“Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.” (Luke 23:34).
The other day someone who is very dear to me hurt my feelings terribly.
Now, possibly the worst part of the whole experience is that this person hurt my feelings completely unintentionally… They did not go out of their way to upset me. They were not trying to be unkind. They were not even trying to annoy or irritate me. However, in the course of one short conversation, this one person managed to upset me very deeply and very seriously.
And I spent a day or two reflecting on that while I nursed my poor old broken heart. You see, it was not that I wished this person evil or that I wished to gain vengeance against this person. In fact, even in the deepest part of my hurt I understood that this person had hurt me unknowingly, and unintentionally. And because I could understand that there was not real malice in this person’s dealings with me, I was not even able to hold this person’s actions against them – though I did complain about this hurt and shed a few tears over it over the course of the next couple of days…
The thing that really upset me – the thing that really broke my heart – was that this other person had picked on the weakest part of me and used it against me. And the great injustice of that struck me so forcefully, that instead of just taking the words at face value as I normally would, it was as though they stabbed into the very heart of me and damaged all the vulnerable insecurities in my life…
And as I was pulling myself back together and getting on with things, I spent quite a bit of time thinking about Christ…
You see, Christ – who is GOD – made Himself vulnerable and weak for my sake. There was never any need at all for Christ to be a weak Man. God the Son always was and is and will be. God the Son is as infinite and unlimited as the other Persons of the Most Blessed Trinity. And that means that NOTHING can harm God the Son.
And yet – for LOVE of me – God the Son deliberately allowed Himself to be weak. He deliberately allowed Himself to be so weak that the weight of a Cross, or the iron of a nail had the ability to overpower His Physical Self.
You see Christ made Himself so small just so that He could allow all the ungrateful souls who ever lived to hurt Him. That was the reason why.
He deliberately chose to make Himself small just to allow miserable souls like mine to harm Him so that He could bare the brunt of sin – so that He could feel every single hurt that there was to feel so that I would never hurt alone (and so that you would not hurt alone either).
And I have been thinking about that today, because it seems to me that there was so much meaning conveyed in those words – “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.” (Luke 23:34). Feeling that hurt, I can understand a whole wealth of meaning in those words and it occurs to me today that if I spent my lifetime and then all eternity contemplating them, I would never uncover their full meaning…
For with prayer, I stand on Holy Ground where everything is clear. Here. At the Foot of the Cross.
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