1. "Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do." (St. Luke, XXIII, 34.)
2. "To day thou shalt be with me in paradise." (St. Luke XXIII, 43.)
3. "Woman, behold thy son! Then saith He to the disciple, Behold thy mother!" (St. John, XIX, 26.)
4. "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" (St. Matt., XXVII, 46.) [214]
5. "I thirst." (St. John, XIX, 28.)
6. "It is finished." (St. John, XIX, 30.)
7. "Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit." (St. Luke, XXIII, 46.)

One of the first things which emerge in one's consciousness as one studies the first word from the Cross was the fact that Jesus requested His Father to forgive the people who crucified Him; He evidently, then, did not regard His death upon the Cross as adequate to that need. There was [215] no remission of sins through the shedding of blood; but there was the need to ask God's pardon for the sin committed. The two facts which come to the fore in this word are the Fatherhood of God, and the fact that ignorance, if productive of wrongdoing, does not make a man guilty and therefore punishable. Sin and ignorance are frequently synonymous terms, but the sin is recognized as such by those who know and who are not ignorant. Where there is ignorance there is no sin. In this word from the Cross Christ tells us two things:

1. That God is our Father, and that we approach Him through Christ. It is the inner hidden man of the heart, the unrealized Christ who can approach the Father. Christ had earned this right because of His proven divinity and because He had passed through the third initiation, the Transfiguration; when we too are transfigured (for only the transfigured Christ can be crucified) then we too can invoke the Father and call on the spirit, which is God, the life of all forms, to adjust relationships, and to bring about that forgiveness which is the very essence of life itself.
2. That forgiveness is the result of life. This is a hard truth for the Western believer to accept. He is so used to resting back upon the activity of the Christ in the distant past. Forgiveness is, however, a result of living processes which bring adjustment, cause restitution, and produce that attitude wherein a man is no longer ignorant and therefore not in need of forgiveness. Life and experience do this for us, and nothing can arrest the process. It is not a theological belief that puts us right with God, but an attitude to life and an attitude to the Christ dwelling in the human heart. We learn through pain and suffering (that is, through experience) not to sin. We pay the price of our sins and mistakes, and cease to make them. We arrive eventually at the point, where we no longer make our earlier errors or commit our former sins. For we suffer and agonize, and learn that sin brings retribution and causes suffering. But suffering [216] has its uses, as Christ knew. In His Person He was not only the historical Jesus Whom we know and love, but He was also the symbol to us of the cosmic Christ, God suffering through the sufferings of His created beings.

Justice can be forgiveness when the facts of the case are rightly understood, and in this demand of the crucified Savior we have the recognition of the Law of justice, and not that of Retribution, in an act at which the whole world stands aghast. This work of forgiveness is the agelong work of the soul in matter or form. The Oriental believer calls this karma. The Western believer talks of the Law of Cause and Effect. Both, however, are dealing with the working out by a man of his soul's salvation, and the constant paying of the price which the ignorant pay for mistakes made and so-called sins committed. A man who deliberately sins against light and knowledge is rare. Most "sinners" are simply ignorant. "They know not what they do."