Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Meditations for the Seven Last Words of Jesus
Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, New York City
Good Friday 2025
April 18, 2025
To watch a video of this word, please click below:
To listen to an audio recording of the homily based on this word, please click below:
The following text guided the homily:
- “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do.” Jesus said these first words as his executioners, sadistic Roman soldiers, began to hammer him to the Cross. They stretched out Jesus’ arms, which so often would have been extended in prayer or in eager gesticulations during his sermons, and drove nails through his wrists. They then took his feet — the feet that had been washed and kissed by the woman in Simon the Pharisee’s, the feet that Mary of Bethany had anointed with a full year’s salary of aromatic nard, the feet that had taken the greatest news ever up and down Judea, Samaria and Galilee — and drove a 5- to 7-inch nail through them into the tree. The likely 195 or more lacerations on his back would have been reopened as the soldiers stripped Jesus of his tunic and then would have been irritated beyond belief as those wounds rubbed up and down against the grating, uneven wood of the vertical stipe.
- In the midst of all of this agony, Jesus didn’t cry out in pain, as likely the two thieves on his sides were doing at that instant. He didn’t cry out like men normally do when they’re sentenced to death. As my predecessor as national director of The Pontifical Mission Societies, Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, once said from this pulpit, the last words of men who are being executed by capital punishment either insist on their innocence, condemn those who brought them to justice and sentenced them, or ask for forgiveness for their sins. But Jesus, condemned to a shameful death, cried out for mercy, asking God the Father to pardon those who were doing him wrong.
- They, of course, didn’t deserve it. Like the Pharisees and scribes who were conspiring to have him executed once admitted when Jesus gave them a parable about tenants who beat, stoned and killed the emissaries of the landowner and killed the landowner’s son in order to try to seize his inheritance, those who sought to kill the prophets and the Son of God deserved to be put to a “wretched death” (Mt 21:33-45). But Jesus didn’t cry out for justice. He had come not to judge the world, but to save it. He who had told us to “love your enemies,” and “pray for those who persecute you” and “do good to those who hate you;” who said that if they strike us on one cheek to offer the other as well; who pronounced that God’s mercy is everlasting and that God forgives us 70×7 times; who had given us the parable of the lost sheep, lost coin and lost sons; who called us to be merciful like our heavenly Father is merciful, showed he was indeed mercy incarnate. Rather than thinking of his torments, he looked with love on his tormentors. He who was criticized during his public ministry for being a “friend of tax collectors and sinners,” who had forgiven the paralytic at Capernaum, the sinful woman in Simon the Pharisee’s house, the adulteress in Jerusalem, proved himself to be a friend of sinners to the very end.
- True love, of course, shows itself in mercy. It’s easy to love others when they love us, when they’re lovable. As Jesus himself said during the Sermon on the Mount, “If all you do is love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same?” But it’s difficult, sometimes heroically difficult, when others are not easy to love, when others really hurt us. But the Lord in his first word on the Cross preaches to us the necessity of this mercy. “Father, forgive them!” Jesus, in the midst of enormous pain, provides his Father with an excuse for why they should be forgiven: they didn’t know what they are doing. Even though the executioners technically knew very well what they were doing as they were crucifying him, and may have been doing so with relish, even though the Scribes, Pharisees, Sadducees, chief priests and members of the Sanhedrin, were very intentional at every step, no sinner really ever knows the full consequences of sin, which bring about an eternal death penalty. If they did, if we did, how could anyone possibly choose it? How could any of us ever consciously choose Barabbas over God and ask for God’s holy one to be crucified? St. Paul alluded to this partial ignorance in his first letter to the Christians in Corinth (1 Cor 2:8): “None of the rulers of this age understood this; for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.” Jesus was praying for them and he was praying for us. And he wanted us to know he was praying for us.
- That’s why this first word is such an incredible source of hope. Jesus was praying for us and others to be forgiven for every sin we’ve ever committed. He was begging God the Father to give us a second chance, a third chance, a seventy times seventh chance. That’s why St. Paul would write to the first Christians in Rome, “If God is for us, who can be against us? … Who will bring a charge against God’s chosen ones? It is God who acquits us. Who will condemn? It is Christ [Jesus] who died, rather, was raised, who also is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us. What will separate us from the love of Christ? … Neither death, nor l(ife, … nor anything in all of creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom 8:31-39). The only thing that can separate us from God’s mercy is our choice. This is what Jesus warned against elsewhere in the Gospel when he referred to the “unforgivable” or “everlasting sin” or “blasphemy against the Holy Spirit” (Mt 12:31; Mk 3:28-29). The Catechism of the Catholic Church (1864) describes that this refers to cutting ourselves off from mercy, either by not thinking we need God’s mercy, or not trusting he will give it, or refusing humbly to come to receive it. God will always give it but we have to open ourselves to it and come to receive what he freely gives. As Pope Francis famously said in his homily and Angelus reflection his first Sunday as pope, God never tires of forgiving but we can tire of asking for it, praying that we might never tire of asking for what God never tires to give. God wants us to grasp that even though our sins may be like scarlet, God desires with mercy to make them white. He can and indeed wills to bring good even out of the evil we’ve done or received, even, as St. Ambrose said, making us better than even if we had never sinned because we now know him far more profoundly in his mercy.
- Having received God’s mercy, Jesus wants us to pay that mercy forward. He has called us to follow him and to love others as he has loved us first. He calls us to live by the standard of his merciful love, making his words, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do” our own. He taught us, after all, to pray to God the Father, “Forgive us our trespasses, just as we have forgiven those who have trespassed against us.” He gave us the Parable of the Two Debtors to remind us that God has forgiven us 10,000 talents, the equivalent of 6 billion dollars in today’s money for those who would make $12.50 an hour, and whatever sins people have committed against us are the equivalent of a mere $10,000 at the same pay scale. This forgiveness is a source of hope for the world, a hope that resentment and revenge will not have the last word.
- We’re all called to live by that hope that, having received God’s mercy, we can indeed be transformed by it to be like Christ versus others. We see that in St. Stephen who prayed for those stoning him to death, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them” (Acts 7:60) and his prayers led to the conversion of St. Paul.
- We saw it in St. Maria Goretti who forgave Alessandro Serenelli who tried to rape her and stabbed her 14 times with a ten-inch awl. Her forgiveness not only helped make Alessandro a new man but transformed her mother when Alessandro visited her after being released from prison. Assunta said that if her daughter could forgive him, then she could, too.
- We saw it in St. Rita of Cascia who forgave her abusive and unfaithful husband, which helped finally convert him. She likewise forgave and reconciled with those who later murdered her husband and tried to persuade her sons not to carry out a vengeful vendetta.
- We saw it with St. John Gualbert, who as a young man sought revenge against the man who murdered his older brother, but when he found him, the man dropped to his knees with arms outstretched in the form of a cross, begging for mercy. Since it was Good Friday, inspired by Christ’s forgiveness on the Cross, he granted the man’s plea. Entering a church afterward, the figure of Christ on a crucifix bowed to him. He later became a monk and founded his own religious order.
- We saw it in St. Josephine Bakhita said that if she ever were to meet again the six slave masters who owned and abused her, including one who lacerated her flesh with razor blades, pouring salt in the wounds so that they would never heal, she would not only forgive them but kiss their feet because it was ultimately through slavery that she would come to meet Christ and be set free not just from physical bondage but from all resentment.
- We saw it in the Venerable Cardinal Francis Xavier Nguyen van Thuan, imprisoned for 13 years by the communists in Vietnam, including nine years in solitary confinement, who forgave his guards and sought to befriend them, teaching them French and English and other languages, and transforming so many waves of guards by mercy that the authorities stopped changing them.
- And in one of the most famous examples of all time, we saw it in St. John Paul II, who forgave his assassin, Mehmet Ali Agca, visiting him in prison and seeking to do good to someone who sought harm.
- They did it. We can do it, too. There’s not only hope in Christ’s mercy, but there’s also a hope that we, with God’s help, can share the divine mercy we receive and become merciful like our Father, merciful like Christ on the Cross, merciful like Saints Stephen, Maria Goretti, Rita, John Gualbert, Josephine, John Paul II, Cardinal van Thuan, and so many others.
- I had the great joy nine years ago, during the extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy, to be appointed by Pope Francis a Missionary of Mercy, with special papal faculties to remove the censure and absolve sins restricted to the apostolic see. But each of us, like St. Paul, is meant to be an ambassador of mercy, God as it were appealing through us to be reconciled to God and to others.
- Christ on Calvary showed us that in his divine plan, mercy wins. Evil does not have the last word. This is a word of hope and we are all called to be recipients and ambassadors of that hope that flows from divine mercy, that hope that still flows into and out of the Sacraments of Baptism and Confession, including this afternoon, the hope that awaits us and others.
- Christ’s first word from the Cross reminds us that he was thinking of us as he was agonizingly hammered to the wood and lifted. He was thinking of us with mercy. And so we are filled with hope. And that’s why we’re able to cry out with gratitude, “Hail, O Cross, instrument of divine mercy, our only hope. Help us to lift high that Cross every day!”
Podcast: Play in new window | Download