Rev. Nick Cheeck
Isaiah 53: 1-6 and Luke 23: 26-34
After Jesus is falsely accused, condemned, and beaten, he is sentenced to death. He is then forced to carry his method of execution through town… up a hill and to a location outside of Jerusalem. As he drags the cross… an angry mob hurls objects and insults his way. Once he finally reaches Calvary, he is nailed to the cross and hung up for all to see as they continue their mocking.
The cross of Christ is unpleasant. It exemplifies everything that is wrong with our humanity. The cross shows us what we are capable of. The violence of the cross exposes our hatred for one another. The brutality of the cross reveals our hunger to hurt others and cause pain. The cruelty of the cross exposes our lack of empathy towards our neighbors. The injustice of the cross reveals our apathetic silence when we witness prejudice and discrimination. The cross… it unwraps the sin we have hiding away… deep within the crevasses of our hearts and minds…. And it throws it in our face. It says “look… don’t you see… from his head, his hands, his feet…sorrow and love flow mingled down. Look… don’t you see… on this wondrous cross… on which the prince of glory is dying. Don’t you see… the sin of the world… and the Son of God… together… hanging on a tree?
As he slowly suffocates, Jesus feels the full weight of the sin of the world. And the first word he cries out is not protest. Not condemnation. Not even vindication. It is forgiveness. “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” It doesn’t make sense. It’s not what we would expect… and it is certainly not what most of us would say if we were in his place. No one standing at the foot of that cross would have imagined those words coming from his mouth. We might understand cursing; we might understand anger. We might understand a cry for justice. But forgiveness? It conflicts with our human instincts… it conflicts with a world that continually retaliates… a world that leans toward payback, and revenge.
If we’re honest, Jesus’ response to the betrayal before him is almost … too gracious… too holy…. And if we were to quickly move through this scene, we might be tempted to overly Christianize it. We might assume that it was easy for Jesus to say those words… that he was somehow floating safely above the pain. But… Jesus was human, too, just like the rest of us. He felt real anger toward His accusers, frustration with unjust systems… and sorrow for the sin of the world. Even days before the cross… in the garden of Gethsemane, Jesus prays… “God, take this cup away…I don’t want to drink it.”
Yes, I don’t think it was as easy for Jesus to say the word… forgive… just like it is not easy for us to say the word in response to the people, circumstances, or systems that harm us or those we love.
On June 17, 2015, a young white supremacist walked into Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina. What began as a Wednesday night Bible study ended in horror: nine parishioners were murdered, including Rev. Sharon Risher’s mother, Ethel Lance, two of her cousins, and a childhood friend. As a hospital chaplain and ordained minister, Sharon knew the theology of forgiveness. But in the immediate aftermath, she could not feel it. The initial shock gave way to anger, disbelief, and a profound struggle with what faith seemed to demand. “All those tools just kind of vanished,” she said. “I was not a grieving chaplain. I was a grieving daughter.”
Sharon’s journey toward forgiveness was not linear or simple. She recalls sitting through a sermon during the trial about instant forgiveness, as if it were something as easy as eating breakfast or taking a breath. That was not her experience. At one point, she admitted she wanted the shooter gone, even though she opposed the death penalty, because hate still gripped her heart. She later wrote, “The journey of moving toward forgiveness has been hard, lonely, and complicated. I was shocked, I was angry, thinking how could this be? … Forgive? Who had time to even digest what had happened? I wanted and needed people to know that that wasn’t how everybody felt.”
Time went by… and all Sharon could really do was pray…through the devastation, through the heartache, through the emptiness. Eventually, even her prayers did make their way to the shooter… She prayed for God to help her find forgiveness in some way. Her story also refuses the Christian myth of instant reconciliation. It tells the truth: forgiveness is not a quick religious checkbox; it is a long, honest wrestling with grief, anger, and faith. It doesn’t happen overnight… and our individual journeys with forgiveness are unique and often complex. And forgiveness may take on different forms. For Sharon, it took on the form of advocacy. Today, she speaks across the country to end gun violence. She also speaks about what it means to move toward forgiveness without erasing pain or excusing wrongdoing. What keeps her moving forward, she says, is a deep desire to “help other people know that hate won’t win.”
Theologian Fleming Rutledge reminds us that the cross is God’s judgment on sin before it is ever comfort to sinners. In other words, the act of forgiveness isn’t cheap grace… it actually boldly tells the truth. Forgiveness names what is wrong in the world. The gospels don’t sanitize this scene. There is cruelty. There is injustice. There is state-sponsored violence carried out in public view… and Jesus’s prayer is spoken in the midst of the spilling of blood. Jesus’ very plea for forgiveness exposes the violence and sin before us. The forgiveness spoken from the cross does not minimize evil; it confronts it. It names it. It shines a light upon it. At the same time, and equally important, the cross also shields us from another temptation, the temptation to dehumanize the other. It shields us from the temptation to convince ourselves that the perpetrators in our story are monsters. It shields us from saying they are the bad guys… they are evil… and we are the good guys. Certainly… I’m not the reason Jesus is on the cross… they are.
What Jesus prayed in that moment is important. Looking up to the sky… He does not pray, “Father, destroy them.” He does not say, “Father, give them what they deserve.” He does not pray, “Father, they are beyond redemption.” He prays, “Father, forgive them.” Jesus’ prayer does not deny the ugliness. It also doesn’t erase accountability. But it does refuse to reduce human beings to their worst acts…. It insists that those who drove the nails are still human, just like the rest of us.
The cross of Christ does not draw a line between the holy and the unholy. The cross of Christ does not separate us from one another… it actually does the opposite. The cross joins us together – together in sin… and together in grace. Jesus went to the cross because of sinners AND for sinners.
In “Faith Seeking Understanding,” Christian theologian and professor at Princeton Theological Seminary, Daniel L. Migliore writes about the cross. “Whenever the message of the cross of Christ is rightly preached and heard with repentance, whenever people of faith gather at the Lord’s Table to celebrate new life in Jesus Christ and its promise of a new creation, whenever forgiveness is offered to others…the deadly circle of violence and counter-violence is broken, and the rule of violence begins to yield to a new world of solidarity, compassion, and peace. The cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ inscribes deeply into human history the truth that God’s compassion is greater than the murderous passions of our world, that God’s glory can and does shine even in the deepest night of human savagery; that God’s forgiving love is greater than our often paralyzing awareness of guilt, that God’s way of life is greater than our way of death.”
Church, on this cross, we see the awfulness of humanity along with the graciousness of God. We see beauty and ugliness… and through it all…we encounter a God who so loved the world… that he gave us an only son. A God who in the face of our screaming sin… says boldly… forgive… forgive…