Forgive them Father, they know not what they do.
Yes, the words of Jesus Christ while hanging on a cross, a stauroo (Greek), a torture stake. A thing devised to display a man naked, stripped down to all his fundamental inability to move or do and barely allowing breath to speak. Reduced to no more than a thing hung for display of its powerlessness, utter weakness, its being shown in all as subject to the greater force(s) upon it, as exposure and gravity work to undo its life. Stuck like a bug in a display case while yet alive to be seen, noted, observed as warning. The end is not rehabilitation or turning of offender, just display as a total reduction and caution…even threat…to all observers. Man is reducible, divisible from all his prior activity while yet alive to a thing able to do no more than barely squirm against its pinioning. And perhaps consider its own finitude, its utter limitation in such squirming.
Someone wrote somewhere of being a “worm and no man”.
Now, many understand those words in only the context of that particular circumstance, that that plea for mercy and forgiveness for what “knows not” is solely made in reference to the ignorance there, of executing an innocent man, even the man as the Son of God. As though their (our) “knowing not” was of particular highlighting, or a thing only of applicability there, and note. But this is not so. Jesus was not shy nor reluctant to make mention of this “not knowing” as endemic to man’s estate. One need only read the scriptures, those writings about Jesus to see how often he referred to man’s inability to know and his estate in not knowing. Even going so far as to plainly state there is no knowing apart from its being a given thing, and that from above. And this is a very pointed thing to tell any who are already convinced in their self of their knowing. It provokes hostility.
Yet, truth only answers to truth.
No, as much as Jesus is not a religious icon nor even a religious figure, he is not a philosopher engaged in epistemology. He offers no investigations of methods, no dissections of terms, no musings about how a man might know. Man does not…and cannot. Neither can he do anything about this of himself. That door is irrevocably closed to any and all knowing in truth, of truth, unless another open it and give. Man cannot appropriate it, reason by sense or senses to it; truth will always be as elusive to him as his own self eludes him in all fraudulent construct. Because man as liar…is. In a self he cannot escape. Both in all lying to himself, and thence communally sharing…for some agreement, for endorsement, for a feedback from all other liars to some consensus which somehow then is able to mark the threshold of truth. But liars can never agree. Homo sapiens…really? Man as free? Really? To even name himself?
Thinking he knows himself.
Such descent into the heart of the earth, into the void that is man, into all the emptiness of spaces (even allowed discoverable by man) as even now knowing himself no more than the swirling of molecules assembled, agglomerated only in and to pulsing electrical signals, was made. This fancy dirt holds…nothing. Neither can it but of such pulsing it calls life, which is only at best metaphor, with a consciousness itself that is only, and at best, metaphor. And yet it calls this of the real stuff by which all undertaking is undertaken. But who could see such dire estate? And what would, or could even care enough about man…to let him…know? It would take man as no other, able to pronounce such dire assessment (even knowing the consequences) but without trepidation, without concern for a self useless to him for anything, without denying his too, is of such like in forming.
Of myself I can do nothing. He said.
No, not philosopher. Not guru. Not theologian. Not iconic religious figure. A man who would not lie about man, forsaking all and any advantage that is commonly shared amongst them in maintenance of such lie to the hiding of the complete impotence of self.
Of myself I can do nothing.
He told on us when he told on his own self.
And, he is right. Made willing to be merely a self among other selves.
Yet he speaks of how all things are.
I used to believe “my own man”, too.
Then another came to show what a liar he is. And how easy slaughter is to it.
And judgment is turned away backward, and justice standeth afar off: for truth is fallen in the street, and equity cannot enter.
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