The First Word: “Father, Forgive Them”

This devotional is meant to be read on the first Sunday of Lent.

Father, Forgive Them!, Wayne Forte, 2013. Charcoal and acrylic on rag paper, 30 x 36 in. Private Collection.

Last Words (Tenebrae) from the album Resurrection Letters: Prologue by Andrew Peterson and Ben Shive.

Week Two: The First Word: “Father, Forgive Them”

The Dutch Holocaust survivor and author of The Hiding Place, Corrie ten Boom, told a powerful personal story of forgiveness. Her sister and elderly father had died in the Ravensbrück concentration camp at the savage hands of heartless Nazi butchers. After the war she returned to Germany, bringing Christ’s message of forgiveness to the beleaguered people there, as these German citizens struggled to return to some sense of normalcy. At the conclusion of one of her talks, a man she immediately recognized as her former prison guard came forward and extended his hand as he earnestly asked for her forgiveness. Ten Boom said taking his hand and actually forgiving him was the hardest thing she ever did. But as a result of her faltering grace, Corrie experienced the most intense love she had ever known.

Therapists, ministers, and social workers all encourage the victims they council to forgive those who have hurt them if they themselves want to be made whole. The majority of the world’s religions teach some form of forgiveness. Yet Christ’s teachings on forgiveness are more radical and extreme. Dr. Preston Sprinkle writes, “Jesus’s command to ‘love your enemies’ was the most popular verse in the early church. And enemy-love was the hallmark of the Christian faith. Other religions taught that people should love their neighbors. They even taught forgiveness for those who wronged them. But actually loving your enemy? Only Jesus and his followers took love this far.” Christ’s extraordinary first word from the cross was a prayer to God the Father asking forgiveness for those who had sinned against him.

Outrageous love is at the very center of all true forgiveness and it comes from God. In fact, the unfathomable love of God thrives on forgiveness. Creating humans with free will and then watching them fall into sin required a perfect sacrifice, which Christ fulfilled through His unique death on the cross. Hebrews 9:22 (NIV) reads, “...without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins.” All of us are Christ's crucifiers, desperately needing to be washed in His cleansing blood. When He prayed, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do,” Christ was praying for you and me as well as those who unwittingly condemned and crucified the King of Glory. And now, for Christians who immerse themselves in His continual forgiveness, “Father forgive them” becomes a way of life that consistently repays evil with good.

Poetry:

from “The Synthetic a Priori”
by Kathleen Graber

Yesterday I spoke to a friend who is despairing: back home,
waiting tables, he’s dating a woman whose marriage has only
just come to an end. When he wakes, he discovers he does not
recognize himself. One afternoon, walking home from school,
I hit my best friend in the face with a book. It may well be
that she hit me. Thin pages flew out into the street. More punches
were thrown & I came away bruised. In that book, a novel
by Emily Brontë, the land is violent & unjust & we are violent
& unjust upon it. Even worse, our greatest passions
change nothing at all. Before one of us hit the other,
there must have been a cause, but I can’t recall it, which makes it
seem nonlinear now, &, thus, apocryphal, both impossible
& impossibly real. I failed, though I tried, to offer comfort.

It’s not that our lives don’t resemble our lives. I’ve been alone
so often lately I sometimes catch myself watching myself—
breathing in the fresh spears of rosemary or admiring the shallots,
peeling their translucent wrappers away, centering one on the board,
making the first careful cut, lifting the purple halves.

Before stories, we were too busy for stories, too busy
hunting & suffering to invent the tales of our own
resurrections. Caught out in the kitchen’s brightness last night,
the handle of the skillet cast its simple, perfected form
across the stove—pierced, like the eye of the needle, so that
it can be hung from a hook, as pans, presumably, have always been.

Outside the wind picked up. Thunder. The dog trotted off,
hid her head beneath the chair. But today: a charity sale
at Trinity Chapel & sun on the tar of the buckled walks.
In the cracks, beads of water spin into light. Tell yourself
it’s simple: this is where it’s been heading all along. Tell yourself
something you have no faith in has already begun to occur.

DIVINE GENEROSITY: FATHER FORGIVE THEM

Andrew Peterson’s song, “Tenebrae,” is named after a service that many churches hold on Good Friday, in which the final words of Christ are read sentence by sentence, and the lights in the sanctuary are slowly turned off until the congregation leaves in silence and darkness. It’s not a service I grew up with, but as an adult I find it to be one of the richest moments of the church year.

When you leave a Tenebrae service, the world seems irredeemable. You’ve just witnessed the death of your maker. You feel the absolute injustice of it and your complicity in it, everything seems hopeless and gray. As Kathleen Graber describes in her poem, “the land is violent & unjust & we are violent/& unjust upon it”. You feel what it might have felt like to be a disciple, aware that you had abandoned your Lord and that he is gone now. The light that had illuminated the world and your heart had been replaced by darkness.

Some may ask why it’s necessary or even helpful to stop at Good Friday and live, for a few days, as though Christ’s death had not been swallowed in victory. I think it’s important, first, because it helps me to feel the weight of Christ’s death, something that’s easy to lose in the busyness and the long habit of celebrating Easter year after year. It counteracts the kind of doublethink that has me stopping at the drug store on Good Friday to pick up the last few chocolate eggs to lay out on Easter morning.

I also think it’s necessary because some part of me is always trying not to think about the fact that sin, my sin, meant the light of the world had to be extinguished. I think this has gotten harder in recent years because as a culture we are becoming less sure that forgiveness is necessary or even good. There are some understandable reasons to think this way. We are concerned about the way that forgiveness has been used to let the guilty off or has minimized the suffering of victims. We’ve become less willing to turn a blind eye to abuse the way we have in the past.

In many ways this change has been a good thing, but it comes with costs. If we believe that holding someone accountable means leaving no recourse for reconciliation, it can cut us off from the logic of the gospel. It can also leave us living in fear, lest our own sins are discovered. The core message of the gospel is that we are all unrighteous. We all need a path back into grace, and the only possible path is through the forgiveness of the very one we have offended. It’s only in acknowledging this that we can receive the full reality of Christ’s work for us, that we can come out of hiding and accept the terrible mercy that we need.

Prayer:

Father, forgive us, for we know not what we do. We try so hard to be righteous, and we are so afraid to be found out in our sin. Thank you for sending the Light to expose us in our sin, thank you that in his willing submission to death he made forgiveness possible for even us. Please give us the freedom to accept it.
Amen.

Dr. Janelle Aijian
Associate Director of Torrey Honors College
Associate Professor of Philosophy
Torrey Honors College
Biola University

For more information about the artwork, music, and poetry selected for this day, please visit our website via the link in our bio.