‘Christ’s Seven Last Words’ is a production of the University Church in Oxford, featuring Professor Graham Ward, Regius Professor of Divinity, which will be released each evening throughout Holy Week.
In this first episode, Professor Graham Ward reflects on the words, ‘Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do’.
Music sung by the University Church Choir.
Sound design by Ana-Maria Niculcea
The first of the seven last words: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”
1. There were many people at the foot of the Cross: believers, non-believers, and functionaries carrying out the execution. Christ speaks from His elevated position to the world below Him, his family, his friends and those who have come to taunt. He is never more exposed as strung up on that cross, and neither is the gospel. And yet, even in this event, most particularly in this event, His work as the Mediator between creation and the Creator is dramatically and painfully revealed. This is who He is: the one who mediates. This is what the gospel is: salvation in and through that mediation that now, as if in some moment of tortured rest, arrives at the final stages of its completion. The inner rhythm of His intercession, to us, to God, to us again and back to God is revealed. It wraps the world in a call and response in which all things are submitted to their final, divinised consummation. But the coronation is by thorns. The Word itself is crucified, and we are left with meditating on this last day in which Christ’s suffering and exaltation are inseparable.
I like to think I’m one of the disciples. I like to think I would be among the women at the foot of the cross. We all do. But I am not. I am exposed in Christ’s exposure, and what are revealed is not the endless repetition of little misdemeanours, but the scars I still bear of my deepest betrayals. And always these are betrayals of love; wounds I inflicted that were not loving and that did not keep faith. We know them, the deep ones, because they are unforgettable. We live with certain levels of selfishness and certain levels of compromise, but our human frailty, its pettiness and even banality, is not what I am talking about. I’m talking about those occasions in which I acted, in which I perpetrated, something I cannot forgive myself for doing. We try to rewrite the story, we might even have the opportunity of saying sorry, but the shame does not go away. It won’t go away. On the cross, Christ speaks the first of his seven words: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.” But the things of which I speak were not done in ignorance and forgiveness is not a disinfecting wipe that cleans them away. Forgiving is not forgetting. The wounds will remain, remembered, even when forgiveness by Christ has been received. Just as the wounds on Christ’s body from the crucifixion are not erased with His resurrection. Forgiveness enables us to live with and through them, that we might understand what salvation is and isn’t. If it is a restoring to wholeness, then it is not our human understanding of wholeness. Being healthy, young, fit and well-proportioned is a human projection of wholeness. On the cross, Christ mediates for us a salvation in God that transfigures our human views of mental and physical perfection. We come to the cross bearing what we are, and the wounds are part of that. Through them we too are exalted. In some way. We will never have the security and consolation of closure. But redemption works with that and through that. The cross is the ultimate mediation between creation and our Creator.
