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

Anyone who has followed Jesus for even a little while has had to deal with that chronic, maddening suspicion that it’s not at all what you expected. It starts off nicely.  You pick up a welcome bag and eat a chocolate bar while you read about puppet shows, breakfasts for champions, and ski trips and think this Christianity stuff is pretty great.  But when you really dig into the whole movement, you find some stuff that isn’t as bright and fluffy.  It’s pretty dark actually.  And that darkness culminates today.  I wish I could be more uplifting… I enjoy the chocolate aspect of the faith… but the truth about today must be shared.  There comes a point in our walk of faith that we don’t shy away from this part of the story.  We embrace it for what it is.  Even so, there are times when we ask ourselves, “Am I a fool for getting into this mess?  Does Jesus really know what he is doing?  Why does he go to the trouble of the cross?” 

He seems a little like the professor on Gilligan’s Island.  The Prof can create a two way radio out of coconuts and fashion a generator out of palm trees but he never seems to get around to fixing the hole in the boat.  Jesus has done things no healer has done and he has said things that no other suitable Messiah has suggested and yet we still find ourselves in the predicament of this day… Jesus on the cross.  I feel a little guilty about going first in this vigil.  Our timing today is representative of the time we believe Jesus went through this dying experience years ago.  We can almost hear the nails being driven in his hands and feet.  They pierce our hearing like the disaster sirens that sound in our community when a big storm is brewing.  The beginning of the end is upon us and we gather here… just a few of us… to pay respects, to reflect on the depths of this moment, to find out if we know what we are doing.

In many ways, not much has changed since this occasion on the hill.  Jesus utters his first words from the cross… “Father forgive them, for they know not what they are doing.”  Isn’t that the truth?  It was just another crucifixion that day and those performing the task were just doing their jobs.  It meant more in the days to follow… they would need to do a press conference the following week to say, “Oops… we made a mistake” and then resign from their official positions.  They were in the presence of God’s spirit and skeleton covered in human flesh but they didn’t know it.  I’m not sure we really get it either. 

We sentimentalize this cross business.  We hear Jesus say that we are to pick up and bear our own crosses and so we go to our jewelry boxes and pull out some 14-karat gold symbol to wear around our necks.  The cross had no religious meaning when he said that to his followers… the cross was an image of the worst violence and terror imaginable…not witness wear.  This day would bring meaning to his words.  But we have distanced ourselves from this experience.  It is natural.  Horrific events in history lose their sting after a while.  We are pained to remember the Holocaust, we cringe at the sight of atomic bomb smoke in Hiroshima, you recall where you were when Kennedy got shot, and we can still see the Towers collapse in our minds when we hear those two little numbers: 9/11.  The sting that once ran deep softens and we raise our glasses to their memory, but we don’t share in the suffering much any more.  We don’t put big fliers about this part of the story in the gift bags.  Christians have tried to market it better, however… “Good Friday” we say… “TGIF”… thank God it’s Friday.  It just doesn’t work.  Good Friday is a downer and we don’t really know what to do with it either.  That’s why 200 will worship here today and 2,000 on Easter. Easter is cleaner… it is gift bag worthy.

But we are here and we are curious about these words of Jesus.  Scholars have debated whether or not Jesus actually said “Father forgive them for they know not what they do” as many of the earliest transcripts do not record such a prayer.  But they make sense… they fit his character and I’m willing to give Jesus the benefit of the doubt in this case.  I can hear him offering the prayer in all sincerity.  It was a prayer for “them”…for us…not for himself.  He had already prayed for himself…that was done in the Garden.  “Father, if possible remove this cup from me,” he prayed.  If he was not going to go through with the whole ordeal, he would have backed out a long time ago.  He knew the cross would be a part of his story.  This prayer was one of love for all….from those who put their whole strength into beating him without mercy to those milling about just curious to see a crucifixion.  It’s a prayer for us too for we often fall into the category of “not knowing” and we help muddy the waters of a world gone astray of God’s intentions for us.

The realization of “not knowing” creeps up on us.  We think everything is fine and then we come to realize that all is not okay.  You think your teenager is doing great and then you find a bag of marijuana in their jean pocket when you’re doing the laundry.  Work is going better than you ever remember and then you find a pink slip in your office mailbox.  Things are going well, positive, upbeat, fun even, and then we trip over the cross.

Flannery O’Connor was diagnosed with lupus shortly after completing her first novel.  She came to embrace her illness as a gift that attributed to her vocation as an artist.  Before her death at the age of thirty-nine, she wrote that “our spiritual character is formed as much by what we endure and what is taken from us as it is by our achievements and conscious choices.” 

The cross happens to Jesus… and therefore it happens to us.  We cannot separate ourselves from today, from this suffering Savior.  We come to know that he is the Messiah, not because he rescues us from the suffering we face in life but because he joins us in our suffering and promises not to leave us there alone.   But even still, we don’t understand it all.  We know not what we are doing.  Even O’Connor acknowledged that “people don’t realize how much religion costs.  They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross.”[1]  

We are all trying to figure out what to make of the cross.  Jeremiah Wright, the pastor who presidential hopeful Barack Obama has distanced himself from, is offering one message of what the cross means. Billy Graham offers another suggestion.  Bill Hybels yet another. The pastors of this church stand before you today trying to make sense of this cross as well.  None wants to think we know not what we are doing but in our most honest moments that may be the case.  How do we make sense of this world that seems to crucify goodness over and over again.  We trade hope for hate.  We do not care for the world as we should.  We contaminate the earth.  We pass judgment unfairly and we do not consider the needs of others.  It is excruciating… which is where the word crucifixion comes from: “ex” meaning from and “cruc” meaning the cross.  Excruciating and crucifixion are one in the same and the atrocities of our world, our nation, and our very city are looming on the shadow side of the cross.  We do not always see these things or we choose not to see them.      

In the City on a Hill…surrounding “The Skull”…to those in the City of Hoosiers…nobody seems to know what’s really going on.  Ah, but we know better than that.  Somebody knew.  Maybe they didn’t know at the time, but the time would come and they would know.  The fact that we are gathered today demonstrates that somebody knew.  And as you sit there now, in full view of the cross, you know and knowing is terrifying.  “Knowing” the cross means that something happened and something still needs to happen today.   God is walking in our midst again, leading us, guiding us, working through us to forgive others and perhaps more importantly, forgive and embrace ourselves.

In her book, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith, Anne Lamott writes about a ski trip she took with her friend Sue who was dying of cancer.  Their trip fell during Holy Week which Anne later came to appreciate even more as she reflected on what they shared together.  It was that week where she grew to understand about Sue’s slow pain-filled journey.  On Good Friday they shared communion together in the hotel room where they were staying and she later wrote these words as she recalled the experience:

It’s such a sad day, all loss and cruelty; and all you have to go on is faith that the light shines in the darkness, and nothing, not death, not disease, not even the government, can overcome it.  I hate that you can’t prove it. If I were God, I’d have the answers at the end of the workbook, so you could check to see if you’re on the right track, as you went.  But nooooo.  Darkness is our context, and Easter’s context:  Without it, you couldn’t see the light.  Hope is not about proving anything. It’s choosing to believe this one thing, that love is bigger than any grim bleak crap anyone can throw at us.

After the Good Friday service, [Sue] wanted to show me her legs, the effects of all that skin grafting [that was required in her treatment].  The skin was sort of shocking, wounded and alien as snakeskin. “Wow.” She let me study it awhile.  “I have trouble with my cellulite,” I said.  “Yeah,” she answered, “but this is what me being alive looks like now.”[2]

What does “being alive” look like for you?  On this day, and everyday, as a follower of Christ, being alive means bearing some scars…. nails, sickness, broken relationships, despair.  And it bears some communal scars that we cannot overlook… poverty, bigotry, war.  Being alive on this side of the cross means that we bear our own crosses even as we sort through our gift bags of faith.  We embrace Good Friday even as we shout hallelujah at Easter.  We cannot separate the two.  When we are confused; when we have lost our way; and when we do not know what we are doing… we need to stop and stand before the cross again.  Not the cross we carry in our pockets, not the cross decal we put on our cars, not even the pristine cross that draws our eyes in this sanctuary.  Instead, it is the splintered cross, the one dragged through the dirt by our beaten Savior, the one that bears his sweat and his blood; the one that reminds us that suffering is a part of our story.  It is a gift, in fact, and it’s in the gift bag we find at the cross: a word from Jesus that says, “Take up your cross, and follow me.”