Since crucifixion is unknown to us today, there is good reason to try to convey something of its peculiar horror to modern audiences. However -- and this is of utmost importance in view of filmed attempts to depict the full ghastliness of crucifixion (which they can never fully do) -- we should note something striking. The evangelists tell us nothing at all about Christ's physical suffering. Why is that? It must be because they want to emphasize something else. It is our role to try to understand what that is. Perhaps we can do so by reflecting upon recent conflicts. We have been reminded by events that it is against the Geneva Conventions to display or humiliate a POW. Crucifixion, however, was purposefully designed to do just that -- to display and to humiliate. The crosses were placed by the roadside as a form of public announcement -- this miserable being that you see before you is not of the same species as the rest of us. The purpose of pinning the victims up like insects was to invite the gratuitous abuse of the passersby. Those crowds understood that their role was to increase, by jeering and mocking, the degradation of the person who had been thus designated not fit to live. The religious meaning of this is that crucifixion is an enactment of the worst that we are, the most sadistic and inhuman impulses that lie within us. The Son of God absorbed all that, drew it into himself. All the cruelty of the human race came to focus in him. ...

Crucifixion was shameful. The Epistle to the Hebrews puts special emphasis on this, saying that our Lord "endured the cross, despising the shame" (Hebrews 12:2). Yet Jesus of all people did not deserve to be shamed. Whose shame is it then? It is our shame that we see Jesus taking upon himself. In the mocking of Jesus, in his death by torture, we see all of the absolute worst that people can do. And here is what we need to remember. In this first word from the Cross, Jesus does not pray for the good and the innocent. He prays for people doing terrible things. He prays for men who are committing sadistic acts, offering them to his Father's mercy. It is for his enemies that he prays, saying, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."

There is a suggestion here that human beings are in the grip of something they do not fully comprehend. The evil that lodges in the human heart is greater than we know. This means at least two things. It means that there is nothing that you or I could ever do, or say, or be, that would put us beyond the reach of Jesus' prayers. Nothing at all. And it also means that no one else, no one at all, is beyond that reach. His prayer for the worst of the worst comes from a place beyond human understanding. From that sphere of divine power we hear these words today as though they were spoken for the first time, as though they were being spoken at this very moment by the living Spirit, spoken of each one of us: Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.