Sunday, April 8, 2018

Forgiveness.

John 20:19-31
April 8, 2018

I.

Last week we heard that Mary went back and reported her experience of the risen Jesus to the disciples… but here we hear that they apparently did not believe her.  Because they were still cowering in fear of the police coming to arrest them and do to them what they did to Jesus 3 days before.  They don’t believe until they actually see Jesus either, which is why we should cut Thomas a bit more slack than he usually receives here. 

Jesus does then appear among them with a message of peace, showing them his wounds, which authenticate him as the same Jesus who was crucified.  And he gives them Holy Spirit by breathing on them, saying: “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them.  If you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”  The Holy Spirit is therefore the spirit of forgiveness.

This is the first use of the word “forgive” in the gospel of John.  It comes practically at the end.  The word used for what Jesus himself does with human sin is “take away.”  But the disciples are to forgive sins, which literally means letting them go.  Jesus takes away the sin of others because he has no sin himself, being the incarnate Word of God.  The disciples have to let go of sin because they are still mired in a sinful environment and so much of it has stuck to them.

What this means is that the community that Jesus gathers is primarily and essentially a community of forgiveness.  We are a community of people who let go of each other’s wrongdoing.  In the name of the One who takes away sin altogether, we are about releasing sins and not holding them against anyone.

Sin is a state or condition of being separate from God.  It is therefore a habitually and chronic missing of the mark, that is, falling short or going wide of who we truly are and even what we really want.  Further, sin is the specific instances and examples of this in terms of actual behavior.  Traditionally we have lists of sins like gluttony, lust, greed, envy, and so forth.  And finally, it is the actions themselves: the excess consumption, sexual assault, stealing money, or other acts of mindless and even violent selfishness.  

Jesus is saying that our calling is to let this all go.  We do not hold people’s behaviors against them.  We do not let people’s wrongdoing define them permanently in our eyes.  We do not accept that what people have done — even the wrong they have done to us — accurately represents who they are in God’s eyes.  

The Lord says this as he is standing in the midst of a group of men almost all of whom had only recently abandoned him and fled in terror when he was arrested and killed.  In other words, he is demonstrating the forgiveness he is talking about by not holding against them their cowardice, denial, betrayal and disbelief.  Jesus insists that we who follow him treat each other, and everyone, the way God treats us: with grace, goodness, acceptance, and equality.  

II.

It is as a community of forgiveness that the disciples proceed to move out into the world.  Forgiveness is the very content of the good news that they will preach.  It is forgiveness that will characterize their message and lifestyle.  Forgiveness becomes the key to the church’s identity and success.  

But it is not the kind of faux-forgiveness that assumes a moral superiority over someone.  Sometimes our act of so-called forgiveness is little more than a backhanded way of placing blame on someone else, while emphasizing the wrongs we have endured, and making ourselves the benign dispensers of mercy.  In this way, what we call forgiveness is only a way of making someone indebted to us.  And that’s not what Jesus means.

Jesus’ understanding of forgiveness is precisely the opposite because it assumes that we all need it.  We do not approach others from the perspective of sinlessness or moral perfection.  We are people who need forgiveness who  at the same time offer it to others out of a common sense of humility and brokenness.  

Forgiveness is not a transaction or an exchange.  It is not about giving something and receiving something in return.  It is certainly not about owing and indebtedness.  It is rather about recognizing our common addiction to selfish, egocentric, shortsighted, and often violent approaches to each other.  We let go of in others what we see in ourselves.  We live together a humble, circumspect, self-aware life that is without blame, without retribution or punishment, and without judgment or condemnation.

Jesus gives us two alternatives here.  We can live as his disciples who are about giving things up, relinquishing, letting go, or forgiving, and so allow God’s love to flow through us.  Or we can be about retaining, holding on to, hoarding, grasping, and keeping, in this case others’ sins, and so block the love of God.  

Because they see and know him and have now awakened to the Way, the Truth, and the Life revealed in him, the followers of Jesus have a responsibility that other people, who do not know the Lord, simply do not have.  Others may casually and unconsciously commit all kinds of selfish acts of stupidity and violence, not knowing that there is another way.  But disciples of Jesus are, as we say today, “woke.”  And being woke brings responsibility.  Now we know that whether we forgive and release sins, or retain and hold on to them, is a choice.  It is something we consciously do or not.  And as a choice we are now accountable.

Ignorance is not a defense for us.  We have seen the Lord.  We trust in the resurrection.  We know that life wins in the end.  We know that forgiveness is the truth of who we are and who God is.  And we will be held responsible for any sins we choose to retain.  If we choose not to follow Jesus and instead retain people’s sins by holding them against them, then we will suffer the consequences.

III.

To forgive is to be emissaries of God’s peace, the peace Jesus bestows on the disciples when he appears among them.  The Lord says, “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”  The gospel community is sent into the world with a message which is forgiveness, which is more than a verbal message, but a way of life.  Jesus empowers us to live a life of letting go.  

Unfortunately, too often the church has been about retention, punishment, retribution, exclusion, judgment, and condemnation.  We have not recognized that to participate in such things serves only to bring them down on ourselves.  Because the choice we have is whether we are going to live lives of forgiving and being forgiven, or condemning and being condemned.  There is no life in the Lord Jesus in which we condemn others while imagining that we are ourselves forgiven.  To be forgiven is to forgive.  A forgiven, forgiving person is constitutionally incapable of condemning another.  This is what Jesus is saying.  To condemn another is to reject your own forgiveness.

Not only is this forgiveness very difficult, but it is also quite frightening because we feel it is imperative to differentiate between bad people and good people, between people we are willing to forgive, and people we find it necessary to condemn.  We convince ourselves that to be all-forgiving is to be bereft of standards and dissolve into moral relativism and a weakness that simply lets evil prosper and thrive among us.  We convince ourselves that punishment and retributive justice are what holds society together… which is exactly what Pontius Pilate thought when he signed Jesus’ death warrant.  

In reality what the life of forgiveness threatens is a self-righteous hypocrisy that pretends we hold the moral high ground and retain the right to execute judgment on others… when we don’t.  We are willing to condemn those who perpetrate atrocities, while steadfastly refusing to admit to the atrocities we have committed, and continue to participate in, sponsor, fund, and rationalize.  But Jesus forces us to recognize that torture is bad no matter who does it.  It is not justified when it is done by “our side,” but an unspeakable evil only when our enemies do it.  It is always evil.

Forgiveness, because it lets go of blame, breaks the vicious cycle of violence that does indeed hold a godless and corrupt society together… in sin.  The fact that Jesus forgives his executioners while they are in the process of killing him effectively neutralizes this way of thinking.  His resurrection proves that no amount of State violence is enough to permanently snuff him, or, actually, anyone.  

When we follow him on the Way of forgiveness, we are basically letting go of, relinquishing, and releasing a whole false world and a whole destructive, murderous way of acting in the world.  We are saying that we are not going to participate in a system that feeds on fear and anger and grinds up the earth and people, turning them into enemies and competitors.  We are not playing the condemnation game anymore, pitting us self-righteously against each other.  We are letting that go.  We are turning instead to forgiveness.

IV.

At the end of this story Thomas makes the fundamental confession of Christianity, when he calls Jesus “my Lord and my God.”  To truly believe that, to place our whole-hearted trust in Jesus, is to let go of our trust in ourselves and our own reasoning and memories.  It is to let go of all that would hurt or divide us.  It is to let go of the very idea that we are not all one in him.  It is to let go of the hatred, paranoia, violence, and self-righteousness that he bore on the cross.

To confess him as Lord and God means receiving his Spirit, his breath, his peace, his commission, and his welcome into God’s family.  To confess him as Lord and God means giving up our will to his.  To confess him as Lord and God means becoming agents of his forgiveness, a forgiveness that heals the whole world.

+++++ 

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