A Little OP for Holy Monday

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

THIS was not the first mistake Roman justice had made…. Other innocent men had been crucified and had protested their innocence through lips swollen with agony….But here was some-thing new on a Roman cross….No cry of protest or of pain…Only a prayer that those who were doing this thing to Him might be forgiven…When men crucify their God, they can expect to hear something different…Nor had a voice like this been heard at Athens or Rome or Delphi….Other men had reached up into the Unknown; now God Himself was reaching into the Known.


His first word is His last prayer….It sweeps up to heaven burdened as no other prayer in the history of men…Burdened with sin…All the loneliness and hate and terror of the centuries before and after…A man’s sin is after all limited by the time and space allotted to him…He is completely sin, but he has only seventy years and a few square miles to work out his sinfulness… By the cross, however, all sin is swept up and placed on a hill be-yond Jerusalem…Here totals meet…All sin, total sin; and all for-giveness, total forgiveness…The sum of man’s years and man’s shame and the greater sum of God’s forgiveness and God’s love…

This is our faith…A religion without forgiveness is only the ghost of religion which haunts the grave of dead faith and lost hope…No wisdom, no culture, no philosophy can give answer to the first need of man, the need of a hand so strong that it can break down the wall of separation between the two worlds in which we must live and the need of a heart so great that it can take all his sins into itself and still have room for forgiveness… Surely one day this year—Good Friday—these two matters, sin and forgiveness, should be remembered …With the breathlessness of approaching death, a voice too long unheard cries in the shadow of the crosses we have raised for ourselves and others: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”… O.P. Kretzmann *The Pilgrim*