Sev’n times he spake, sev’n words of love;
And all three hours his silence cried
For mercy on the souls of men:
Jesus, our Lord, is crucified! (Frederick Faber)

Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani? that is, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

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

Truly I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise.

Father, into your hands I commit my spirit!

Woman, behold, your son! … Behold, your mother!

I thirst.

It is finished.

A friend, a freshly minted Christian, was telling me recently how he had come to the point of believing. It was a long story and a very good one, but one of a rapid series of turning points came when he watched The Passion of the Christ in hopes of experiencing what he’d been reading in the Bible a little more vividly.

He told me that when he got to the crucifixion scene, even though he knew from previous reading what Jesus was going to say, he broke down in tears at Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.

“No human said that,” he told me.

Setting aside the Christological imprecision, it’s a beautifully simple observation that has stuck with me for weeks. At the heart of the gospel is this Jesus, Son of God, Son of Man, submitting to the wrath of God against man and the wrath of man against God, trusting his Father and forgiving his tormentors to the bitter end.

That’s not, as you might say, natural. It’s not normal. It’s not how we function, not how we deal with our suffering and perceived failure and the opposition and betrayal of our peers. It’s not how any god we would fashion in our own image would operate. It just isn’t human religion.

And so this impossible scene brings the flowering of an impossible religion. If we say, as my friend does, this is the God I want to believe in, then the basic way we attach ourselves to Him is to demand that He be for us the Father who answers that prayer of His Son from the cross. There is nothing else we may demand of God, but we must require this of Him.

As with all things, there’s a catch. If we require of the Father that He forgive us for the Son’s sake, then He will require of us that that prayer be on our lips as well, that we relinquish every claim to fairness and call upon the Lord to have mercy on the undeserving. And He will answer that prayer of ours, often enough, by letting the recipients of His mercy first do things to us that He will then forgive, for they know not what they do.

Life will be unfair, in a word. Increasingly unfair, even. If we walk this path, then more and more we will love and care for people who will receive that love with resentment, envy, even hatred. I suspect that the evil returned for the good we do will tend to increase in proportion to the sincerity and purity of our love. And we may never see, before we die, the effect of that love on those who received it so ungratefully. Christ didn’t.

And in that way, we’ll come to know this Jesus from inside his own story.