Light Under Storm Skies (S16 Episode24)

Lent is now upon us, and for the weeks leading up to Easter at Nexus we’re slowing the pace down on purpose. Each week we’ll take just one of Jesus’ sayings from the cross and we’ll keep a single piece of art in front of us as a visual companion. This Sunday’s artwork is Karel Dujardin’s: The Calvar (1661): https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Duajrdin-Calvaire-Louvre.jpg a dark, storm-charged scene where the world feels loud and chaotic...and yet Christ is strangely illuminated, impossible to ignore. And the saying we’ll sit with is as disarming as it is unsettling: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” That line cracks open a revelation about what God is like, but it also exposes something about us. It confronts our revenge impulse, our certainty, and the way communities can get carried along by fear and scapegoating. We’ll also look at a modern echo of this prayer through the story of one church, with a long history, where forgiveness showed up, not as sentiment, but as a costly refusal to let evil move in. For us, the question won’t just be “Does God forgive?” but something more personal and a little dangerous. Can we become the kind of people who interrupt the cycle? Can we become people who tell the truth, hold boundaries, pursue justice, and still refuse to be remade into enemies?