And Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” And they cast lots to divide his garments. Luke 23:34.
There is something mind boggling about this text. Jesus is being crucified, horribly tortured and beaten and His response is to ask the Father to forgive His adversaries. The “argument” from Jesus is that they do not know what they are doing. Our gut reaction might be harsh! “What does Jesus mean they do not know what they are doing!! Really!” Regardless of their ignorance of the very identity of the one they are crucifying; the moral evil is staggering.
I think they were very aware of what they were doing. How can Jesus appear to let this level of “evil” be accredited to “not knowing what they are doing.” Jesus had spent countless times revealing Himself in His teaching, His miracles, and good works. His ministry was about revealing God’s messiah to His people, Israel. How can Jesus make even the slightest inuendo that the deliberate, intentional, and vindictive hatred of these people toward Him, be mitigated by, “they don’t really understand what they are doing.”.
On the other hand, obviously they don’t have any clue what they are doing. If Jesus unveiled Himself to these people as He did with the disciples in the transfiguration narrative in Matthew 17, and they truly understood He was God in the flesh, then I suspect none of the horrors of the crucifixion would have developed. That, of course, would leave us in a perilous predicament that would produce overwhelming despair and grief. Our deepest need would remain unsolved and unfixable.
Was Jesus’ request answered by the Father. This would be the million-dollar question in this narrative. Did the Father actually forgive these people? On the one hand, it would appear to create the problem of universalism. The idea is that because Christ died, and possibly affirmed by His own declaration, some would conclude that if the Father forgave those who were literally putting His very Son to death, how could He exclude anyone from being forgiven. If the Father unilaterally acts upon His Son’s request, it will seem to imply instant and automatic forgiveness for everyone. But that would seem to contradict the very nature of believing God and the having faith in the message of the gospel. There are too many passages that call humanity to repent and believe in Christ – Acts 17:30-31.
The theological basis for God to forgive anyone is the cross of Christ. I believe that Christ is communicating with the Father and making a declaration of the full nature of what His death will accomplish. His plea with the Father does not automatically secure “forgiveness” for all the people around Him. His declaration opens the door that even those who are afflicting this horrible evil upon Him can be forgiven. From our myopic and finite perspective this is hard to see. Certainly, we agree that Christ’s sacrifice is sufficient for anyone and everyone who places their faith in Christ. But on occasion there are a few evil people that we (secretly) feel are simply too evil to be forgiven.
What this declaration does mean is that anyone, no matter how evil their heart and actions, can be forgiven. This is not as much a “personal request” in the sense that Jesus was asking the Father to immediately forgive those specific human beings for their personal evil towards Jesus. One might say, at least from the perspective of the Romans soldiers, they were just doing their job and Jesus was, in their eyes, just another criminal being put to death. But I believe Jesus is declaring that a holy God, is now ready and willing to forgive sinful human beings in a unique manner because of the sacrifice of His own Son. Even these people, as much as their actions and attitude demonstrate the darkest evil and malevolence, can be forgiven by the Father because of the Son. The cross was the turning point from a sacrificial system that could never take away sins (Heb. 10:1-4), to a savior who would remove sin permanently because of the sufficiency of the death of Christ (Heb. 10:11-14). This reality may be alluded to immediately after Jesus commits His spirit to the Father, the centurion suddenly makes this declaration, “Certainly this man was innocent.” This may not assume he placed faith in Christ, but something in the fabric of this horror changed his perspective of Jesus.
Pastor Brad
