What we need is forgiveness. In the movie The Mission, an eighteenth century slave-trader who murdered his blood brother in a fit of jealous rage becomes a Jesuit in South America. In penance he drags through the mountainous jungle, by a rope tied to his neck, the heavy armor of his former life. He arrives in a Christian Indian village where, in the past, he had taken children by force from their mothers, husbands from their wives. One of the Indians rushes toward him with a knife -- and cuts the rope from his neck. The armor clangs down the mountainside; the forgiven murderer sobs with joyful repentance. This is the forgiveness we need; this is what Jesus prays for on Good Friday.

Received, this forgiveness looses more forgiving. The tender mercies which flow into the world from Christ on the cross create more mercy. Getting forgiveness is somehow all tangled up with giving it to others. The echoes of Jesus' prayer are heard sounding through the centuries from the lips of Christian martyrs.

The spirit of "Father, forgive them; they know not what they do," is spoken by Stephen under a rain of stones; by James the Righteous just before the blow which killed him; by Thomas More to his executioner; by the dying Anabaptist Michael Sattler with a tongue already cut by his pious torturers; and by Archbishop Romero as his blood spilled upon an altar in El Salvador.

Such mercy does not flow from the unforgiven. Like poor Simon the Pharisee who had no tears with which to wash the feet of Jesus, the Inquisitor has no cleansing compassion. Never is this prayer heard from confident heresy hunters. This should be no surprise for us who so often pray: "forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors." It is the Inquisitor's hands which are tied; the forgiven who are free to offer forgiveness.

Once we do, we can move beyond forgiveness. Jesus wants more for us than the lifting of punishment; he died for reconciliation. The forgiving is the unlocking of the door which stands between the prisoner and return to family, if there is one. And there is.

Jesus' final vision is a family reunited, a homecoming without anybody missing; a "Yes" answer to the song's question: "Will the circle be unbroken?" Jesus knew that forgiveness is the only way to that end, so He prayed for it.

In Places in the Heart, a drunken black man in a sleepy Southern town shoots the local sheriff dead on a quiet Sunday afternoon. The killer is lynched by an angry mob. The sheriff's widow and two small children are left destitute. Hope appears in the form of a black sharecropper who rises to help her work her farm, but he is soon driven off by the Klan. The movie ends with the despairing widow trying to find solace at a small-town church service.

There we see her alone as she receives communion from the minister. Then the scene shifts to show us the person sitting at her side to whom she offers the bread and cup. It is the black sharecropper who had been run out of town. While we try to adjust to his entry into this sacred scene, the sharecropper turns and passes the host to the dead sheriff, somehow resurrected. The revelation closes as the sheriff offers the broken body and the shed blood to his own murderer, sitting beside him, sober, clothed in his right mind.

Jesus calls for us to be forgiven and for us to forgive that such communion may become reality. In this way the love of God makes our worst day a Good Friday.