Father, forgive them

Everything Jesus taught for three years was now put to the ultimate test, in his own body. Betrayed by a friend, abandoned by the rest, convicted in a rigged trial on false testimony, beaten, mocked, spat on, and nailed to a Roman cross to die in public. If ever a human being had the right to hatred, it was this one, then.

Listen to what actually came out of him. As they drove the nails, Luke records his prayer:

Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.

Luke 23:34

Not after the pain faded. During. Unrequested, unearned, mid-torture, he did the thing he had taught on the hillside: he loved his enemies and prayed for his persecutors. This is why his teaching carries a weight no philosophy ever has. He paid full price for every word of it.

Beside him hung a criminal who, with nothing left to offer and no time to reform, simply asked: Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom. The answer came without conditions: truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise. The last person he welcomed before dying was a convicted thief with empty hands. The door really is that open.

He also cried out, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me, praying the words of an ancient psalm from the depths. He did not float above the suffering. He went all the way into it, including the feeling of abandonment, which means there is no darkness you can enter where he has not been.

Then, early on the third day, women came to the tomb to anoint a body, and were met with a sentence that split history:

He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him.

Mark 16:6

The empire killed him, religion condemned him, a grave sealed him, and none of it held. Death did not get the final word. That is the claim at the center of everything: what God raises cannot be destroyed, and the life he offers runs deeper than the grave.

Two days left. Tomorrow: how to find out, for yourself, whether any of this is true.