“Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do.”

Few hours after our Lord Jesus Christ was nailed on the cross and hanging there until His death at around 3 o’clock in the afternoon what was our Lord Jesus Christ thinking and feeling at the time?

Does all the recollection of His childhood, adolescent life, baptism by St. John the Baptist, temptation in the dessert, the calling of all his apostles, the first miracles at Cana and all the other miracles, all His teaching and preaching inside the synagogue and with the multitude or crowd of peoples and every small details of His Life ministry keep on flashing back on His mind?

Our Lord Jesus Christ uttered the word “forgive them”. To whom is our Lord Jesus Christ referring to when he say “them”? Is he referring to the Pharisees, the High Priest and the Elders, as well as Pilate and Herod, Judas Iscariot who betrayed Him, all the Jews who shouted “Crucify Him!”, Peter who denied Him three times and the rest of humanity for our individual and collective sins?

Forgive them of what? of sins? What is sin? It’s said to be the transgressions of God’s law as exemplified in the Ten Commandments or The Decalogue. There’s also the beautiful teaching and preaching of our Lord Jesus Christ in The Beatitudes.

Forgiveness

   In the Lord’s Prayer there is the part which says “Forgive us for our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” True to His own teaching and preaching, instead of hating those people who has something to do directly or indirectly with His Passion and Death, or better still the whole of humanity, our Lord Jesus Christ ask for forgiveness for us from the heavenly Father.

This implies that our Heavenly Father is a forgiving Father in the same way that our Lord Jesus Christ is a forgiving Son of God.

In the forgiveness of our sins by God, there is the reconciliation of the relationship between Humanity and Divinity as if we are once again going back to our original nature that we are created in the image and likeness of God.

For us human being sometimes the hardest thing to do is to forgive others who might have offended us or done us something wrong. Even if we forgive others it is also sometimes hard to forget the bad things done to us by others whatever it is.

There is the saying that to forgive is divine and it is true for if we forgive others, we are already transcending the confine of our human limitation and our narrow-mindedness.

Which is easy to do: to forgive others or to harbor that hatred for others in our heart? Forgiving others gives us this sense of well-being and of course we can breathe easily and give us an easy feeling, a peace in our mind and heart.

Not Knowing What We Are Doing?

The Passion and Death of our Lord Jesus Christ shows and exemplify all our human weaknesses, but above all, it points to our spiritual blindness and our lack of capacity to nurture Faith, Hope and Charity towards God and towards our fellow men.

Our Lord Jesus Christ says about the Second Greatest Commandments “Thou shall love your neighbor as you love yourself.” We do not think anything bad about the person we love don’t we? And of course we don’t put anyone we love to death don’t we?

Further, we don’t crucify the one we love don’t we? This is perhaps the reason why our Lord Jesus Christ as depicted in so many paintings is always pointing to His Heart—amores vincit omnia, love indeed conquers all!

Our Lord Jesus Christ heart is flowing with love for us.