Everything was up in the air and thoughts swirling threateningly already – thoughts about the way in which some people are trumping up lies and twists and ugh, HORRIBLE compromises to integrity… But I suddenly found a grain of hope (it’s ironic, this) when, at the Good Friday procession, I heard that Jesus had had to endure all of this sort of thing. Indeed, never have I heard what happened to Jesus so clearly as I heard it today, all because of how torn my own heart is as I listen to the story of His trial. He had to stand there, knowing He was innocent, and watch His accusers try to find people to trump up lies in order to bear false witness against Him. How positively awful. I say that with conviction because I’m experiencing for myself how I feel with others fabricating stories in order to shore up ghastly accusations. It’s a terrible feeling. It leaves me with a bitter, bitter taste; and how on earth are we supposed to love people who behave in such an underhand way? It all feels impossible… yet here, in the Gospel, we are told that Jesus did love them. “Forgive them,” He said, “because they don’t know what they’re doing.”
I heard earlier today somebody describe forgiveness as ‘understanding’. “I prefer to use the word ‘understand’,” she said, “because forgiveness seems too big.” Yes, I would echo that wholeheartedly.
So if I am to love people who are lying against me, can I find some understanding of them? I sighed at the computer at the very idea. It’s all so daunting. I suppose (suppose) that people who are bent on bringing false accusations against a fellow human must feel desperately insecure. They must feel horrible inside themselves, so what we see and describe as ‘lies’ and ‘twists to the facts’ – they are signs of a pressing need to be right. Their own needs have rushed to the fore until they cause a blindness; they can no longer see what they are doing, nor imagine that they are damaging the life of another. If I try really hard, I can glimpse, just glimpse, a cause for compassion.
Did Jesus struggle to find His compassion? We are not told. I find Scripture as fascinating for what it doesn’t say as for what it does. We know that He was silent in the face of His accusers. Why? Could His silence have been despair? Had he lost hope, I wonder, and was He resigned to the inevitable consequence? He had been caught in a pincer grip, and the Jews were so hell-bent on having Him killed – did He sense that there was no point in fighting? Or was He spurred on by something more positive; what we refer to as our “calling”? Did He know that He had come to die, and this was the moment, and therefore could His outer silence have been because of His inner work of prayer: communing with His Father?
If so, what appalling, utter bitterness when even His Father withdrew. In His time of greatest need, the One to Whom He was closest – His greatest hope, His beginning and His destination; His Alpha and His Omega – HE withdrew. I can scarce take it in.
I can only imagine the incomparable dismay of abandonment in His voice when He cried, “My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?”
I’m no theologian; this may be heresy. I merely share how it hits me. I sit weeping before my computer at the thought… it is all too real, since I came to this day with the knowledge that I’m being accused falsely, and I feel like an endless battle. Endless loss.
And yet Jesus could conclude: “It is finished.”
Amazing.
As the person closest to Jesus declared: “Surely He was the Son of God.”
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