The Armor He Could Not Carry

In the 1986 film The Mission, Rodrigo Mendoza is a mercenary and slave trader consumed by guilt after killing his own brother in a jealous rage. As penance, he agrees to something almost unthinkable: dragging a heavy net filled with his iron armor and weapons up the sheer cliffs of Iguazú Falls — hundreds of feet of mist and rock — to reach the very Guaraní village he once raided for slaves.

The climb is brutal. He slips. He bleeds. Other missionaries urge Father Gabriel to end the penance. Gabriel refuses. He understands that Mendoza must carry the weight until grace comes to remove it.

When Mendoza finally crests the cliff, wrecked and weeping, a Guaraní warrior approaches. The man reaches down — and with one clean stroke of his knife, cuts the rope. The entire net of armor plunges away into the river below. Mendoza collapses on the ground, laughing and sobbing at once, undone by the mercy of the very people he had wronged.

That scene captures what every one of us needs to understand about redemption. We cannot climb high enough, suffer long enough, or work hard enough to shed the weight of our past. Grace doesn't come from those who owe us — it comes from the One we have wronged most deeply.

The cross is God's knife, cutting us loose.