_Father forgive them, for they know not what they do_.
In previous considerations we have studied the Life of Christ in His
Mystical Body from an angle at which the strange and innumerable
paradoxes which abound in all forms of life at a certain depth become
visible. And we have seen how these paradoxes lie in those strata, so to
say, where the Divinity and the Humanity meet. Christ is God and God
cannot die; therefore Christ became man in order to be able to do so.
The Church is Divine and therefore all-holy, but she dwells in a Body of
sinful Humanity and reckons her sinners to be her children and members
no less than her saints.
We will continue to regard the crucifixion of Jesus Christ and the Words
which He spoke from the Cross from the same angle, and to find,
therefore, the same characteristic paradoxes and mysteries in all that
we see. In the First Word we meet the _Paradox of Divine Forgiveness_.
I. Ordinary human forgiveness is no more than a natural virtue,
resulting from a natural sense of justice, and if a man is normal, his
forgiveness will be a natural and inevitable part of the process of
reconciliation so soon as a certain kind of restitution has been made.
For example, a friend of mine sins against me--he injures, perhaps, my
good name; and my natural answer is the emotion of resentment towards
him and, perhaps, of actual revenge. But what I chiefly resent is my
friend's stupidity and his ignorance of my real character. "I am angry,"
I say, with perfect sincerity, "not so much at the thing he has said of
me, as at this proof of his incapacity to understand me. I thought he
was my friend, that he was in sympathy with my character or, at least,
that he understood it sufficiently to do me justice. But now, from what
he has just said of me, I see that he does not. If the thing he said
were true of me, the most of my anger would be gone. But I see that he
does not know me, after all."
And then, presently, my friend does understand that he has wronged me;
that the gossip he repeated or the construction he put upon my actions
was not fair or true. And immediately that I become aware of this, from
him or from another, my resentment goes, if I have any natural virtue at
all; it goes because my wounded pride is healed. I forgive him easily
and naturally because he knows now what he has done.
II. How entirely different from this easy, self-loving, human
forgiveness is the Divine Forgiveness of Christ! Now it is true that in
the conscience of Pilate, the unjust representative of justice, and in
that thing that called itself conscience in Herod, and in the hearts of
the priests who denounced their God, and of the soldiers who executed
their overlord, and of Judas who betrayed his friend, in all these there
was surely a certain uneasiness--such an uneasiness is actually recorded
of the first and the last of the list--a certain faint shadow of
perception and knowledge of what it was that they had done and were
doing. And, for the natural man, it would have been comparatively easy
to forgive such injuries on that account. "I forgive them," such a man
might have said from his cross, "because there is just a glimmer of
knowledge left; there is just one spark in their hearts that still does
me justice, and for the sake of that I can try, at least, to put away my
resentment and ask God to forgive them."
But Jesus Christ cries, "Forgive them because they do _not_ know what
they do! Forgive them because they need it so terribly, since they do
not even know that they need it! Forgive in them that which is
unforgivable!"