Yesterday (Sunday 23rd November 2025) I led worship at Sherbourne Community Church in Coventry. It is always an honour to be asked to do so. Below is the text of my sermon.
To be clear: this is basically the text that I wrote beforehand but in practice I deviated from the wording at times and added in a couple of extra comments. However, the substance is much the same.
The sermon followed two Bible readings:
There was nothing remarkable about the crucifixion of Jesus. That is to say, from the point of view of the Roman soldiers assigned to the job, there was nothing remarkable about the crucifixion of Jesus. The Roman authorities crucified people all the time.
It was a common form of execution for criminals, particularly for rebels and troublemakers. Revolutionaries were crucified, if they tried to rise up against Roman rule. Slaves were crucified, if they resisted their supposed owners. In the Roman Empire, crucifixion was a method of execution for people who defied authority, who did not accept their place in the order of things. It says something about the brutality of the Roman Empire that they used crucifixion to punish such people. And it was commonplace. For the Roman soldiers, it was, perhaps, all in a day’s work.
Jesus wasn’t even the only person they were crucifying that day. As we heard earlier, Luke tells us, “They crucified Jesus there with the criminals, one on his right and one on his left”.
I wonder if and when the soldiers realised that there was something very different about this particular victim. Perhaps it was when he told one of the other people being crucified that he would shortly be in paradise. Or perhaps it was earlier, when he said, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing”.
“Father, forgive them”.
Forgiveness is not easy. Many of us do not find it easy to forgive people who have hurt us. How much harder would it be to forgive people as they are literally killing us? Could you forgive someone as they killed you? Could I? As I’ve never been in that situation, I honestly don’t know. I can only pray that God would give me the strength to do so.
Now in Coventry, of course, we’re used to seeing the words “Father, Forgive” displayed prominently. They’re written in the ruins of the old cathedral, destroyed by German bombing 85 years ago this month. I praise God that anyone in Coventry was able to think of forgiveness at the time of that bombing. There were others, I’m sure, who found it difficult or impossible to do so. But the story is well known. After the war, volunteers from Germany helped to rebuild Coventry Cathedral, just as volunteers from Britain helped to rebuild the cathedral in Dresden, where the old cathedral had been destroyed by British bombing. It’s a remarkable story of forgiveness and reconciliation, and a noble part of Coventry’s history.
So why were there people in Coventry and Dresden who were prepared to forgive the bombers? Because they were following Jesus’ example, perhaps? And that leads to another question. Why did Jesus ask his Father to forgive his killers? He wasn’t forgiving people because they were repenting. He wasn’t offering forgiveness to people confessing their sins. He was offering forgiveness to people who were continuing to sin in the most extreme way possible – they were literally murdering him! What did he mean when he said, “Father, forgive them, for they now not what they do”? Or to put it in more contemporary English, “Father forgive them, because they don’t know what they’re doing”?
Some people say it’s because the soldiers didn’t realise who Jesus was, they didn’t realise they were killing the Son of God. And of course that’s true. But at the same they knew they were killing someone. They knew they were crucifying someone. And crucifixion is one of the most painful forms of death that human cruelty has ever invented. So surely they knew some of what they were doing?
Perhaps we’ll understand more if we ask why these soldiers were killing Jesus. As Christians, of course, we believe that Jesus’ death has significance for the whole world, and for all time. But I think we can understand how and why it does so if we think more about why Jesus was killed, why Jesus was executed, in the first place.
So who killed Jesus? These Roman soldiers, who we’ve just been talking about, who nailed him to a cross, who cast lots for his clothes, who mocked him and put up a sarcastic sign describing him as “king of the Jews”. They killed Jesus. Why did these soldiers kill him? Well, they were obeying orders. The death sentence had been passed by Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea.
Despite this, for centuries, many churches have taught that Jesus was killed by “the Jews”. It is still quite common to hear this. Like me, you’ve probably heard it said that “the Jews killed Jesus”. Indeed, I heard a street preacher in Birmingham say this only a few months ago. But it makes no sense.
Jesus was a Jew. Jesus’ first followers were Jews. His arguments with Pharisees and Sadducees were arguments among Jews. The gospels – particularly Matthew and John – draw our attention to the role of Jewish leaders in persecuting Jesus. But these were the Jewish leaders kept in place by the Romans, not chosen by the Jewish people. The High Priest of the time could keep his job only as long as he kept the Romans happy. These leaders were part of the influential Sadducee faction, resented and opposed by many other Jews for their collaboration with Roman rule.
I dare say that many of these people genuinely believed they could get a better deal for the Jewish people by co-operating with the Romans. John’s Gospel tells us that the High Priest, Caiaphas, feared that the Roman authorities would become so scared of Jesus’ preaching that they would brutally suppress the Jewish people as a whole. According to John’s Gospel, the High Priest supported the execution of Jesus because he thought it was better “to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed” (that’s John 11,50). Perhaps all of us, at times, can convince ourselves that colluding with injustice will serve a greater good. Father, forgive us, because we don’t know what we’re doing.
But Jesus was sentenced to death by the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, and killed by the Roman soldiers obeying Pilate’s orders. One of the oldest surviving Roman references to Christians, written by Tacitus in the early second century, says little about them other than that Christ has been executed by Pontius Pilate.
So why have churches for centuries claimed that Jesus was killed by “the Jews”? Well, it’s partly down to anti-Semitism. But also, blaming “the Jews” helps to ignore another awkward truth about the death of Jesus.
At times over the last few centuries, church leaders have been very powerful. They have shared an interest in preserving the status quo. To acknowledge that Jesus was executed by the Roman Empire would mean recognising that the Romans executed revolutionaries, troublemakers, slaves – people who got above themselves. It has always been awkward for some people to accept that Jesus not only sided with outcasts but defied authority and challenged the rich and powerful. Much easier to put the blame on “the Jews”.
Of course, Jesus’ resistance to authority went way beyond a simple political programme for the moment. He challenged all sin, all systems that divide people, all attempts to dismiss some people as less important than others. Love for all is a subversive message. Jesus proclaimed the “Kingdom of God”. In the Greek of the New Testament, this can also be translated as the “Empire of God”. No wonder the authorities of the Roman Empire considered this alternative empire to be a threat. As we heard earlier in the reading from Colossians, God has rescued us from the power of darkness and transfers us to the kingdom of his beloved son.
When we heard from Luke’s Gospel, we saw the soldiers mocking Jesus and saying, “Let him save himself if he is the Messiah!”. They imagined that if Jesus were really powerful, he would use force to bring about his will. To them, power was about violence and coercion. They were not used to the power of love that Jesus embodied.
“Father, forgive them, because they don’t know what they’re doing”. Well, the Roman soldiers knew they were torturing a man to death, even if they did not understand who that man was. But we might well consider them less guilty that Pontius Pilate and the other leading Romans who gave the orders. Similarly, when we think of the Luftwaffe bombing Coventry, the bombers surely knew they were killing innocent people, even if they did not understand the full impact, but we might want to put more blame on the Nazi leaders who sent them to drop the bombs.
Powerful leaders who give orders, however, are powerful only when people obey their orders. At the same time, to refuse those orders can take almost unimaginable courage unless others do so at the same time. Members of Hitler’s armed forces who did refuse orders were executed almost immediately. Amazingly, some refused and accepted death. But it is hard to judge those who didn’t. So the cycle of sin goes round and round, at times appearing like it can never be broken.
Some years ago, I sat in a café in Jerusalem interviewing an Israeli ex-soldier who had decided to refuse his call-up to the reserves. He had wanted to follow his conscience by treating Palestinians with respect when he was manning checkpoints. But he had come to the conclusion that by serving in the army at all, he was helping to uphold an unjust occupation. He said something which has stuck with me. He said, “You cannot live morally in an immoral system”.
The problem of course is that all of us, to one extent or another, are part of immoral systems. Sometimes, the Kingdom of God breaks through, witnessed in moments of kindness, acts of love, and campaigns for justice. But all of us, nonetheless, are complicit even in the sins that we seek to resist. For example, however ethical you try to be, it is almost impossible not to buy at least some products that have been produced unethically. This is not a reason just to give up and not think about ethics when you buy things! Nor is it a reason to beat yourself up and become obsessive so that you never buy anything unethical, as if that were possible. It is a reason for humility, to recognise that we are all broken people in a broken world, that we commit the very sins against which we protest, that we will constantly mess up even as we pray that God will help us to improve the way we live and to change the world around us.
Sometimes in our confusion, all we can do is to turn to God and say, “Father, forgive us, because we don’t know what we are doing”. And we pray that God will transform us, transform each other, transform our communities and our world.
This is where the historical details of Jesus’ death point to its meaning for all time. To the Roman soldiers who hammered in the nails, perhaps it was just another day at work. To the Roman authorities, this was just another troublemaking Jewish peasant who could easily be killed off. Perhaps to the High Priest and his colleagues, this was just another necessary compromise.
But it didn’t work. Crucifixion was supposed to crush people who resisted authority. But resurrection is the ultimate example of resistance to authority: when you’re executed by the state, you’re supposed to stay dead. Jesus, the sinless human being, defeated sin. The divine human being defeated death.
Jesus rose from the dead, because the forces of sin and violence could not hold him. Yes, sin and injustice still have much power in the world. We are still compromised by them and entangled with them. But with Jesus’ resurrection, the forces of sin, oppression and empire are put on notice: the final victory of love and justice is assured, the salvation that comes through grace and forgiveness has begun. As Colossians puts it, in Christ we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. All the power of a mighty empire, all the mockery of armed men, all the cynicism of casual violence, are no match for the power of love embodied by the Christ who in the midst of unbelievable horror says simply “Father, forgive”.
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My book, The Upside-Down Bible: What Jesus really said about money, sex and violence (Darton, Longman and Todd, 2015) can be bought in paperback or e-book, priced £9.99.
Symon Hill 