[AI translation] The last words of the deceased are particularly long remembered by their relatives. Dying always has a special sanctity and dignity. The words spoken are always solemn, quiet, sincere and true. - Jesus spoke seven times while dying in terrible agony on the cross. All seven sayings are very short, just a few words. It could not have been anything else in such unbearable physical and spiritual suffering. There is no rhetoric, only the bare minimum. But even if a sentence is short, it is extremely serious, because it contains almost the whole meaning of the suffering of the Redeemer. In that very first sentence of his, which I have just read, how much love, what overflowing grace, what power and strength, flow from his words! Even agonized in the strangling embrace of approaching death, he still pleads for God's forgiving grace for his murderers: "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do!" This last prayer of the dying Jesus for the people reveals to us two great truths: on the one hand, a very devastating truth, and on the other, a very uplifting truth.What is infinitely devastating is what he says: "They know not what they do!" And yet, at first sight, this sounds as if it were a saving circumstance for the sin of the people who mock, humiliate, torture, physically and spiritually torture Jesus, who take his life. Yet in my heart it sounds more like an accusation. I almost shuddered when I thought about what it really means to say "they don't know what they are doing"! It made me realise that we humans really don't know what the sin is that we are so full of in our lives. We don't know, we have no idea what we are doing, what a terrible thing we are doing when we do something sinful, however small it may seem. For example, just making a snide remark to someone, just passing on a little gossip, maybe not maliciously, but thoughtlessly hurting someone, and not knowing what wound you have inflicted on their soul.
Once upon a time, in a school, a teacher said to a skinny little child who was hovering around him: "What are you doing here, you little runt? Many years later, a melancholy young man committed suicide. That was all he wrote in his suicide note: "What does a little pipsqueak like you want in this life?! - The teacher didn't know what he had done when he uttered a word of derision. He didn't know he was going to kill a man! Do we know that sin is such a terrible, such a deadly poison?! It may be a word you have long forgotten, but one carries it in one's heart like a thorn; and like a thorn, it can fester, it can do harm you may not have meant!
It happened a few years ago that a little rumour was started against someone here in the church. Today no one talks about it anymore. It's gone, it's not interesting anymore. But that someone was kicked out of this church, and every other church, forever by that rumor! He hasn't been led back since! Whoever started that rumor then, and whoever was munching on it, didn't know what they were doing. Perhaps he would say now what so many have said: if I had known it would come to this, I would not have done it! But many a time has one wailed thus: 'Oh, if I had known that I would thus have my unkindness to my old parent returned to my children; that I would thus see my youthful sin in my grandchild, I would have been more careful... Oh, but what Jesus says here on the cross is painfully true: They know not what they do!
Here, on Calvary, it is something even more serious. These people who here accuse Jesus, condemn him, abuse him, torture him to death: they don't really know who this Jesus is with whom they are doing all this evil. If they knew that this is the one they spit in the face of, the one they beat with a whip, the one whose head they stab with a crown of thorns, the one whose hands and feet they nail to the cross, the one whose executioners they become; if they knew that this wretched one is really the Son of God, the image of the invisible God on earth, they might shrink back from their own evil. They might not dare to lay hands on God. They might not dare to trample on the heart of God! After all, the murder of this Jesus is the most terrible evil that men could ever commit on earth. For here is a murder of God! If they had known!... But they didn't know. Neither the disciples when they abandoned Jesus, nor the chief priests when they demanded his death, nor Pilate when he pronounced the death sentence on him, nor the crowd when they jeered around the cross, nor the Roman soldiers who carried out the sentence - no one! They did not know what they were doing! They were doing a terrible evil, but how great that evil really was, they did not know!
And here sin is revealed in all its horror, for we do not know that in fact all sin - from the smallest to the greatest - is in the end the murder of God! We have just been singing a Good Friday hymn; I wonder which of us had a tremor in our hearts when we uttered these words: 'All the pains and pains I have brought upon you, O Lord, for this suffering I am accused in my soul... - For so it is, literally! Every sin we commit: the slap in the face of Jesus; every behaviour that alienates people from God: the mockery of Jesus. Every hurt we cause someone: a wound to the soul of Jesus; every harshness, anger, hatred towards anyone: a lashing of Jesus' body. Every lie is a nail in his hand. Every denial of Christian love from anyone: a crucifixion of Jesus over and over again. Remember, Jesus said, "What you have done to men, you have done to me. Yes, it is true: the Jesus who would love with our heart, help with our hand, comfort with our word, how often we bind him, we silence him, we bury him, we eliminate him from daily life! Look at your hand - I look at my hand: this hand struck Jesus in the face, this hand drove nails into his hands and feet, this hand hurts Jesus, the heart of God, and in vain do we wash our hands like Pilate - this hand is bloody with the blood of Jesus! This is what we do not know when we do something vile. Yet even a secular poet has felt it: in a poem published in the latest issue of Life and Literature, he says: "Rejoice, what we and we alone understand: we were able to torture God, to kill, to roll a stone on the tomb of Him who dies for us again and again!" The worst of all evils! And not knowing what we are doing is not an excuse, but an aggravating circumstance, because it means that our vision is so impaired that we have no idea how terrible a sin is. This is where it is exposed at Calvary.
And there is something else Jesus says: "They know not what they do!" No son of man knows, Jesus alone knows - but then He really knows - what it means to be punished for that sin, what it means to suffer the wrath of God's judgment for the wickedness that man does for a lifetime. We trivialize sin and do not take God's punitive judgment seriously. Well, here in the hellish suffering and death of Jesus, try to see what God punishes that little lie, that little selfishness, that little wickedness, hatred, impurity - the sin that is in your life and in mine! Jesus took our sins upon Himself, and there on the cross He languished in our name - as an accused before the judgment seat of God - the punishment of our sins was visited upon Him in that agonizing death. As soon as we took the condemnation, the torment that awaits the unatoned sinner after death, exposed to all the torments of the power of darkness. Here, on Calvary, was not a general execution, as there have been many on this earth, but here was one who went through hell in this crucifixion. Here Jesus took the punishment for others, in place of others, took the judgment from others. People who, when they commit a sin, don't know what they are doing. They have no idea of the fatal consequences of what they do before the judgment seat of God!
If we have now grasped something of the devastating truth of the second part of Jesus' prayer - "They know not what they do" - then we can truly marvel that Jesus nevertheless pleads, "Father, forgive them!" - Can this be forgiven? After all, we have just seen that on the cross of Calvary all the sins of the world reached their climax by smashing right into the face of God! If this can be forgiven, then everything can be forgiven! The forgiveness of sin is the most divine act of God. The forgiveness of sins is God's greatest miracle. It is truly a miracle like creation, because there it is about creating something that is not. And in the forgiveness of sins, it is about abolishing, destroying something that is. And that is the miracle Jesus is pleading for. It is not just a theatrical exclamation, not just a pious sigh, but a promise in itself, a pledge of full, unlimited divine forgiveness. It is itself an undeserved, uplifting, consoling forgiveness, since it was asked for us by Jesus, who suffered for us.
Forgive them... it does not say what. So that all is included: all the variants, the whole sum of all the iniquities, the sins committed against Him, that is, against God and man, all the transgressions of all time. So it includes everyone: the chief priests, the soldiers, the Jews, the Romans, the onlookers, the scoffers - everyone. Everyone who has ever offended God and man. And if you now, among those who know not what they do, have confessed yourself in repentance, now include your own name in this "them" and receive forgiveness for your sins! Jesus pleaded for you there on the cross. That is why, that is the only reason why I can say with a sincere, grateful heart in the Sermon on the Mount of Faith: I believe - yes, I believe - in the forgiveness of my sins!
The Holy Land, where the physical events of redemption took place, is still visited by many tourists and pilgrims. In his excellent book, Morton describes how, in the so-called Chapel of the Holy Sepulchre, where tradition says Jesus' body lay, he saw an old Bulgarian peasant with a stooped back kneeling in a toprongy dress and heavy, huge felt shoes. He had come on a pilgrim boat, and had probably been saving for this trip all his life. He knelt in front of the marble slab and kissed it again and again, while tears streamed down the deep creases of his face and trickled down onto the stone. His big, rough two hands, his black nails broken, touched the marble with a soft, caressing motion, then he folded his hands in prayer and made the sign of the cross. He prayed aloud, his voice trembling. 'Never in my life have I seen such happiness,' Morton writes, 'never in my life have I seen such peace, such contentment, with a light clearly readable on a human face. The old man fell again to his knees and turned to the grave. He did not wish to go. He did not know what to do in his faith, in his devotion. With his large, black, battered hands, he stroked the marble with the tenderness of a child's silken hair...
I wondered. Even today, almost two thousand years later, does someone still make such a tearful pilgrimage to the place where Jesus died? What power there must be in that death! One might say: a sick infatuation. But the wonderful thing is that if someone makes a pilgrimage to Golgotha today in spirit - not physically, like this Bulgarian peasant, but in true faith - he will also experience this blissful, uplifting divine power. Because Jesus crucified: Jesus risen! In whose presence the heart is at rest, freed from its sins, the embracing love of God is felt. There, at the cross, a miracle happens to man: something dies in him - at least the old self, whose sins committed in ignorance have been punished here, is mortally wounded in him - and a new self, a new life, is born in him, which now begins to know what it is doing and tries - by the power of redemption - to do otherwise.
If only you had come here now, to the Good Friday service, not as a tourist, just looking around to say that you have been there - but as a pilgrim, sharing in the blessings of what happened there, on Calvary!
Amen.
Date: Good Friday, 3 April 1969