“Father forgive them; for they know not what they are doing” Luke 23:34

The first of the final words, as Jesus is dying on the cross. Did he fully understand how he was fulfilling God’s covenant with Israel and writing a new one with his own blood? I’m reading this book “Cross-Shattered Christ” by Stanley Hauerwas and it’s freakin blowing my mind. It is so easy to assume we have heard and understood something as fundamental as the cross, but then some author or friend challenges the very things we have understood as fundamental. Like what this book says about our personal buddy Jesus

“I think nothing is more destructive for our ability to confess that the crucified Jesus is Lord than the sentimentality that grips so much that passes for Christianity in our day. Sentimentality is the attempt to make the gospel conform to our needs, to make Jesus Christ our ‘personal’ savior, to make the suffering of Christ on the cross but an instant of general unavoidable suffering.”

That pretty much rips at the heart of most sermons I have heard on the cross. So as I take this Lent to ponder the cross, I am challenged to see what it meant for God. How did the crucifixion impact the Trinity? There is something much deeper going on than Jesus dying for me (as warm and fuzzy as that makes me feel). And if this death is not about me, than neither is this first statement made from the cross (although Hauerwas makes the point that this we most likely not what was first said).

“They don’t know what their doing”, yes they do their crucifying some Jew who ruffled too many feathers. In one sense, they absolutely know what they are doing, yet in some other they don’t. Maybe we still don’t really know what they were doing. What does it mean to kill God? When Jesus died, in some way God died and that death was taken up into the Trinity and in some way is the means to our redemption. Which of course only gets more confusing when Jeuus later cries out “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me”, words that seemingly reveal a God who has a horrible problem.

So why has the Christian tradition chosen these words as the first, what about them helps us as we journey towards that final moment? Maybe it has to do with our human desire to make everything about us, about our personal conversion moment, about our faith, about our sins, about our transformed life. What if that is not the main point. Here we see Jesus crying to his father to forgive people who have not asked for forgiveness. Jesus alone has the right to ask the father to forgive us. We get to look at the cross, but we can not enter into it because it was an act that was between a son and a father. We see the Trinitarian life being lived out in front of us, but we can not fully grasp it. All we can do is realize that Jesus alone has the right to ask the Father to forgive us, and that even in suffering he longs to see us forgiven.

Jesus forgive us for us for our narcissistic theology and worldview.