors had given him distasteful, stomach-turning, vinegar wine. John’s gospel shares with us that Jesus requested something to drink, and so the soldiers decided to play their prank on failing Messiah. As they extend the sponge to his lips, the mock him once more. “Hey Jew King, save yourself!” The Jews present really didn’t care for this much. They were glad to be rid of Jesus, but Pilate had the audacity to hang a sign above Jesus’ cross that declared him as King of the Jews. The Pharisees and Sadducees had complained to Pilate that Jesus was not their king, but Pilate wouldn’t listen to them. They wanted Jesus killed on grounds of sedition, that he was claiming to be the Christ and that he had authority from God. Therefore, Pilate thought the sign on the cross was a fitting way to make it clear why Jesus was being killed.
Amidst all the arguing over whether or not Jesus should have a sign over his cross, amidst all the jeering and mocking of this poor Nazarean carpenter and countryside prophet, amidst all of Jesus agony with thorns in his brow, spikes of metal driven through his limbs, splinters slicing into his back which had already been ripped open by the cat of nine tails, this suffocating laughing stock of a King utters something that makes absolutely no sense . . . or does it? “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do!”
Oh, Jesus was a King alright, a King like the world had never seen before, like the world hasn’t seen since, and like the world will not see until his return. Kings are supposed to command powers that protect them and when others attack them, kings are supposed to seek vengeance. Kings aren’t supposed to suffer. They are supposed to inflict suffering upon others. Yet this king suffers immensely, and instead of calling out for revenge against his enemies, he asks God to forgive them. Not only does Jesus asks God to forgive his torturers, but he asks this forgiveness for them on the grounds that they don’t know what they are doing! Has Jesus gone insane? Prussian king Frederick the Great was once touring a Berlin prison. The prisoners fell on their knees before him to proclaim their innocence-except for one man, who remained silent. Frederick called to him, "Why are you here?" “Armed robbery, Your Majesty,” was the reply. “And are you guilty?” “Yes indeed, Your Majesty, I deserve my punishment.” Frederick then summoned the jailer and ordered him, “Release this guilty wretch at once. I will not have him kept in this prison where he will corrupt all the fine innocent people who occupy it.” Now this is the kind of forgiveness that we can admire, the kind of forgiveness we think is descriptive of how God forgives us. When we finally quit making excuses for what we’ve done, when we finally quit pretending to be innocence, when we finally repent, God will forgive us just like Frederick the Great forgave and released the prisoner who admitted his guilt. However, Jesus requests that God forgive those who are sinning against him not because they are sorry, not even because they are pretending to be innocent, but in spite of the fact that they really don’t see the wrong in what they are doing. We read this text and we think that these Roman soldiers and Pharisees know exactly what they are doing. The Roman soldier who drove spikes into the wrists and ankles of Christ knew what he was doing. Pilate knew he was sentencing a man to death. The crowd surrounding the cross knew they were acting hatefully when they spat upon this one who had healed their sons and daughters.
If these people knew what they were doing, what could Jesus possibly mean when he asks the father to forgive them for they know not what they are doing? As always, when we focus in on the small picture, Jesus confronts us with the bigger picture of what God is doing in our lives. Jesus is not merely addressing the horrific actions of these individuals but he is speaking to the state of existence in which they live and in which you and I live, the state of Sin. We are never sinners because we disobey God’s commands. We disobey God’s commands because we are in a state of sin, and we are utterly helpless in that state of sin. We are so helpless in fact that Jesus declares the same words from the cross to the Father for each of us. He pleads with God to forgive us because we don’t know what we are doing. Oh, we know we do some bad things and we can probably list what some of those are; but none of us has an idea of just how backward and distorted we are from what we were intended to be in this state of sin. In such a state of sin, we can’t even pray for our own forgiveness. Jesus must pray that prayer for us . . . and he has. He has prayed for the Father’s forgiveness to abound in all of our lives. And for this reason forgiveness makes me shudder because Jesus words from the cross make it clear just how desperate our situation is. This divine forgiveness shakes me in the very foundation of my beings because it confronts me with the reality that I don’t even know just how sorry I should be for my sins, that I am so estranged from God in my state of sin that all my crying out for forgiveness is inadequate because I don’t even know what forgiveness is. None of us knows what forgiveness truly is until Jesus revealed forgiveness to us from the cross. The mother of a nine-year-old boy named Mark received a phone call in the middle of the afternoon. It was the teacher from her son’s school. “Mrs. Smith, something unusual happened today in your son’s third grade class. Your son did something that surprised me so much that I thought you should know about it immediately.” That was not a particularly comforting thing to say to her. The teacher continued, “Nothing like this has happened in all my years of teaching. This morning I was teaching a lesson on creative writing. And as I always do, I tell the story of the ant and the grasshopper: The ant works hard all summer and stores up plenty of food. But the grasshopper plays all summer and does no work.” “Then winter comes. The grasshopper begins to starve because he has no food. So he begs, Please Mr. Ant, you have so much food. Please let me eat, too.” Then I say, “Boys and girls, your job is to write the end of the story.” Your son, Mark, raised his hand: Teacher, may I draw a picture? “Well, yes, Mark, if you like, you may draw a picture. But first you must write the ending to the story.” “As in all the years past, most of the students said the ant shared his food through the winter, and both the ant and the grasshopper lived. A few children wrote, ‘No, Mr. Grasshopper. You should have worked in the summer. Now, I have just enough food for myself. So the ant lived and the grasshopper died.’ But your son ended the story in a way different from any other child, ever. He wrote, “So the ant gave all of his food to the grasshopper; and the grasshopper lived through the winter. But the ant died.” And the picture? At the bottom of the page, Mark had drawn three crosses. This is the forgiveness that Jesus grants, not some sort of nice gesture as we would imagine it. Jesus didn’t merely share the knowledge of what forgiveness is through his teaching. In that case our understanding might have been improved, but we still wouldn’t have quite got it . . . just as many of us still don’t get it today. No, Jesus knew that the only way we would be able to receive forgiveness in the measure that we need forgiveness and in the measure God desires to bestow forgiveness upon us was to pour forgiveness out upon us from the cross. And so we can pretend if we so desire that we know what sinners we are and in so doing meet God halfway on the journey toward forgiveness. We can pretend like we really aren’t that blighted by sin and in so doing meet God halfway on the journey toward forgiveness. Or we can surrender to the reality that we have no idea how badly we need forgiveness realizing that we have done nothing to meet God halfway but that God has completed the entire journey into each of our hearts through Jesus Christ. God has forgiven us to the extent that we need forgiveness and that is an extent beyond what we can imagine.
As Jesus hangs upon the cross, it doesn’t seem like anybody gets this. I would like to see one humble Pharisee with a twinkle in his eye thank Jesus for forgiveness, the twinkle in the eye meaning that he gets it. Or maybe one widow falling face first to the ground beneath the cross with tears of understanding in her eye. But there is no humble Pharisee, no enlightened widow. Instead we have one prisoner who joins the crowd in mocking the suffering king hanging upon the cross next to him. And then we have another criminal who I think actually gets what’s going on . . . at least in part. He warns the other prisoner to shut his mouth. Why? Because this prisoner realizes that he is dying for his crimes; whereas the one next to him is dying innocently. Jesus will die innocently, but not without a purpose; and this man dying next to Jesus wants to receive that purpose. He wants Jesus to remember him in the kingdom. He wants the forgiveness Jesus has to offer, and he doesn’t realize how badly he needs it; but he also realizes he doesn’t have to know because it is given freely and in abundance. It’s like the story of the boy who was shooting rocks with a slingshot. He could never hit his target. As he was in his Grandma’s backyard one day, h spied her pet duck. On impulse h took aim and let fly. The stone hit, and the duck was dead. “The boy panicked and hid the bird in the woodpile, only to look up and se his sister watching. After lunch that day, Grandma told Sally to help with the dishes. Sally responded, “Johnny told me he wanted to help in the kitchen today. Didn’t you Johnny?” And she whispered to him, “Remember the duck!” So, Johnny did the dishes. What choice did he have? For the next several weeks he was at the sink often. Sometimes for his duty, sometimes for his sin. “Remember the duck,” Sally would whisper when he objected. So weary of the chore, he decided that any punishment would be better than washing more dishes, so he confessed to killing duck. “I know, Johnny,” his Grandma said, giving him a hug. “I was standing at the window and saw the whole thing. Because I love you, I forgave you. I wondered how long you would let Sally make a slave out of you.” He’d been pardoned, but he thought he was guilty. Why? He had listened to the words of his accuser. How many “Sally’s” will you let keep you from the forgiveness that is offered in Christ? Continue wallowing in guilt for past mistakes and you are saying that God’s forgiveness isn’t enough. Continue believing that you know how badly you need grace and therefore you have somehow met God halfway and you still don’t really know what forgiveness is. However, surrender completely to the God of grace admitting that you need forgiveness more than you can imagine—and by the way, we need to mean that because we do need forgiveness more than we can imagine—and there you will discover that you have already been forgiven. Yes, forgiveness to the extent that God grants forgiveness through Christ makes me shudder because I need it more than I know; but I need not shudder long because that which I need so badly has been graciously given. I can cease to shudder in my plight as a sinner and turn to heaven and smile with assurance that I am a child of God. I pray you will join me.
