We Don't Know What We Are Doing

Reflections on Luke 23:34

Then Jesus said, “Father forgive them; 

for they do not know what they are doing.” 

There are occasionally moments in life that transcend time. Moments when the boundaries of past, present and future melt away and all that was and all that is and all that will be, come together on equal footing, without the advantage of hindsight or the excuse of ignorance. In those moments, even if only for a moment, truth is revealed.  The truths that these events reveal are often of the bittersweet variety. The type of truth that strips humanity of pretense as if everything we have spent our lives hiding and denying has been laid bare for all to see. These moments are deeply personal and yet fully communal for the truths that they reveal speak to every human heart and every human community.

The cross is such a moment.   

It doesn’t matter the year or the place, the culture or the creed, Good Friday takes us to a place, to a moment when time, as we understand it, is put on hold … suspended … transcended. The cross takes us to a time when ultimate goodness is brutally executed by the misguided good intentions of every human heart … yours, mine, theirs. 

When Jesus speaks these words from the cross they hang in the air over every generation.  It is as if Jesus, in the midst of unthinkable personal suffering, sees all of history, past, present and future laid out before him and speaks words of mercy and of judgment.

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

Isn’t that the God-awful truth that we all long to deny … we don’t know what we are doing.

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There is a powerful scene in a movie that was released in the 1992 entitled, The Power of One. It is the story of a white English boy growing up in South Africa during WWII.  It is a long and complex story, far too complex for me to recount. But there is a scene midway through the movie that takes place in a South African prison camp. There native blacks, African men of various tribes, all prisoners are brought together to perform a concert for a visiting British official.  It is to be an impressive display of the jail master’s ability to tame the so-called savages, the oppressor lording over the oppressed. It is a scene that that has been played out over and over again over the course of human history every time one person or one group seeks to dominate another.

In this scene the concert is conducted by the young English boy who is moved with compassion for the plight of these native African prisoners, men who have been treated like animals … beaten … spat upon … starved … ridiculed … tortured emotionally and physically. The young boy, inspired by the observation of one of the prisoners, a man by the name of Geel Pete, uses his words as the lyric to a song to be performed, a song sung in their native language. It is a song that cuts to the heart of the awful truth about their captors. 

They run this way.  They run that way.  They are confused.  They are afraid.  They are cowards.

It is a simple lyric, sung as a round. The South African harmonies of men’s voices rise from the bare ground on which they sit, huddled under torn woolen blankets, enclosed behind barbed wire fences, with the guns of Afrikaner guards pointed at them. They run this way.  They run that way.  They are confused.  They are afraid.  They are cowards. It is beautiful.  It is awful.  It is true.  But the truth of their words is lost on an audience that refuses to hear.  An audience who in fact cannot hear a language their do not understand, a language they never deemed worthy of study or acknowledgment, a language of savages.  And even as the music fills the night air, the truth of its message is being lived out just yards away as in the shadows a prison guard beats Geel Pete to death.

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We do not know what we are doing.  We run this way.  We run that way.  We are confused.  We are afraid.  We are cowards.

We say we want peace … so we start wars. We do not know what we are doing.

We say that money isn’t everything, but then we pour our energy in to the making and squandering of more and more money. We do not know what we are doing.

We long to be loved, but we keep all those closest to us at a distance. We do not know what we are doing.

We break our promises and blame others for our failings. We do not know what we are doing.

We condemn what we fear and hate what we do not understand. We do not know what we are doing.

We seek to major in the minors, holding on to petty grievances and neglect the major joys and blessings that hold us together as the human family. We do not know what we are doing.

We chase after what we have yet to attain and we ignore what we already posses. We do not know what we are doing.

Jesus’ first words from the cross reach far beyond a hillside outside of Jerusalem. They reach back to the Garden of Eden when Eve and then Adam reached for equality with God. Jesus’ words extend forward to slavery in the United States and apartheid in South Africa, to the Jewish Holocaust, and modern-day fanatical terrorism both religious and otherwise. At the same time Jesus’ words reach out to grade school classrooms where one student, singled out by his classmates, is teased and bullied without mercy, and to American college campuses where rapists return to class and victims are shamed. Jesus words’ reach out to our nation’s invisible poor and those whose who refuse to see them, and to victims of racism and those infected by its hatred. Jesus’ words condemn American Christianity and its obsession with who we can and who we can't love. Jesus’ words expose all our frantic and misguided attempts to claim purity and orthodoxy while sitting in judgment of our Christian brothers and sisters who are seeking more truth and more light. Jesus looks at the whole of human history, start to finish, and sees us as truly are. He sees us as we run this way and that way. He sees us in our confusion. He sees the fear that motivates us.  He sees that we are cowards. And he passes this judgment … “they do not know what they are doing.”

What is to be the sentence for our crime? An eye for an eye? A taste of our own medicine? A turning of the tables. No. 

“Father forgive them.”   

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There are occasionally in life moments that transcend time. In those moments, even if only for a moment, truth is revealed. The cross is such a time. And the truth is that in that moment and in its memory we stand exposed. The truth is that in that moment and in its memory we stand forgiven.