Seven Responses to the Cross: Forgiveness and Mission

A man was awakened in the middle of the night by a phone call. On the other end a frantic, sobbing girl managed to get out the words, “Daddy, I’m pregnant.” He was groggy and stunned but communicated his forgiveness and prayed with her. The next day he and his wife wrote the daughter two letters of counsel and love. Three days later the man received another phone call. His daughter was shocked by the letters, because she was not the one who had called. Some other distraught girl had dialed a wrong number. Nonetheless, the letters were not wasted. Their expressions of unconditional love and forgiveness are now a treasured possession. Here are a few excerpts from the letters: “Though I weep inside, I can’t condemn you, because I sin too. Your transgression is no worse than mine. It’s just different. It all comes from the same sin package you inherited through us. We’re praying much. We love you more than I can say. And I respect you, too, as always. This is a day of testing, but hold our ground we must. God will give us the victory. We’re looking forward to you being at home. Love, Dad.”1

These very first words of Jesus Christ from the cross, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” should impact us with their full intensity for both the substance of their message and their preeminence as the first of the seven statements. With these words, Jesus extends forgiveness to the crowd that a week earlier had cheered His arrival, but now mocked Him and demanded His death. He just offered forgiveness to the Jewish leaders who had orchestrated this heinous premeditated act of injustice. Jesus has just extended forgiveness to the very Roman guards who drove in the spikes and now gambled for His cloak. He has just extended forgiveness to you and me. The realization and acceptance of His words of forgiveness is the doorway to the restoration of relationship with our Holy God. In response to these powerful words, we must cry out, “Father, I accept Your forgiveness and I extend forgiveness to myself and others.”

First, we need to extend forgiveness to ourselves. We need to experience the freedom from the shame of the past. Jesus looked at the woman caught in the act of adultery and in the absence of her accusers says, “Then neither do I condemn you, Go now and leave your life of sin” (John 8:21). Jesus had every right to condemn her. She had clearly violated His law. He had every right to stone her; there were the mandated two witnesses to her sin. He had every right to reject her; she had chosen an unworthy lifestyle. But Jesus forgave her. Like this woman, all of us have missed the mark set for us by our Heavenly Father. All of us have been caught in the act and stand before Christ without defense. His desire is not to have stones thrown at us, not even those that are self-inflicted. Many of us suffer from the effects of depression, anger directed inward, from which we need to be set free. Christ, however, calls us to see ourselves as a person of value, so valuable that Christ sacrificed himself for us. We need to accept the forgiveness Christ offers for our past mistakes, hurts upon ourselves and others, and out and out sins. Jesus awaits each and every one of us on the beach with a meal like He did with Simon Peter to offer hope, reconciliation, and a new calling and purpose. Oswald Chambers writes of the holy believer, “Sanctification means to be intensely focused on God’s point of view.”2 This includes God’s view of us. We must see ourselves through the eyes of love our Creator has for us. What true joy it is to know that we are loved, accepted and free from the past that weighed us down. Those to whom Christ has set free are free indeed.

Second, we need to extend forgiveness to those who have wronged us and caused us great pain. Life is often painful and the source has been carried out by the hand of others selfishly seeking their own agenda. We, however, must still forgive as Christ forgave us. Corrie ten Boom, the Dutch survivor of a Nazi concentration camp, found herself face to face with one of her former prison guards following a service at which she was the featured speaker. She wanted to hate him, but the power of Christ’s forgiveness overcame her. She extended her hand and offered fellowship and forgiveness to him, a now saved former Nazi. God performed something supernatural in her and He can do it in each of us. Prior to this event, when Corrie ten Boon had struggled with this thing called forgiveness, she had sought the help of a kindly pastor. He responded that up in the church’s tower was a bell which was rung by pulling on a rope. The pastor said, that once someone pulled on the bell to make it ring, if they let go of the rope the bell would continue to ring slower and slower until it would stop and be silent. He believed that when we forgive, we take our hand off of the rope and even though our angry thoughts keep coming back to us for a while, eventually they will grow silent within us and forgiveness will have its completed work. Our act of forgiveness may need to be extended to the parent who abandoned us before we could ever get to know them or the one who heaped abuse or unrealistic expectations upon us that stole the joy of childhood from us. It may be those that bullied us as children or the mate that ran from their vows. The fallen earth that we live in brings with it much pain and much disappointment, but we don’t have to be controlled or driven by it. We must take hold of Christ’s forgiveness and offer it to a hurtful and hurting world. Doing this allows us to transcend the pain and grow beyond it in healing and renewal. Forgiveness opens the doorway to joy and true agape love. We are most Christ-like when we forgive and move on.

Third, we are called to proclaim the message of forgiveness to a world that has been robbed of its hope and security. I was told as a child in elementary school that one day in the future, every home would have a computer and we would have so much leisure time that the average American would only need to work twenty hours a week. Technology would reward us in a myriad of ways. Well, there are PCs in most homes today, but we find ourselves working more than in the past. So much for the technological seers of my youth! We are a stressed out, overworked and exhausted generation. We really do need forgiveness and healing. We must let others know about the real hope and forgiveness that can be found in Jesus Christ alone.
Jesus turns to the repentant criminal and says, “I tell you the truth, today you will be with me in paradise.” We must cry out in response, “I accept my part of the mission to share the hope of the gospel.” This is the true mission of the Church. We must reach out with the hope and power of the gospel and help others to receive Jesus Christ as Savior and become growing, active disciples. This is our calling and we must not neglect it. For too long the Church has focused on secondary issues, and created a false reality and ignored the real spiritual needs in the world.

In 1977 Nicholas Scotti of San Francisco was flying home to his native Italy to visit relatives. En route, the plane made a one-hour fuel stop at Kennedy Airport in New York. Thinking he had already arrived in Italy, Mr. Scotti went to the nearest police officer and asked directions, in Italian, to the nearest bus depot. The policeman, originally from Naples, replied in perfect Italian. Mr. Scotti then spent the next twelve hours believing he was in Italy and was amazed at the number of “American tourists” and how much his homeland had changed. Worried relatives notified police who finally located him and returned Mr. Scotti to San Francisco. They were never able to convince Mr. Scotti that he had not been in Italy!3 So often the Church has been busy initiating programs that leave them wondering why the world won’t come into the building. They will exclaim, “There must be something wrong with them!” Christ has commissioned us to “go and make disciples.” We must reach out to a hurting, dying world through proclamation, through service and through compassion.

Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea had become followers of Jesus Christ. As members of the Jewish ruling class a public declaration of their faith would have resulted in a loss of their societal standing. Remember, Nicodemus had come to talk with Jesus at night to avoid detection. Both men had tried to live out their faith in the shadows and in secrecy. They had not agreed with the Sanhedrin, but they had not taken a public stand for Jesus. One cannot truly be a disciple and remain in the shadows. Following the crucifixion, they made their faith public by going to Pilate and requesting the sacrificed body of our Lord. They risked their very lives by identifying themselves as followers of The Way to the Roman authorities. It was, however, finally time to come out of the shadows and declare their faith in Jesus. Joseph provided the tomb and Nicodemus provided seventy-five pounds of precious burial ointment and spices. The time has come for all true disciples of Jesus Christ to come out of the shadows and declare their faith in our Lord. In response to Christ’s words on the cross, we must respond in both word and deed.

1. Raymond McHenry, Something To Think About. Hendrickson Publishers, Inc., Peabody, Massachusetts, 1998. p. 104.

2. SermonIllustrations.com, “forgiveness” accessed September 2009.

3. Stephen Pile, The Incomplete Book of Failures. E. P. Dutton Publishers, New York, 1979. p. 27.