Father, Forgive Them; For They Know Not What They Do

As Jesus was being nailed to the cross, He cried out, "Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do." I believe that He was referring not just to the Roman soldiers who were carrying out the execution, nor to Pilate who gave the order, nor to the crowds who demanded to crucify Him, nor to the Sanhedrin who tried and condemned Him, nor to His friend Judas that betrayed Him with a kiss. When Jesus said "Forgive them; for they know not what they do" He was completing His Atonement for the sins of all of God's children. When He said forgive them, He was referring to all of us. All of us have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, and, what's more, it can be said accurately and truthfully of us when we are at our worst that we know not what we do. We are all lost and scared and blind little children who don't know what we are doing. We try things out and we get it wrong most of the time and we make it up as we go along and we end up hurting ourselves and those we care about because we don't know what we're doing. And then because deep down we're basically good people, we carry around all of this guilt, even though if we had a full knowledge of exactly what's going on inside of our own heads and exactly what's going on inside the heads of others and understood all of the complex and intricately woven interconnectedness of all of our lives and choices and decisions, then of course we wouldn't have done or said those things. God knows that with a perfect knowledge of things we could act perfectly, but He put us on this Earth to test us to see if we can figure out how to be good even when we don't know what we are doing. And then He sent His beloved Son Jesus Christ to pay for our ignorance. Our Heavenly Father and our Savior Jesus Christ knew that the only way for us to learn is if we start out not knowing what we're doing. And if we have to learn through ignorance, that means that we are going to make lots of mistakes and introduce a lot of unfairness and injustice and even cruelty and malice and evil, as the maelstrom of mistakes and sins and guilt and shame and vengeance and judgment and retribution and anger and fear and hatred and suffering chew all of us up and spit us out broken and confused and sometimes knowing less than when we started. But that's why Christ took upon Himself the burden of our sins. Because we don't know what we're doing. Whether we're eight or one hundred and eight, whether we have a PhD or failed even to get a GED, whether we've been everywhere and done everything or been nowhere and done nothing, in the grand scheme of things, we don't know nothing yet. And if we choose to repent, then our Heavenly Father will forgive us, because 2000 years ago on a hill called Golgotha, Jesus said, "Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.