Episode 415: Holy Week Special - Selected Reading from Thank God It's Friday by William Willimon

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Welcome to Voices in My Head, the official podcast of me, Rick Lee James. I'm a recording artist, a singer, a songwriter, an author, a worship leader, and an ordained minister in the Church of the Nazarene. The Voices in My Head podcast is where I discuss music, movies, books, pop culture, theology, and more with friends, colleagues, and sometimes just by myself. Now make sure to let me know what you think of today's episode by leaving me a review on iTunes or by tweeting at me @RickLeeJames on Twitter. And please join my mailing list at rickleejames.com where you can receive an email every time a new episode is released. By the way, in case you're interested in a daily dose of kindness and encouragement beyond this podcast, I also run the Twitter account @MrRogersSay, where I post daily quotes from Fred Rogers, one of the voices in my head. Well, I guess that's it for the intro, so sit back, relax, and listen to the latest episode of Voices in My Head.

Welcome back to Voices in My Head, everyone. As always, I am your host, Rick Lee James, and I am very glad that you're here with us this week for this Holy Week edition of Voices in My Head. This week I'm going to be sharing with you from one of my favorite books for Holy Week. This is from my friend and friend of the show William Willimon's book Thank God It's Friday: Encountering the Seven Last Words from the Cross. If you have not read this book, it really is one, one of William Willimon's greatest books. He has so many incredible books, it's really hard to just say like this is one of his greatest books because they are really all so good, and you really couldn't just like pick one and say this is his best one because they are all so good. And as you know, if you've listened to the episodes when we've had him on here before, they are all so great. But this book in particular is great for Holy Week because it focuses in on the 7 last words from the cross. And I've always wondered why they call them the 7 last words because really they're the, the 7 last phrases of Jesus, and they are a source of reflection. They are a challenge for the church. They require us to search our soul when we think about the statements that Jesus made from the cross. And really, these are reflections that William Willimon makes in this book. And so what I'm going to do today is really just share the opening chapter with you on this show in hopes that you will go out and find a copy of the book for yourself. You can find it on Kindle, and for me, that is the easiest way to get the book. That is where I am going to be reading from here. I am going to definitely leave a link in the show notes where you can find a copy of the book and buy a copy for yourself. I hope you will do that. It is a great way to reflect on Holy Week. Maybe you can use it during Holy Week this year. Maybe each day take a different chapter chapter and read it through. I know as this podcast releases, it is Wednesday, so we are about halfway through Holy Week, but that does not mean you cannot still take some time throughout the rest of the week and spend some time with these words. So today on Voices in My Head podcast, we are going to focus in on the first word, which is again the first phrase that Jesus uses from the cross. Here it is from the book from William Willemijn, "Thank God It's Friday: Encountering the Seven Last Words from the Cross." The first word: Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. From Luke 23:32-38. Father, forgive. Jesus speaks the first word not to us, but to God. For 3 years he has spoken to us, preached, taught, exhorted, instructed us. Now, as we have hung him up to die, Jesus, turning from us, speaks to his Father: Father, forgive. Having been those who once were directly addressed, we are rendered into bystanders. Overhearers of a conversation deep in the heart of the Trinity. Now at the end, the once adoring crowds are gone. No one is left to listen to Jesus but the Father. And the word he speaks is a word that only God can dare say to God, for only God can forgive. We have no right to pray this prayer. For Jesus. And what does the Son say to the Father? Of all the things he might pray, he prays, "Father, forgive. They know not what they do." I've spent most of my life trying to figure out what I'm doing. Isn't that how they defined human growth in that child development class? Human growth is the process of increasing self-awareness. We begin with naked instinct, mechanical reaction, hormonal response, but gradually, with puberty and a college education, gradually we learn where we are and what we're doing. We learn to seek pleasure and to avoid pain. We learn to avoid certain unproductive, dysfunctional behavior and to engage in more fruitful, beneficial conduct, and now possessed with a keen sense of self-awareness, we move reflectively, knowledgeably about the world, our world, that through our knowledge we have made our own. Yeah, right. I took a course in seminary in Christian ethics. Christian ethics is the weighing of various ethical options, and through careful rational deliberation discerning the one right action, and then pursuing that option in a prudential way. Yeah, right. I made an A in that course, in Rational Ethical Deliberation, only to flunk when I tried actually to do that in life. One little problem with our attempts to be thoughtful, prudent, reflective, and careful people We're also the ones who on a Friday, just rationally following the best of Western jurisprudence, tortured to death the very Son of God. Why? Well, we didn't know what we were doing. We did not then know, do not now know, will never know what we're doing. We're all stumbling in the dark. I once knew a man who on sentry duty one dark night in France in the Second World War was surprised to get a perfect shot of a German soldier coming toward him down a country road. When he went up to examine the body, he discovered it to be one of his best friends from another unit. He did not seem to be much consoled by my, but you didn't know what you were doing. Meeting with my stockbroker about my pension, I watched as he pulled out the charts and graphs. I asked, "Does this mean that you have now elevated stock brokerage from the level of casino gambling?" He said, "No, it means that I am giving you the illusion that I really know what I'm doing." But we don't know what we're doing. It's a fact, not an excuse. Most of our malice is exercised without a forethought. Roman soldiers, Jewish Sanhedrin, raving mob, how did each of you decide to murder God's Son? Well, we thought we were standing up for law and order. We believed we were supporting good biblical values, We were just soldiers obeying orders. We had this gut feeling. We weren't actually in charge of the proceedings. It was done by the government. Everything was done in accordance with the best legal advice. In truth, it is as Jesus names it: "They don't know what they're doing." Wasn't that what the tempter promised us back in the good garden? There was the tree of knowledge. Eat of the fruit of that tree and our eyes will be opened. We will know, that is, we will be just like God. For what is it that separates us from God? God knows everything, but we are severely limited in our knowledge. At Satan's invitation, we took, we ate, And our eyes were opened. And what did we see? Our genitals? Our eyes were opened and we knew only one new thing: we are naked and afraid. Our newfangled knowledge only exposed our vulnerability. Matthew 25:31-46, Parable of the Great Judgment. One of the nastiest little stories Jesus ever told. 21:31 At the end the Son of man shall ascend the throne, and judge all the ethnoi, all the peoples. 21:32 On his left the goats, who having not done good to the least of these, having not recognized the incognito Christ among the poor, the imprisoned, and the oppressed, are punished. 21:33 On the judge's right the sheep, Those having reached out to the least of these are eternally rewarded. Isn't it good to know the answers to the questions on the final exam? There will be judgment at the end, but on what basis? I was in jail and you visited me. Here's the shock. In Jesus' story, the sheep talk exactly like the goats. Same words, same reaction to the judgment of the Son of Man. "Lord, when did we see you?" The sheep and the goats talk the same. Now, you expect the goats to be stupid. They didn't go to Sunday school, don't use gender-inclusive pronouns for God, don't volunteer for Habitat for Humanity. But in Jesus' story, the sheep are as dumb as the goats. The sheep say the same thing as the goats: "Lord, when did we see you?" The blessed sheep knew enough to visit the prisoner, give the cup of cold water, and so on, but they don't see Jesus any more clearly than the unethical, apathetic goats. They're all stupid. When it comes to seeing Jesus, in the end, you can't tell a sheep from a goat. Both have nothing more to say for themselves before the throne of judgment than the dumb, "Lord, when did we see you?" Jesus' story of judgment is more than a peek at ethically correct behavior. It's a concluding symphonic— it's a concluding symphony of ignorance. If you thought that Jesus waited for 25 chapters before finally at the end letting us sheep in on the inside scoop? Forget it. The disciples who have had such difficulty figuring out Jesus for 24 chapters, in the end are just as stupid as they were at the beginning. Following Jesus since chapter 4, they go from dumb to even dumber by chapter 25. We're all amateurs in regard to Jesus. There is no way to commandeer and to command the sovereign judgments of a righteous God. Surely there is some way to be enough in the know, to be politically progressive enough, to ensure that we are on the right side, that we can bypass God's judgment because we so knowledgeably see Jesus? No, we don't know what we're doing. There is a reach for you and for me. In the days after Hurricane Katrina, a much-raised question was, "How could a good God do such a thing?" God's got some explaining to do for this one. In our theology, theodicy, the justification of the ways of God to humanity, is the only game in town. Trouble is, the Bible has no interest in theodicy, particularly in trying to explain natural disasters to humanity. Natural disasters are the preoccupation of biology rather than the Bible. In the Bible, it's more homodicy, justifying sinful humanity to God. It's human sin, not hurricanes, that the Bible's big— that's the Bible's big concern. 2 Corinthians 5:19 doesn't say Christ was in the world reconciling God to the world, but rather God was in Christ reconciling the world to God. How typical of us to think that it's God in the dock, God who has got to be justified to creative, compassionate folk like us. How typical, until we get to the cross. And don't you find it curious that the first word The very first word that Jesus speaks in agony on the cross is, "Father, forgive?" Such blood, violence, injustice, crushed bone and ripped sinews, the hands nailed to the wood, with all the possible words of recrimination, condemnation, and accusation, the first thing Jesus says is, "Father, forgive?" Earlier, he commanded us to forgive our enemies and to pray for those who persecute us. I can't tell you how long it's been since I've uttered a really good prayer for the soul of Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden. On the cross, Jesus dares to pray for his worst enemies, the main foes of his good news for us. How curious of Jesus to unite ignorance and forgiveness. I usually think of ignorance as the enemy of forgiveness. I say, forgiveness is fine as long as the perpetrator first knows and then admits that what he did was wrong. First sorrowful, knowledgeable repentance, then secondary grace, gracious forgiveness, right? Yet here from the cross is preemptive forgiveness. We begin with forgiveness. Jesus' first word is forgiveness. It's as if when God the Father began creating the world, the first word was not "Let there be light," but rather, "Let there be forgiveness." There will be no new world No order out of chaos, no life from death, no new liaison between us and God without forgiveness first. Forgiveness is the first step, the bridge towards us that only God can build. The first word into our darkness is "Father, forgive." Father, forgive must always be the first word between us and God because of our sin and because of God's eternal quest to have us. Forgiveness is what it costs God to be with people like us who, every time God reaches out to us in love, beat God away. Here on the cross, God the Father had two possibilities, the way I see it. One, God could abandon us. God could have said, "Alright, that's enough." I did everything possible to reach toward them, embrace them, save them, bring them toward Myself, but when they stoop to killing My Son, that's it. God could have abandoned us at this moment. Or two, God the Father could have abandoned God the Son, handed Him over into our sinful hands. God could have left the Son to hang there as the hapless, helpless victim of our evil. But these were never real options for God if God were to continue to be the God who is revealed to us in Scripture. God the Father cannot be separated from God the Son. God the Father stays with the Son and in the suffering and horror gets us in the bargain. God the Father stays with us and gets a crucified Son. The unity of the Trinity is maintained—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—and in doing, the Father and the Holy Spirit take on the suffering of the Son. The Father, of course, could not have abandoned the Son without abandoning who the Father really is. So the Father maintains the life of the Trinity by uniting with us through massive forgiveness. For there is no way for God the Father and God the Holy Spirit to be with God the Son, the Incarnate Word, without being with us, murderers of God. There, in forgiving from the cross, Jesus is only doing what he did throughout his ministry. And the Father, in receiving the plea for forgiveness of us by the Son, is only doing what the Father in the power and resourcefulness of the Holy Spirit constantly does—reach out to sinful humanity. The Son is doing on the cross what the Father and the Holy Spirit have done throughout the history of the world, only intensifying it, focusing it through the cross. This is why I said in the beginning that we are witnessing a conversation within the life of the Trinity. Remember the prayer of Jesus in Gethsemane? Father, I don't want to die. Let this cup pass from me. Jesus was not placating in that prayer. He did not eagerly seek the cross. And yet, because he was determined completely to love us and have us in the name of the Father, The cross found Him, and He willingly took up the cross as the will of His Father. In how many instances in the Old Testament do we hear a similar debate, as the Father says, "Israel, I have had it with you. I have tried to make covenant with you, and sought earnestly to be your God, but now with your idolatry and apostasy, I've had it with you." I'm outta here. Then just a few verses later, oh Ephraim, how can I leave you? How can I let you go? And the Holy Spirit is so resourceful and relentless in getting intimate with us, yet also so elusive, evasive, free, and beyond our grasp, coming and going among us just when we least want the Holy Spirit to come or to go. Now, here on the cross in the suffering of the Son, the Father is suffering what that Old Testament hesed, steadfast love, finally comes to. And the relentlessly communal Holy Spirit is suffering the pain that intimacy with the human race inevitably entails for any God who would come so close to us. Here on the cross, as Jesus prays, "Father, forgive them," We see that what Christ said in John's Gospel, "I and my Father are one," is true, and that because the Son and the Father are one, if the Son is to love and serve the Father, and if the Father is to love and serve the Son, then both will take us in the bargain. And there is no taking murderers like us without a stunning act of divine forgiveness. The Trinity has reached out, drawn in, attached itself to us sinners, and look what it got— a cross. And we sinners have used every means at our disposal, including our religion, our spirituality, our faith, to resist this love, and look what it got us— forgiveness. That's one of the things Jesus meant when he said in John's Gospel that there's no other way to the Father except through him. That is, there is just no way that we'll get to the Father except by the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit getting to us through Trinitarian forgiveness. I don't think it's "Father, forgive them," because they are not really to be held culpable, for they don't rationally know what they are doing, I think it's, "Father, forgive them, for among other things, they don't know what they're doing." Of course, God will never get us except through forgiveness of our stupidity and cruelty. If God is going to wait until we know the wrong that we do, God will wait forever. If you are awaiting me to know To admit, to confess my complicity, my sin, you will wait an eternity, and I am not eternal. Only God is that. If God's going to wait to talk with me until I first admit that I am a sinner, the conversation will never occur. I'll be too defensive, too deceitful in my guilt. I'd rather die. Did you conspire to crucify the Son of God? Who, me? Why are you always picking on me? I'm doing the best I can. So the first thing we hear is, "You are forgiven." Then, "Can we talk?" My friend, writer Reynolds Price, suffering from a tumor on the spine, in his illness had a dream. In his dream, Reynolds was standing knee-deep in the Jordan River, and there was Jesus baptizing. Jesus looks at Reynolds and says, "My son, your sins are forgiven." Reynolds snorts back, "Who said I was worried about my sin? I want to be cured." Jesus looks annoyed and says, "That too." What an interesting progression here. First, Father, forgive. Then second, they don't know what they're doing. Thank God our relationship with God this day is not predicated on our awareness of what we're doing and who we are and what this all means and what our motives— and what were our motives. Our situation with God is determined by God. Preemptive forgiveness. Reminds you of all those times when Jesus walked about Galilee on brighter days. He was forever walking up to folk and without warning saying to those whom He met, "Your sins are forgiven," and "Go and sin no more, your sins are forgiven." Almost nobody ever asked Him to forgive them. Jesus knew that without forgiveness being the first word, there would be no meeting of God and humanity. There is that sense in which forgiveness precedes repentance. We lack the courage, the sense to confess without the prior knowledge that our truthfulness and honesty about God, about ourselves will not, by God, destroy us. So before there is truth-telling from the cross, there is forgiveness from the cross. Christians confess our sin not in order to receive forgiveness, but rather because we are forgiven. Father, forgive, they don't know. When I taught preaching at Divinity School, I taught my students to be attentive to the very first words that they spoke in a sermon. Your first words, the first couple of sentences, will set the tone for where you expect to go in the sermon. And the very first words that Jesus speaks are a prayer: Father, forgive. What does that tell you about where this conversation from the cross is headed? A few years ago, when great scholar of the world religions Huston Smith visited Duke, he gave a lecture in which he characterized the most notable, most peculiar aspect of each religion: Islam prayer, Judaism—family; Christianity—forgiveness. It is distinctive of the faith of Jesus, and to faith in Jesus, to forgive enemies. That this is the first word of Jesus is interestingly at odds with us. For us, if we forgive at all, it is a distinctly secondary word. First, let the offender ask for forgiveness. Say that he is sorry, truly sorry, then comes forgiveness. But at Calvary, nobody asked to be forgiven. Nobody said, "I'm sorry," or, "Oops, I guess we're executing the wrong rabbi. Forgive us." And yet, Jesus said first, "Father, forgive." I believe that Catholic moral theology specifies that In the dynamic of penitence in the church, for there to be forgiveness, there must be an act of contrition. There is none of that here. Only, "Father, forgive." Is this Jesus at His most offensive? In His talk of preemptive forgiveness? Is this why we nailed Him to the cross, in His forgiving us even before we asked and what is more, asking us to forgive others? In a sermon on forgiveness, Augustine said that sometimes people in his church omitted the phrase from the Lord's Prayer that says, "And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors," just passed right over that phrase silently because they knew it would be lying for them to say that aloud. They knew, says Augustine, that they were making a kind of covenant with God in this 'Forgive us our sins as we forgive the sins of others.' In some of the earliest versions of Luke's Gospel, these words are omitted from the Lord's Prayer. Forgiveness is hard. A rabbi once said to me that while he admired most of what Jesus said and did, as a Jew, he found these first words from the cross among the most offensive, lamentable, and reprehensible. Why? We've had enough Jews crucified by Gentiles. We don't need more Jews forgiving Gentiles for killing Jews. I could see his point. When in my former congregation, a woman being abused by her boyfriend said to me, "I've prayed to God for the strength to be able to forgive him." I said to her, "No, first you tell him that he is wrong." that if he abuses you again, you are going to call the cops, have him thrown in jail, and then, and only then, if he stops, then we'll talk forgiveness. With Jesus on the cross, the sequence was different. First, he prayed to God to forgive. If we are meant to listen and to learn from the words of Jesus on the cross, this must be among the most distinctive, difficult lessons to learn, this first one. 'Who is this who forgives sin?' His critics asked. This day, we, His would-be followers, ask, 'Who is this who first forgives sins even before anybody has acknowledged the sin?' Have you ever had the experience—I have—of having someone forgive you when you didn't ask for forgiveness? Maybe you didn't even know that you had done anything that needed forgiving. In a conversation with a group of faculty, I said something about what a bad book had been written by a professor at another seminary. I added that I expected a bad book from someone who was such a jerk. After most of the group had moved away, no doubt duly impressed by my candor and wit, a faculty colleague lingered and said, "The person whom you just trashed was the only person to stick by me in my divorce." The only person personally to offer me help and comfort. But I want you to know that I intend to forgive you for your boorish insensitivity. You are forgiven. I can tell you that offer of forgiveness did not feel good, that good to me. Until I got that forgiveness for being an insensitive boor, I did not know that I was an insensitive boor. Jesus' first word: Father, forgive, they don't know what they do. Someone said to me, my ex-husband has done everything he can to make my life miserable before and after the divorce. I am so eaten up with anger and resentment that the doctor says it has affected my health. Can't sleep, can't eat. I've tried everything now. There's nothing left for me to do but forgive and forget him and hope to God that I'll be done with him forever and he'll forever be done with me. Good strategy on her part, I thought. They say that sometimes you need to forgive in order to get the wrongdoer off your back, in order to breathe, in order to finally start over. But here Jesus forgives not in order to get away from us murderers, but in order to get close to us, in order to save us. He asks forgiveness, not as a strategy for a more fulfilling life, but because as the Son of God, Jesus knows it to be the very nature of God to forgive. Jesus first forgives. On the cross, before he asks anything for himself, he asks something for us. Father, forgive them. Our culture first identifies the victim. When there is tragedy, we focus upon the victim, stick with the victim, fix blame, assign guilt to the perpetrator after hearing the victim's side of the story. To move too quickly to talk of forgiveness appears to commit added violence against the victim, and let the perpetrator too quickly off the hook. Yet, Jesus in his first word focuses upon the perpetrators, us. Father, forgive. When a group of victims of sexual abuse by Catholic priests met with their bishop, and after hours of weeping, angry shouting at the sympathetic bishop, apologies and offers of reparations by the bishop, when the bishop dared to mention the word forgive, he was Shouted out of the room. When there is injustice, wrong done, first get a lawyer and then get even; second, no, fourth or fifth, consider the possibility of exculpation after there has been restitution and compensation. Or we say, the offender has first got to be made to see that what he has done is wrong, very wrong; sin has got to be named and claimed, owned as sin Yet, from the cross, Jesus forgives precisely because they—we—don't know sin as sin. "Father, forgive them. They don't know what they are doing." Jesus doesn't just forgive. He preemptively forgives. One day Jesus told a really inappropriate story about a farmer who had a fig tree in Luke 13:6-9. 6 through 9. He came looking for fruit. For 3 years he's been looking for fruit. Fig trees are supposed to bear every year, but for 3 years no fruit. Cut it down, he says, the master. His servant pleads, Master, let it alone. I'll put some dung on it, dig around it, then let's see what happens. The Greek Ephētēs can be translated as either "let it alone" or "forgive it." Cut it down, that would be the just desserts for so bad a tree. However, "Master, forgive" is how the story ends. Here in this little parable of Jesus, up to our necks in dung, we are listening in on a conversation deep in the heart of the Trinity. A story that ends in forgiveness, as our story this day begins. There is thus, because of an infinitely forgiving and forbearing Master, still time. Isaiah foresees a day when the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea, Isaiah 11:9. Well, we aren't there yet. Today, this Friday, as Jesus hangs from the cross, as the blood and bile start to flow, we pray ponder the enormity of our cruelty and stupidity. This day, as Jesus speaks his first word from the cross, we ponder the enormity of his grace. There is time. Father, forgive them. They do not know what they are doing.

Thank you for joining me here this week on Voices in My Head. I hope you'll visit me on my website at Rick Lee James. Leejames.com, where you can find out more about me, get my music on vinyl and CD, follow my blog, and even schedule me for a concert or a speaking engagement. Better yet, even a book signing in your neighborhood. You can find all that and more at rickleejames.com. Also, it would mean a great deal to me if you could write a review of this podcast on iTunes. The more positive reviews that we receive, the the more visible this podcast will be online. And now for the benediction: May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope. God bless you, and thank you for listening to Voices in My Head.