What Last Friday Was For

It was a bloody scene. His flesh was torned beyond recognition. The crown of thorns added to the list of sufferings that He had already faced. With barely enough strength left, He had to carry the huge wooden cross to His final destination. The crowd looked at Him not with sympathy, but hatred. As the nails drove through His hands and feet, His cry was drowned by the sea of laughter and joy. It felt like a celebration. O yes, it was indeed a celebration - the man that the crowd hated so much was about to die!

Hanging on that cross naked, He said, "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing" Hey, did I hear wrongly? Did He say "forgive"? He had all the rights to hate and yet, He chose to forgive?! What is wrong with this man? Is He out of His mind?

That must have been what I was thinking when I was busy hating someone last week. And that was what Jesus taught me on Good Friday - Forgiveness.

There are so many times in our lives when things just seemed so unfair and we thought we had all the rights to be angry about it - When your boss accuses you of not doing your work, when your project mate is on "all talk, no action" mode, when you realised someone is making use of you, and the list goes on. Hatred appears to be the right reaction to these situations. Yes, it is, if you looked at these circumstances through your own eyes.

Look at what Jesus did when He was at the cross, having all the rights to hate. He forgave. Not because He was out of His mind, but because it was the right thing to do. As a saying goes, "An eye for an eye makes the world goes blind." What is right is always right even if the whole world is not doing it, and what is wrong will always be wrong even if the whole world is doing it.

Admit it, we are flawed. If we really trust our own belief system, the world will soon be blind. Why not try looking at these circumstances through the eyes of Jesus, the only perfect one? When Jesus was hanging on that cross, what He saw was not the evil in man, but the creation of His Father. What He felt wasn't hatred but love, love for the lost generation, love for His own creation. He chose to forgive so that two thousand and nine years later on Good Friday, I can forgive.

If Jesus, who had all the rights to hate, chose to forgive, then how can we, who had no rights to begin with, not forgive? We were the ones who drove Jesus to the cross, if He can forgive us, can we not forgive those who hurt us?