Father, forgive them for they know not what they do
Only God measures all the factors of the man who acts: for us there is only the space of mercy. So the man Jesus, addressing the Father, says, Father, forgive them because they do not know what they are doing. On that infinitesimal margin of their ignorance, as he was dying, he built their defense, the defense of the weakness of those men, of the limit of those men who were killing him. This was the occasion for which the Lord, the Father, made that act of theirs the beginning of the mystery of the Church.
Christian forgiveness is the imitation of the luminous and calm power with which the Father rebuilds the destiny of his creatures, surprising and assisting that essential desire for good of which they are made, and which runs through all the disasters of their hysterical, presumptuous, and impatient self-affirmation. Thus forgiveness is an omnipotence that rebuilds upon the last remaining ounce of freedom: Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.
Without mercy, without forgiveness, there can be no growth, because at a certain point one begins to condemn, saying, “There is nothing more to be done”—that is, one condemns to death. But Being is not like a doctor. A doctor may come and say, “there is nothing more to be done,” and quite rightly, because as far as he is able there is no more to be done. But for Being that is not the case: there is still something to be done!
Christ dies to free us from our evil. In the heart of human chaos, of human weakness, a cry goes up for this liberation that is humanly impossible, but possible to God: Lord, have mercy on me!
Today you will be with me in Paradise
In front of the presence of Christ, all our freedom plays out. Man cannot conceive or imagine a problem more tremendous than the original announcement that God has become man; he is here, and he is calling you: I am with you always, until the end of the world! I may be the last man of all, full of mistakes and crimes, but Christ’s gaze makes me free.
Think of the man whom they crucified with him, of the crimes and murders he had committed: Lord, remember me when you come into your kingdom! Today you will be with me in Paradise! He was a murderer! But at a certain moment he became aware of a presence that was different, because of which he would no longer die, before which emerged the extreme expression of the sincerity of humility: I am nothing, remember me in your kingdom. The other murderer has to cry out, get angry, and blaspheme in order not to be swept along on that simple wave of the evident difference of Christ. He had to oppose something foreign to that evident difference.
The great objection to this embrace is that Christianity does not keep the promise made, that promise that Christ has made to the murderer crucified beside him: Mecum eris in paradiso, and that he had prophetically defined earlier as the hundredfold. And this objection is born of another aspect of our consciousness: the fear of sacrifice. If we do not fear sacrifice, we shall experience today, in every moment, every day, a greater beauty, a greater truth in our relationships, with men and with things, as a kind of prophecy, a kind of prophecy lived in the great hope, in the great promise, with which he awaits us at the end.
Mother, behold your son
The love that Christ has for humanity is full of all its human components: sympathy, tenderness, generosity, service, emotion, with that human vibration that makes Jesus close to all and wins their hearts. This humanity appears to us from the Gospel accounts as capable of an affection that, though it is for all, is not generic; rather, in expressing a preference it opens and reveals a depth of love.
Many times the evangelists stress Jesus’s preference as a sign of true humanity: for the rich young man of whom Mark writes, “Then Jesus looked at him and loved him”; for Lazarus, whose sisters will say to Jesus, “Lord, he whom you love is sick.” It was quite true; when Jesus came to the tomb he was moved and disturbed, and the evangelist John writes, “Jesus wept.” And the Jews exclaimed, “See how he loved him!” In the same way Jesus’s preference for John the Evangelist was evident. During the Last Supper together before Jesus’s death, he was lying on Jesus’s breast, the same John whom Jesus looks at from the cross, entrusting his mother to him: “Jesus, then, seeing his Mother and the disciple he loved, said to his Mother, ‘Woman, this is your son.’ Then he said to the disciple, ‘This is your Mother.’ And from that moment the disciple took her with him.”
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
He saves us because he takes upon himself all our sins. The Liturgy says, “Now the plan of the Father is fulfilled, to make of Christ the heart of the world.” So it is that, “He who knew no sin God made into sin for our sake [as if the Mystery of the Father concentrated on him all the sins of the world], so that through him we should become the righteousness of God.” So that we could become just before the Mystery, the Mystery treated Christ as sin, as if he was sin. For “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, himself becoming a curse for us, as it is written: cursed is he who hangs on a tree. Christ died, once for all, for sins, the just for the unjust, to bring us back to God; put to death in the flesh, but brought to life in the spirit.”
Christ, who had no sin, was made sin for us. All the sins of men, concentrated in his heart that dies and cries out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” made him into “sin.” Thus he crucified in his death the sins of all men; they are already forgiven, in the sense that now all ascesis—the work of purification—comes to the surface, is allowed to reveal itself in us, the force that took the place of evil in the world on the cross and made peace; comes to the surface, is allowed to reveal itself in us—today, in the day towards which we are travelling, in the action in which we are engaged—what is now possible because it is already in action: that he become the form of our life, of our thinking, of our deciding, and of our acting.
Our great crime, the sin par excellence, is not communicating the new humanity that has been given to us. There is no graver sin than not communicating. It is to abandon Christ, to leave him alone to cry out to the world: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
I thirst
The Mystery that makes all things has showed itself in the life of man as friend and father in a historically definitive way, the way through which Christ came. “I thirst,” said Jesus. “I came to bring fire on the earth: what do I want if not for it to begin burning?” Christ makes us share in his work: the fire of which he speaks is the unleashing and the manifestation of the truth of the world: its mystery.
Thus man the sinner is made a coworker in the redemption, as the great poet Péguy says in The Portal of the Mystery of Hope:
God, who is all, had something to hope, from him, from that sinner. From that nothingness. From us. He was placed in this condition, he placed himself in this condition of having to hope, to wait on that miserable sinner. . . .
In other words it depends on us.
That the infinitely more not lack the infinitely less,
That the infinitely all not lack the infinitely nothing. . . .That the perfect not lack the imperfect.
That the infinitely great not lack the infinitely small. . . .That the eternal not lack the perishable. . . .
It depends on us that the Creator not lack his creature.
It is finished
May our days be permeated, from the very beginning, by the certainty of the risen Christ, by the certainty that all, truly all, is accomplished, and that therefore life is a sharing in the cross. It is there that all is accomplished. May the sharing in the cross be a sure joy: the resurrection! This is our certainty, that our whole life is permeated by this certainty, so that (in the world, not outside the world, but in the world—therefore in trials, in disagreements, in sorrows, in doubts, in starting again) it may be determined, ultimately, by that which the cross leads to, by that which is promised by the cross: the resurrection.
Into your hands, Lord, I commend my spirit
From the moment when Christ was nailed to a cross and cried out: “Father, why have you forsaken me?”—which is the most human cry of desperation that has ever been heard on earth—and then said, “Forgive them for they know not what they do,” and finally cried out, “Into your hands I commend my spirit,” from that moment, from when that man was placed on, stretched out, and nailed to the cross, the word sacrifice has become the center, not of that man's life, but of the life of every human being. The destiny of every person depends on that death.
From the time that man died on the cross, the word sacrifice has become a great word and has revealed—as when the sun rises—that the whole life of every person is made up of sacrifices, is full of the terror of sacrifice, is as it were dominated by the need to sacrifice: it is impossible to avoid sacrifice—and over everything looms the greatest conceivable sacrifice, which is death.
But there is a point in history in which sacrifice began to be interesting—in other words, to touch on man’s interest, his destiny: when Christ died on the cross, so that men could be saved from death and the world saved from corruption, from being reduced to so many worms.
Christ’s cross revealed on the one hand the dominion that sacrifice has over the life of all men and, on the other hand, that its meaning is not necessarily negative, but rather mysteriously positive: it is the condition for men to reach their destiny: “By your cross, you have redeemed the world,” by your cross, Christ, you have saved the world.
Jesus on the cross, before his last breath, made his own the beginning of the psalm that gives the most complete expression of the human soul, that mysterious depth for which man gives himself, unites himself to God, because he is his creature: “Into your hands I commend myself; you redeem me, Lord, God of truth” (Ps. 31:6).
EDITORIAL NOTE: This article is excerpted from Spirto Gentil: An Invitation to Listen to Great Music with Luigi Giussani (Slant Books, 2025). All rights reserved.
