“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” — Luke 23:34
Context and Key Themes
Luke 23 is the chapter of the cross. The Sanhedrin hands Jesus over to Pilate. Pilate shuffles him to Herod and back. The crowd chooses Barabbas. Jesus is scourged, led out to Golgotha, and crucified between two criminals. One criminal mocks him. The other turns to him in faith and receives paradise. Darkness falls. The veil tears. Jesus dies with his spirit committed to the Father. And Joseph of Arimathea, a quiet believer in the council, takes the body and lays it in a new tomb while the women who had followed from Galilee watch and prepare spices. The chapter is one of the most consequential in scripture and one of the most restrained in tone. Luke does not dwell on physical gore. He fixes attention on the dignity of the Lamb, the injustice of the verdict, and the mercy that flows even from a cross. By the end of the chapter, the Son of God is dead and buried. Everything has changed. And a stone lies across a tomb that will not hold him past the third day.
Before Pilate
The whole company of them rises and brings Jesus before Pilate. They begin to accuse him, saying: We found this man misleading our nation and forbidding us to give tribute to Caesar, and saying that he himself is Christ, a king.
Every element of the charge is a twist. Jesus did not forbid paying taxes to Caesar — he explicitly taught the opposite. He did claim to be the Christ, but the kingship they are smuggling into the phrase is a Roman political kingship that Jesus had consistently refused. The accusers know Pilate will not execute anyone for Jewish theological disputes. So they translate blasphemy into sedition. They present their religious problem as Rome’s security problem.
Pilate asks Jesus directly: Are you the King of the Jews? Jesus answers: You have said so. It is a cryptic answer — neither a flat yes nor a flat no. It puts the weight of the statement on Pilate’s own lips, forcing the governor to decide what the title means to him. Pilate has apparently heard enough to form a judgment. He says to the chief priests and the crowds: I find no guilt in this man. It is the first of three such declarations Pilate will make in this chapter.
But the accusers press harder. He stirs up the people, teaching throughout all Judea, from Galilee even to this place. Pilate seizes on the mention of Galilee. Galilee is Herod Antipas’s jurisdiction. Herod happens to be in Jerusalem for the Passover. Pilate sees an escape route — send the prisoner to Herod and be done with it. He sends Jesus over.
Before Herod
When Herod sees Jesus, he is very glad, for he has long desired to see him, because he has heard about him and hopes to see some sign done by him. He questions him at some length, but Jesus makes no answer. The chief priests and the scribes stand by, vehemently accusing him.
Herod is the son of Herod the Great — the man who killed the infants at Bethlehem — and is the same Herod who beheaded John the Baptist. He is a moral ruin dressed in royal pretensions. He wants a show. Jesus gives him nothing. The silence is deafening. The one who has spoken life to thousands will not waste a single word on this king. And that silence itself is the verdict. Herod’s curiosity is not faith. Curiosity gets no answer.
Frustrated, Herod and his soldiers treat Jesus with contempt and mock him. Arraying him in splendid clothing — a cruel parody of royal robes — they send him back to Pilate. And Luke adds the note that Herod and Pilate became friends with each other that day, for before this they had been at enmity with each other. The cross is already doing its strange work. Enemies are being reconciled. Not yet with God — that will come later — but politically, over the body of the man they are sending to die, a reconciliation takes place. Every shared sin forges a shared bond.
Pilate’s Three Declarations
Pilate calls together the chief priests and the rulers and the people, and says: You brought me this man as one who was misleading the people. And after examining him before you, behold, I did not find this man guilty of any of your charges against him. Neither did Herod, for he sent him back to us. Look, nothing deserving death has been done by him. I will therefore punish and release him.
Pilate has judged. The verdict is not guilty. The only honorable action is to release Jesus. But Pilate proposes to scourge him first — to bloody him enough to satisfy the mob and to make the release sting. It is a cowardly compromise. A Roman governor who was willing to do the right thing would release the innocent man and end the matter. This governor wants to keep the crowd happy.
But they all cry out together: Away with this man, and release to us Barabbas! Luke adds the detail: a man who had been thrown into prison for an insurrection started in the city and for murder. The contrast could not be starker. Barabbas is an actual insurrectionist — the very thing Jesus is falsely accused of being. The man who really did stir up violence is set free. The man who was innocent is condemned. In the deepest possible way, Barabbas is every sinner. Jesus takes the cross that was made for him. Barabbas walks free. The gospel is dramatized in a single prisoner exchange.
Pilate addresses them again, desiring to release Jesus, but they keep shouting: Crucify, crucify him! A third time he says to them: Why? What evil has he done? I have found in him no guilt deserving death. I will therefore punish and release him. But they are urgent, demanding with loud cries that he should be crucified. And their voices prevail.
Pilate finally gives in. He releases the murderer. He delivers Jesus over to their will. The governor has just declared the prisoner innocent three times and then sentenced him to death anyway. There is no legal coherence to this. There is only the collapse of a leader who wanted to be liked more than he wanted to be right. Every ruler who has ever chosen popularity over justice has walked where Pilate walked.
The Road to Golgotha
As they lead Jesus away, they seize one Simon of Cyrene, who was coming in from the country, and lay on him the cross to carry behind Jesus. Simon is a pilgrim, possibly a diaspora Jew from North Africa, who has come to Jerusalem for Passover and finds himself suddenly press-ganged into carrying a condemned man’s crossbeam. The detail seems incidental, but Mark’s gospel identifies Simon as the father of Alexander and Rufus — names evidently known to the early church. It is likely that Simon’s encounter with Jesus on the road to Golgotha turned his whole family into followers. The random chore of a Passover morning became the turning point of a life and a lineage. God works like that.
A great multitude of the people follows him, including women who are mourning and lamenting for him. Jesus turns to them and says: Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children. For behold, the days are coming when they will say, ‘Blessed are the barren and the wombs that never bore and the breasts that never nursed!’ Then they will begin to say to the mountains, “Fall on us,” and to the hills, “Cover us.” For if they do these things when the wood is green, what will happen when it is dry?
The words echo the destruction of Jerusalem forty years away. If this is what Rome does to an innocent man while Jerusalem’s status is still relatively stable — the wood still green — what will it do when the city has pushed the empire past the limit of its patience? When the wood is dry, the fire will be catastrophic. Jesus is using his last public words to warn again about what the city is bringing on itself. Even on the way to his own execution, he is thinking about Jerusalem.
The Crucifixion
When they come to the place that is called The Skull — Golgotha in Aramaic, Calvary in Latin — they crucify him there, with the criminals, one on his right and one on his left.
Luke does not describe the nails, the wood, the positioning, or the physical details of crucifixion. He assumes his readers know what crucifixion is. What he records is the first word from the cross: And Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” And they cast lots to divide his garments.
The prayer is one of the most consequential sentences in human history. The man being nailed to the cross is praying for the men nailing him. He is not pleading for justice. He is not calling down judgment. He is asking the Father to forgive the soldiers, the religious leaders, the crowd, and everyone else whose hands are in this murder. For they know not what they do. The ignorance does not absolve them. Ignorance of this scale is itself a form of guilt. But the prayer extends the offer of forgiveness to hands that have not yet stopped hammering. It is hard to overstate what this moment means. The cross is already working — not only later, as the mechanism of atonement, but right now, as the prayer of forgiveness pours from the very mouth of the victim toward the very hands of the executioners.
The people stand by watching. The rulers scoff: He saved others; let him save himself, if he is the Christ of God, his Chosen One! The soldiers mock him, coming up and offering him sour wine, saying: If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself! There is an inscription over him: This is the King of the Jews. Pilate had insisted on it. The religious leaders had objected. Pilate refused to change it. The charge written to mock him is, in every possible sense, true.
The Thief Who Believed
One of the criminals who were hanged with him rails at him: Are you not the Christ? Save yourself and us! But the other rebukes him, saying: Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed justly, for we are receiving the due reward of our deeds; but this man has done nothing wrong. And he says: Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.
Consider what this dying criminal has managed to grasp. He acknowledges his own guilt. He declares Jesus innocent. He calls Jesus by his personal name — not Lord or Master, just Jesus — the familiar human name, and then makes the most audacious theological claim possible given the circumstances. He addresses Jesus as a king whose kingdom is still future. The man hanging next to him is bleeding to death, mocked by everyone, abandoned by his disciples. And the thief sees past all of that and believes that this Jesus has a kingdom and will enter it. He does not ask for much. Remember me. Just remember me. Do not forget I was here.
And Jesus answers: Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise.
The answer gives more than the request. Not just remembered but with me. Not someday but today. Not survival but paradise. The word Jesus uses is paradeisos — the Persian-derived word for a walled garden, used in the Septuagint for Eden. Jesus is promising this dying criminal that the same day their lives end on these crosses, they will be together in the garden of God. Heaven answers the robbed and ruined with exactly this — not someday, not if you perform better, but today, with me. No sinner on the brink of death has ever had a better word than this one. No sinner in the middle of life has ever had a better promise available. The promise is the same for everyone who asks with the thief’s honesty and hope. The promise has never expired.
Darkness and the Torn Veil
It is now about the sixth hour, and there is darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour, while the sun’s light fails. From noon to three, the middle of the day, the sky goes black. Luke’s phrase the sun’s light fails suggests something more than a cloud. The creation is mourning. The light refuses to shine on the execution of the Light of the world.
And the curtain of the temple is torn in two. This is the massive veil that separated the Holy Place from the Most Holy Place in the temple — the barrier that kept every Israelite except the High Priest from the immediate presence of God, and even the High Priest only once a year with blood. Matthew and Mark note that the veil was torn from top to bottom — meaning by God himself, not by human hands. The way into the Most Holy Place is open. The Lamb has given his body. The blood has been poured out. The sacrifice that the old sacrificial system could only approximate has been offered in full. From now on, the presence of God is not behind a curtain. It is available, by the blood of Jesus, to every believer. The New Testament book of Hebrews will spend entire chapters unpacking what this torn veil means. For now, Luke simply records that it happened. The temple itself, from God’s side, has just declared that its central symbol of separation is obsolete.
The Final Breath
Then Jesus, calling out with a loud voice, says: Father, into your hands I commit my spirit! And having said this, he breathes his last.
The cry is a line from Psalm 31. Jewish mothers had taught it to their children as a bedtime prayer for generations. It is the prayer of a trusting child at the end of the day. Jesus dies praying the prayer he was taught as a child in Nazareth. The Father he has obeyed for thirty-three years receives him now. The loud voice is significant — crucifixion victims typically died too exhausted to speak. Jesus dies with enough strength left for a shout. He is not killed by the cross. He yields his life. John’s gospel adds: It is finished. Luke records the committing of the spirit. Both are true. Both are the same moment.
The centurion, standing by and watching everything, glorifies God and says: Certainly this man was innocent! The Roman officer in charge of the execution has concluded what Pilate tried to avoid concluding. The man he just helped kill was not a criminal. He was an innocent. Mark records him going further — Truly this man was the Son of God. Luke’s version keeps it to innocence, but the implication hangs in the air. The first Gentile confession of the cross comes from a soldier standing next to the corpse.
And all the crowds that have assembled for this spectacle, when they see what has taken place, return home beating their breasts. The gesture is one of grief and repentance. The same crowd that shouted Crucify him! three hours ago is now walking home in silence, struck by what they have seen. Whether any of them came to faith, Luke does not say. But the mood has changed. Something terrible has happened here, and they know it.
The Burial
All those who knew him, including the women who had followed him from Galilee, stand at a distance watching these things. They do not flee. They watch. This is a recurring pattern in Luke — the women from Galilee stay when the men have scattered, and they will be the first to the tomb on the third day.
Now there is a man named Joseph, from the Jewish town of Arimathea. He is a member of the council, a good and righteous man, who had not consented to their decision and action, and was looking for the kingdom of God. This man goes to Pilate and asks for the body of Jesus. Then he takes it down and wraps it in a linen shroud and lays him in a tomb cut in stone, where no one had ever yet been laid.
Joseph has been a quiet disciple. He has kept his head down in the council. He did not consent to the verdict, but he also did not publicly oppose it. Now, on the evening of the crucifixion, he steps forward. He goes to Pilate and asks for the body. In Jewish and Roman custom, the bodies of crucifixion victims were often left to rot or thrown into common graves. Joseph will not let that happen to Jesus. He offers his own new tomb. He uses his position to ensure a dignified burial. What looked for months like cowardly silence turns out, at the last moment, to be strategic restraint that positions him to do something no other disciple could have done. God had placed him in the council for this.
The women who had come with him from Galilee follow and see the tomb and how his body is laid. Then they return and prepare spices and ointments. On the Sabbath they rest according to the commandment. The Sabbath begins at sundown. Everything has to be finished quickly. By the time darkness falls, Jesus is in the tomb. The women know the location. They have the spices ready. They will come back when the Sabbath is over. They have no idea what they are about to find.
Reflection
Luke 23 is the chapter around which the whole Bible turns. Everything before it points forward to this day. Everything after it points back. And the way Luke tells the story is striking in its restraint. He does not linger on the physical agony. He does not accuse. He does not sensationalize. He records what happened, lets the details carry their own weight, and trusts the reader to feel what needs to be felt. The result is a chapter that reads more like a hymn than a report. Quiet. Terrible. Beautiful.
Barabbas is worth pausing on. Luke does not moralize about him. He simply lays the fact on the page: a murderer was set free, and an innocent man took his cross. The echo for every believer is unavoidable. You are Barabbas. I am Barabbas. The one who deserved the cross walked free because the innocent one took his place. Every year on Good Friday, somewhere in the world, a pastor preaches Barabbas. And every believer who hears it rightly understands that they have already been Barabbas. They walked out of a prison they deserved because Jesus walked into a death he did not deserve. That is the exchange. That is the gospel.
The thief on the cross is the chapter’s unforgettable gift. He does nothing to earn salvation. He cannot get down and live a better life. He has no time for sacraments, pilgrimages, or religious discipline. He has minutes. And in those minutes he acknowledges his guilt, recognizes the King, and asks to be remembered. That is enough. Jesus saves him there, on the cross next to his own, and takes him home that very day. Every sinner who ever thought they had come too late should read this thief and take hope. You have not come too late. Paradise is still on the other side of a thief’s prayer. You only need what he had — honest acknowledgment of your guilt, honest recognition of the King, and the willingness to ask. The rest is his to give. And he gives it.
The torn veil is the cosmic announcement that the old religious architecture of separation has ended. The writer of Hebrews will later tell believers that we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh. His body was the curtain. When his body tore on the cross, the temple curtain tore in sympathy. And the way into the presence of God — which had been closed to every human being except one priest once a year — was opened to every believer forever. Every prayer you have ever offered without a priest standing between you and God has been answered because of what happened in Jerusalem that afternoon. The veil is still torn. The way is still open.
And the first word from the cross — Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do — is the sentence every Christian has to wrestle with. If forgiveness extends to the hands still driving the nails, then there is no human injury that falls outside the reach of the grace Jesus came to pour out. And the disciple is called to learn to pray the same prayer over the people who have wronged us. We will not pray it well. We will not pray it quickly. But we are called to keep trying to pray it, because the man we follow prayed it first with nails in his wrists, and if he did, we have no standing to refuse it on behalf of our own comparatively small grievances. The first word from the cross is the standard. The Holy Spirit is given so that we can grow toward it. Slowly. But really.
The body is in the tomb as Sabbath begins. The disciples are scattered. The women are weeping. The leaders are celebrating. Hell is, for a moment, the loudest room in the universe. And there is a stone across a tomb. But the stone does not know what is about to happen. The leaders do not know. The disciples do not know. The women with their spices do not know. Only Jesus knows. And Jesus told them. On the third day, he said, the Son of Man will rise. That is tomorrow’s chapter. And it will change everything.