The Forgiving of the Ignorant

One thing that has caught my attention about this week's Come Follow Me readings was that one verse in Luke 23 in which Jesus says of those who are crucifying Him "Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do."

This caught my attention for two reasons. The first is that, if there's any hope of forgiveness for those who killed the Savior, there's certainly plenty of hope for the rest of us. And the second reason this verse caught my attention is that I wonder how important it was that they didn't know what they were doing. Those without the law can't justly be condemned for not living by it, but that doesn't give everyone without the law license to commit whatever sins they want. One does not need to hear the words "Thou shalt not kill" in order to know that murder is wrong. So, I wonder how much the guards would have known and to what extent they would be accountable for their actions.

I think it's fair to assume that they knew that killing innocent people is wrong. Most cultures have established at least that low baseline of morality. However, it is not always immoral to execute the guilty. So, did those guards know that Jesus was innocent? They must have known that Pilate had said so. Pilate announced repeatedly he had found no fault in Jesus, certainly nothing worthy of death. Yet, the guards also must have known that Pilate gave the order for Christ to be crucified, and the crowd certainly seemed insistent that He was worthy of death, so it's possible that the guards thought Jesus was guilty and that Pilate just didn't see it. After all, not everyone can identify a murderer on sight or with just a few interrogations. Maybe Jesus was guilty of something, and Pilate just hadn't seen enough evidence to be confident in saying so. It's possible that the guards genuinely thought Jesus was guilty of that of which He was accused. It's possible that they thought they were executing a deserving criminal and had no idea that Jesus was innocent, let alone perfect.

But where does that leave us? We are not guilty of such great sins as murdering the innocent, so we have that going for us. However, we also know some things about the Gospel, and we probably have a pretty good idea that we really ought to repent of some of the things we do. We are not guilty of such great sins as the guards were, yet we're also not as ignorant of our sins as the guards may have been. Jesus seemed to think there was some hope for His crucifiers. Is there also hope for us?

The answer, thankfully, is yes, though not entirely for the same reason. Christ may have forgiven the guards on account of their ignorance of the wrong they were doing, but He offers us the same forgiveness on the condition of repentance. Christ's Atonement covers all sins,whether they were committed knowingly or not, whether they're repented of or not. But whether we're forgiven or not depends largely on us. The guards were forgiven because they were more or less ignorant.  We, too, can be forgiven, but only if we repent.