Grace Under Pressure: Father, Forgive Them

Coping with stress

We spend billions to cope with stress every year. In fact, stress is one of the hidden costs in all the money we spend on health care. Physical ailments that have seemingly innocent causes have stress as a factor, which means the innocent causes aren’t so innocent. One study found that hip and knee injuries that cite weight as a factor, went deeper to find that the weight was the result of stress.

Stress is what’s going on on the inside, but we feel the effect of it on the outside. Even our terminology is impacted by stress.

Have you ever noticed that we often speak of stress in physical terms?

“That project was a pain in the neck.”

“When I think about what happened, it makes me sick to my stomach.”

“He has been a thorn in my side for a long time.”

“I feel like everyone is stepping on my toes.”

“That issue has been a real headache for me.”

“I’m carrying too much responsibility on my shoulders.”

Even in our expressions, we understand the link between stress and our bodies. Stress can have a physical effect. Too much stress can make you sick. But it’s all a vicious cycle. The physical issues themselves cause stress. When you’re hurting for a long time, it can wear you down mentally and emotionally.

Jesus and Stress

We see this connection between stress and the physical body more than Jesus. When it comes to thinking about Jesus, I think we lose sight of the very real fact of God becoming man. God entered a world full of pain. God had a body that felt pain and felt stress. From the moment, God became a baby in the manger, God experienced pain and stress, all for the world’s sins. In fact, your salvation and my salvation has a stake on Jesus dying for our sins… and that means we have a stake in Jesus navigating the pain and the stress during his lifetime and ministry. And then, at the height of it all, Jesus, the Creator of the world, suffers physically unlike any human before or since. Jesus died on a cross, which was an instrument of torture. He’s beaten, wears a crown of thorns pressed into his skull, nails through his hands, nudity.. which in the Middle Eastern spring, would be cold, slow suffocation till the lungs collapse. All of it, absolute torture.

What’s amazing about all of this is that in the midst of all this pain and physical stress, Jesus displays total grace. His response to the people around him is all grace.. he is considerate, he is thinking about others who are experiencing this with him, and is still determined to carry out his mission to save his people from their sins.

That doesn’t sound like us, does it? How do you think you would have done in those moments? When we get hammered with stress, we can be at our worst. When the pressure is on, people know it. I can be irritable. I can get short. I can get really blunt and sharp. People feel it when I am under stress. I cause stress for others when I’m dealing with stress.

It’s not like Jesus didn’t have his chance to get sarcastic and snippy with those inflicting pain and suffering. And oh, by the way, this is the Creator of the World. It’s not like he didn’t have reason to get short and insulting. He could have unleashed fire and water like we see happening to people in the rest of the Bible. We know he could have done so. But he didn’t.

The Tone of Grace

This morning, we consider the first of Jesus’ seven statements from the cross. Recorded in Luke’s biography of Jesus, we have the first words Jesus spoke while he was dying. Like everything else in these biographies, Jesus likely had said other things during that time. But these are the ones his biographers choose to give us.

I have no doubt these are the first words he speaks up on that hillside. His first words set the tone for everything that happens in the next few hours. And unbelievably, Jesus’ tone is a tone of grace.

Here’s what Jesus says:

Luke 23:34 “Father, forgive them, because they do not know what they are doing.”

There’s a zillion things Jesus could have said here or could have prayed for here. Of everything He could have said, He prayed for His Father to forgive them. That’s grace. He could have prayed for strength. He could have prayed for glory. He could have prayed for power. He prays for forgiveness. That’s grace.

Who’s They?

There’s a fascinating piece to this though, that we run right through it. Who is “they” here? I know we tend to immediately apply this to the executioners. But Luke frames it this way in his biography for a reason. It could be the executioners, the soldiers standing guard. There’s also the crowd around Jesus who had turned against Jesus, yelling, “Crucify Him!” We also find here in this story that the religious leaders are there. They could be them. There’s also the political leaders responsible for Jesus being crucified. All of those are possible answers.

The great missionary Paul picks up the “they” in this statement. He writes a letter to a church like ours in Cornith, and in that letter he says:

1 Corinthians 2:8 “None of the rulers of this age knew this wisdom, because if they had known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.”

In their ignorance, all of these people had Jesus’ blood on their hands.

But there is one more possibility for “they know not what they do.” It could very well refer to all of humanity. You. Me. He could have been talking about us. Our sins drove those nails into His hands. We’re the ones who have absolutely no clue as to what we do. Especially in those moments when we react out of stress. When the pressure is mounting and we blow up. When we make disastrous decisions that we’d never make when conditions are normal and we’re thinking straight. In so many cases, we sin, not knowing what we do.

Jesus Forgives

And yet here’s Jesus, when the whole world is against him, and the pressure is higher than a pressure cooker… this Creator of the World who doesn’t deserve any of this.. here’s Jesus pleading with His Father… forgive them.

That’s also something else that tends to go right over our heads in this story.

Father, forgive them.

You know, throughout his ministry, we have more than a few examples of Jesus forgiving people their sins. One of those examples is one we talk about often here at The Table. Dr. Luke writes about a woman who is the town sinner earlier in his biography of Jesus. She crashes the party and wipes Jesus feet with perfume and her tears. The religious leaders who were having dinner with Jesus point out that Jesus is allowing a scandalous woman to wipe his feet, and Jesus points out that she is doing this because she knows how much she has been forgiven. And then he says this to the woman:

Luke 7:48 “Then he said to her, “Your sins are forgiven.”

It’s a great moment. It’s a great story about forgiveness. But those guys that had been criticizing her and Jesus doubled down:

Luke 7:49 “Those who were at the table with him began to say among themselves, “Who is this man who even forgives sins?”

Jesus was born to save his people from their sins and this became part of his ministry… to forgive people their sins, even before He died for those sins.

Jesus Intercedes

But on the cross, there’s a change. Jesus doesn’t forgive the sins, but asks His Father to do the forgiving. Jesus is interceding for those who need forgiveness. Jesus is both dying for and interceding for those in need of forgiveness. Jesus loves those he is dying for. They have his forgiveness in his intercession for them. Christ’s forgiveness is unconditional.

Even in those moments when we’re blind to sins, Jesus has us covered. Even when we act out of stress instead of acting out of love, Jesus is speaking to the Father in our defense and giving us forgiveness again.

John, who was at the cross, writes this about Jesus and his forgiveness and his intercession:

1 John 2:1-2 “if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father—Jesus Christ the righteous one. He himself is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours, but also for those of the whole world.”

Jesus teaches what intercession looks like. People might sin against you and never feel sorry. They might be convinced of their rightness, even when God knows they’re wrong. The thing you and I have to remember: I’m almost sure I’ve sinned against someone and haven’t felt sorry for it. So before I go feeling slighted that someone did me wrong and they don’t feel sorry for it… I’ve done it, I’ll do it again. Not that I want to. But too often we come to this bit of forgiveness stuff as if we’re never ever guilty of the same stuff that people do to us. I am constantly in need of the same forgiveness as the other guy. I’m no better just because I think I’ve repented and he hasn’t. My repentance doesn’t earn forgiveness. It’s doesn’t earn brownie points with Jesus.

There are people who are oblivious to the harm they’ve caused us and we’re all bent because they don’t consider repenting. I get that. But that’s the beauty of forgiveness and intercession. We forgive and we intercede precisely because we know that we need forgiveness and intercession from Jesus all of the time, just like they do. We may never have the chance to see or hear repentance or enjoy the reconciliation with others. But we can both forgive them and intercede for others, including our enemies. We want those who don’t look like us, talk like us, act like us, spend like us, or vote like us to experience the forgiveness they have already been given in Christ. We want them to have what we have.

If we have this attitude of forgiveness and intercession, we’re on the road to relieving our stress. We leave the stress with Jesus. We leave the offense with Jesus. We leave it all in God’s hands. And we find our rest in Jesus.

Let’s Pray.

This Table is where Jesus meets you for your stress. Forgiveness. Free and Unbound. Father, forgive them. They don’t know what they are doing. And we’re all here to receive from Jesus. We’ve spent the past week doing a lot of stuff that we didn’t know what we were doing… in sin. And Jesus meets us here. You’re forgiven. Taste the forgiveness. For you.