Father, Forgive Them - A Sermon for Good Friday

Every year as Good Friday approaches I look over the passages I preached from and sermons I’ve preached on previous Good Fridays as the start of a process to try and discern what the word is that God wants me to bring this year.  In 2014 I preached from Matthew’s account of Good Friday and the spiritual pain and significance of the cross.  Last year I preached from Mark’s account, so this year it felt right to look at Luke’s account of the last day of Jesus’ life.

As I read through Luke’s account one phrase jumped out at me above all others: Jesus’ words as they crucified him; “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”

Exactly who was Jesus asking God to forgive?

Was Jesus asking his Father to forgive the Roman soldiers who had just forced him to march, bleeding and in pain through the streets of Jerusalem and then nailed him to the cross?

Was Jesus asking his Heavenly Father to forgive Pontius Pilate who had sentenced him to death on the cross?

Was Jesus asking for forgiveness for the crowds who had shouted “crucify him” and the Jewish leaders who had put him through a farce of a trial?

Was Jesus asking Father God to forgive Judas who betrayed him?

I think that the answer is yes to all these questions.  Jesus was asking God to forgive all those who were involved in his death.  He was sticking firmly to the principle he laid down many times and particularly in the Lord’s Prayer, “forgiven us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.”

Of course Jesus committed no sins during his entire life; he went to the cross in a state of sinless perfection: but he still forgave others and forgave them immediately.

I have left one group of people out who Jesus also forgave that day.  You and me and anybody else in the whole of human history who has sinned against God; who has rebelled against God and his revealed word, who has broken God’s law of love.  It was because of our sin that Jesus went to the cross, your sin and my sin and the sin of every other human being. 

Our sin separates us from God.   When we sin, we move ourselves away from God, away from his loving presence.  It isn’t God who moves, it is us who moves away from God.  Our only way back to God is for us to understand that God is willing to forgive our sins, all of them, no matter how much we have sinned or how badly we have sinned.

I was recently speaking to a colleague in another Circuit who went to see a lady, a faithful member of his congregation, who was in the terminal stages of multiple cancers.  Thirty years before she’d had an affair with a married man who subsequently left his wife and married her.  She was worried that she would be condemned to hell because she was still married to the man, even though she recognized that what she had done was a sin in the eyes of God.  My friend was able to reassure her that God had indeed forgiven her sin of adultery; she could be sure that she was forgiven because Jesus had given his life on the cross for us all to assure us of the forgiveness of sins.

“He died that we might be forgiven.
He died to make us good,
that we might go at last to heaven,
saved by his precious blood.”

When our Lord Jesus said, ““Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing”, he was forgiving us as well.

Forgiveness was on Jesus’ lips a second time as he hung on the cross.  Two thieves hung with him, one on either side, and one of them mocked him, “Aren’t you the Messiah?  Save yourself and us.”

The second thief rebuked the first saying, “We are punished justly, for we are getting what our deeds deserve.  But this man has done nothing wrong.”  That same thief then said to Jesus, “Remember me when you come into your Kingdom.”

Jesus replied, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.”  Only those whose sins are forgiven can come into the presence of God in paradise.  Jesus was telling the second thief that his sins had been forgiven.

The cross is all about forgiveness for sinners.

There is another sign of forgiveness in Luke’s account of the crucifixion.  We read that, “darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon, for the sun stopped shining.  And the curtain of the temple was torn in two.  Jesus called out in a loud voice, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.”  When he said this he breathed his last.

The curtain of the temple was torn in two and straight afterwards Jesus committed his spirit to God.  This is not a coincidence.

The curtain referred to is the curtain that covered the Holy of Holies, the place at the center of the Temple where the very presence of God was believed to be.  Only the High Priest could enter the Holy of Holies, and then only once a year after special ritual preparation to ensure that he was ritually clean.  Because of their sinful nature, nobody else was allowed to pass beyond the curtain.  The curtain was a physical representation of the barrier that sin places between us and God.

When Jesus died on the cross everything changed.  He died that we might be forgiven for our sins and as a symbol that his death accomplished all that he wanted it to the curtain was torn in two.  Jesus’ death ensured that there would be no barriers between us and God.

“Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”

You are forgiven and I am forgiven: we are all forgiven for our sins and can be in permanent and everlasting relationship with God because Jesus died for us all.

“Is crucified for me and you
to bring us rebels back to God:
believe, believe the record true,
we all are saved by Jesus’ blood!
Pardon for all flows from his side:
my Lord, my Love is crucified.”