They Don't Know What They're Doing (Holy Week Devotional)

In commemoration of Holy Week, I will be posting a devotional every day this week. Each day’s verse will be one of the “Seven Last Words,” the seven statements Jesus made from the cross as recorded in the four gospels. I hope that reading these devotionals will help keep the cross at the front of your mind this week as the church prepares to celebrate the resurrection on Easter Sunday.

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“Then Jesus said, “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.””

- Luke 23:34

The latter half of Jesus’s first statement from the cross could not be more evident—those who had sent him to the cross did not know what they were doing. For the crowd’s part, many of them had, less than a week before, hailed Jesus as their conquering king. Now they looked on with satisfaction as he was crucified by the same Romans they had once hoped he would overthrow. As for the Pharisees and the chief priests, it is clear that they did not understand either—as easy as it is to portray them as sinister villains, the truth is that they thought they were carrying out God’s will, defending His name against the blasphemies of a pretender claiming to be His Son. And the Romans, from Pontius Pilate to the soldiers hammering nails into Jesus’s hands, simply wanted to keep the peace through any means necessary, bewildered by the shifting passions of Jerusalem.

No one at Golgotha really knew what he was doing—no one but Jesus. Only he knew that they had condemned God in the flesh. Only he knew that this was fulfilling God’s plan of salvation. Only he knew that his death was serving as a sacrifice for all who would believe. Everyone else was clueless to the magnitude of what was happening, blinded by their own fear and rage.

Were any of us placed in Jesus’s position, this would fill us with anger and despair. We would label the crowd as ignorant, as hateful, as savages too blinded by mob mentality to see the glory of God before them. We would want to see their cluelessness punished and our righteousness rewarded. We would want justice.

But that is not what Jesus wanted—he wanted grace. As he suffered and bled, as he heard the jeering and endured the humiliation, he did not ask his Father to silence his tormentors, but to forgive them. In a moment when anyone else would have been unable to think of anything but his own pain, Jesus was thinking of theirs, the pain of sin that only God could remove. From the cross, in both word and deed, Christ served as intercessor for even the sinners who put him there.

Jesus’s first saying from the cross reminds us that while sin blinds, grace gives light. Sin demands that you see the world in terms of what you deserve, and that you lash out when you believe you are not getting what you’ve earned. Grace puts others first, even when they do not deserve it—and even when it means you suffer as a result. It allows you to forgive people who mistreat you because you understand that, blinded by sin, they truly don’t know what they’re doing. Even in his agony, Jesus responded to sin with grace—as his follower, may you find the strength through him to do the same.