APRIL 3rd, 2026 PASTOR DON PIEPER
GOOD FRIDAY ISAIAH 52:13-53:12
A GOSPEL OF GRACE LUKE 22:39 – 23:34a
“BREAKING THE CHAIN”
There, on a lonely, blood stained hill known as Golgotha, Aramaic for The Skull, Luke's gospel reaches it's climax. It's the turning point in his gospel of grace. Rejected, mocked, scouraged and cruc-ified, Jesus looks around at those who even now hurl insults his way. Gasping for air, he prays for those responsible, and his words travel through the unnatural darkness of that sunless moment, and through the annals of time: “Father, forgive them, for they don't know what they are doing.” (Luke 23:34)
They didn't realize how they're playing into Satan's hands, nor do we, when out of anger or hurt, we seek to rectify what seems unfair, and thereby perpetuate the enemy's vicious cyle of ungrace. To break that chain, God took the initiative. He came among us to model for us what true freedom looks like. This was Jesus' mission, that we might know how deeply God loves us, and how he's broken into our world to show us his world, to liberate us from the bondage to which we're enslaved, the cycle of ungrace that even now darkens our world and relationships. So what do these chains look like?
Consider Daisy's family history. Born into a working-class Chicago family, Daisy's father was a mean drunk. She'd cower in the corner, sobbing as he beat her mother or kicked her baby brother. She and her siblings huddled at the window as her mother was sent packing, and disappeared from view.
Daisy grew up with a hard knot of bitterneess inside of her as a result, a tumor of hatred over what her father had done to the family. One by one, they moved away and he vanished from her life.
Years later, he resurfaced. Drunk and cold, he wandered into a Salvation Army mission one night. During worship, he broke down and prayed the sinner's prayer and to his amazement the demons within were silenced. He sobered up and sought out his children asking for their forgiveness. Initially skeptical, over time, their father won them over, all, except Daisy. She wanted nothing to do with him.
Five years later he lay dying five houses down from Daisy. Nearing the end, a little girl stepped inside his room. “Oh Daisy, Daisy, you've come to me at last.” No one in the room had the heart to tell him the girl was not Daisy, but her daughter, Margaret. He was hallincinating grace.
Daisy continued the chain. Her favorite two words to her children were: “Shut up!” Hard as steel, Daisy never apologized and never forgave. Once when Margaret apologized in tears for some-thing she'd done, Daisy shouted: 'You aren't sorry! If you were, you'd never done it in the first place!'
Margaret's life, sadly enough, mirrored that of her mother's. She too yelled at her kids to shut up and would spank them just to make a point or to release some of the tension coiled inside her. One day she lashed out at her son, Michael: “Get out! I never want to see you again as long as I live!”
And so Michael left. His life thereon was a series of addictions and short-lived relationships. He later told a friend: “My wife and I split up and it's just as well. I never want to see her again!”
Like a spiritual defect encoded in the family DNA, ungrace gets passed on in an unbroken chain from one generation to the next. Ungrace does its work lethally and legalistically, like a poisonous undectable gas: a father dies unforgiven, a daughter lives like a coiled snake, a mother gives her son the silent treatment, and he carries the toxin from one relationship to another.
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Jesus came to break that deadly chain, to bridge the gap between us and our estranged Father, and to point the way towards true, ultimate freedom, by healing us from the inside out. Four truths about the forgiveness Jesus models from the cross can help us take claim to that freedom.
First, Grace Doesn't Come Easy! Just look to the cross if you have any doubts about that. Forgiveness certainly wasn't easy for Jesus, and that difficulty didn't begin at the cross. Luke informs us that his family accused him of being crazy, his closest friends abandoned him, one was even stealing from his ministry, while another, who'd said he'd die for Jesus threw him under the bus denying he ever knew him. “Woman, I don't know this Jesus you speak of!” (Luke 22:56)
Make no mistake, Jesus had all of them in mind when he looked out through his blood, sweat and tears and pleaded for them to the Father, and for you and me as well: “Father, forgive them – all of them – the religious leaders down their mocking me, the Roman soldiers who whipped and crucified me, my beloved friends who have abandoned me, denied me, betrayed me, and all my other friends yet to come who will continue to perpetuate this pestulent chain of ungrace by holding on to grudges and inner wounds past and present: forgive them for they don't know what they are doing!” (Luke 23:34)
To be sure, grace doesn't come easy! Why? Because grace flies in the face of justice, or to put it another way, grace just feels terribly unfair. It's a litany we pick up when we're young, and if we're honest, many of us never really let go of: “It's not fair!” To be sure – # 1:Grace doesn't come easy!
Truth # 2: Forgiveness Is Not A Feeling! Jesus' prayer in the garden, mere hours before he was hung out to die, points to this truth. It's clear from his prayer there that Jesus isn't feeling it! “Father, if you are willing, take this cup of suffering (the pain of forgiving them all) away from me.”
(Luke 22:42) Who can blame him for not feeling like doing it? As C.S. Lewis famously put it: “Forgiveness sounds like a great idea until we are asked to do it!” Forgiveness is not a feeling.
Corrie Ten Boom, a dutch woman whose sister and father died in Ravensbruck Concentration Camp, where they were inprisoned during World War II, talks about how during a speaking tour in Germany after the war a former guard there approached her, told her how he'd come to faith since the war, and putting out his hand asked her if she could and would forgive him for his cruelty...
“I stood there with coldness clutching my heart. I'd learned that forgiveness is not an emotion, it's an act of the will, and the will can function regardless of the temperature of the heart. 'Jesus, help me!' I silently prayed. 'I'll lift my hand; You supply the feeling, because I'm not feeling it.'
Woodenly, mechanically, I thrust my hand into the one stretched out to me, and as I did an incredible thing took place. A current started in my shoulder, raced down my arm, and sprang into our joined hands. Healing warmth seemed to flood my whole being, bringing tears to my eyes.
'I forgive you, brother!' I cried. 'With all my heart!' For a long moment we held each other, the former guard and the former prisoner. I've never known God's love so intensely as I did then.'”
(from Corrie Ten Boom's The Hiding Place)
If you wait until you feel like it, grace will never happen. Forgiveness is not a feeling. That points us to Truth # 3: Grace is an act of faith based obedience. We do it because we know God will use it. Jesus' faith in that truth is what prompted him to pray: “I want your will to be done, not mine.” (Luke 22:42)
Notice how Jesus models the radical nature of grace. He doesn't wait for the soldiers, religious leaders or his fair-weather followers to ask for forgiveness, Jesus takes the initiative. “Father, forgive them...” he prays from the cross. If the chain of ungrace is to be broken, we must take the initiative.
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At the center of Jesus' parables of grace stands a God who takes the initiative towards us: a lovesick father who runs to meet the prodigal, a landlord who cancels a debt too large for any servant to repay, an employer who pays eleventh hour workers the same as the first hour crew, a banquet giver who sends his staff out to the highways and byways in search of undeserving guests.
God shattered the law of sin and retribution by invading earth, absorbing the worst we had to offer in his crucifixion, and then fashioning from that cruel deed the remedy for the human condition. At the Skull he broke up the logjam between justice and grace. By accepting on to his innocent self all the severe demands of justice, Jesus broke the chain of ungrace. In the final analysis, forgiveness is an act of faith. By forgiving the other, I am trusting that God is a better judge than I am.
Les Miserables is a story contrasting the quest for justice with the cure of grace. As he is released from prison, Jean Valjean is told by the prison warden that he will never change, he'll always be a criminal, but as the story proceeds it is the former warden, now chief investigator in Paris, who is unable to change. Gripped by his relentless pursuit of justice, determined to catch Valjean reoffending he's unable to see how Valjean has changed. Repeatedly he observes Valjean showing mercy to others, but when he himself is the recipient of Jean's grace he admits to a colleague: “Everything I've ever believed to be true and lived my life by...he...he has done and doing so I see how I've brought myself, and the police force, into disgrace.” The absence of grace in his life prompts him to jump off a bridge as he succumbs to the toxic influence his graceless life has had on him. He's the one inprisoned.
What he'd failed to see was the impact Valjean's experience of grace has had on him. After stealing a local priests' silverware the local police return him to the priest who greets Valjean like a long lost friend, offering to give him not only the silverware, but his priceless candlesticks.
“Is it true that I am to be released?” Valjean said in an almost inarticulate voice.
“Yes, you are released. You are a free man, Jean Valjean.” the priest said.
Valjean was trembling as he took the two candlesticks mechanically, and with a bewildered air. “Now,” said the Bishop, “go in peace. By the way, when you return, my friend, it is not necessary to pass through the garden like an outsider. You can always enter and depart through the front gate. It's always unlocked. Jean Valjean, my brother, you no longer belong to evil, but to good. It is your soul that I buy from you; I withdraw it from black thoughts and the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God. You belong to him now.”
“It's not the law of religion nor the principles of justice that define our highways and pathways to God; only by encounters w/grace are we led and drawn to God. Grace conquers a multitude of flaws and in that grace, there is only favor, for favor is not achieved; favor is only and always received.” (from Victor Hugo's book, Les Miserables)
That's truth # 4: Undeserved forgiveness, the grace that's at the heart of the gospel,has the power to liberate us and transform our relationships. Unforgiveness shackles us, as our protests about unfair-ness confines us, while grace alone sets us forth on an entirely course altogether. Many of us struggle with the pain and inner wounds and lies that offenses and abuse have left on our souls. Jesus offers from the cross the means for ultimate freedom and inner healing thru the liberating power of grace.
Jean Valjean understood the power of the cross! He understood the great debt that he owed God and how it would be impossible for him to ever make good on that debt, and it inspired him to reflect that grace, as best he could, into the lives of those around him.
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Jesus came to break the chains of resentment, bitterness and unforgiveness that cage us in and by which the enemy enslaves us. Jesus was nailed so that you may be liberated. God longs for you to know his love as intensely as a French convict, or a member of the Dutch resistance, or of someone whose family is captured in a cyle of ungrace, or a criminal suffering capital punishment for his acts of violence, who knows that he deserves to die for his crimes, but to whom Jesus opens wide the gates of grace: “Truly I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise!” (Luke 23:43)
Did he deserve it? No. Nor do I, or you, but it's ones such as us, whose lives show the marks of bondange, the chains of ungrace, that Jesus prays, “Father, forgive them, for they don't know what they are doing!” (Luke 23:34) We may not, but he does! He knows how our struggles with lies and inner wounds have left scars on our souls that have inprisoned us and so he offers from the cross the means for ultimate freedom and inner healing through the liberating power of grace.
“It's not the law of religion nor the principles of justice that define our highways and pathways to God; only by encounters w/grace are we led and drawn to God. Grace conquers a multitude of flaws and in that grace, there is only favor, for favor is not achieved; favor is only and always received.” (Victor Hugo)