June 3, 2007
TEXT: John 20:19-23
When to Retain
Twice he said it. “Peace be with you.” Two times he invoked the classic expression
of God’s own reign – what the Hebrews had called, “shalom”. Perhaps it was because Jesus could see the fear
in their eyes or the confusion or whatever one might label the emotional stew
that bubbles up when our nerves are on high alert and our heart is in
tormented, unsettled disarray; when you don’t know whether to run or fight,
hide under the bed or wilt in a puddle of tears. “Peace,” he said to them, and I wonder if
they were in any position to receive the gift of it.
According
to John’s story line, this scene takes place on Easter evening, the end of a
tumultuous weekend that had begun a lifetime before on Thursday evening in an
upper room where they had shared food together, and embraced again the Passover
story of God’s saving love together and learned a new lesson on humble, servant
love together as Jesus had washed their feet; just before they had fallen
asleep together in the garden despite Jesus’ wish that they remain, with him,
awake; just before it had seemed like all hell was breaking loose through gruff
soldier voices and rough criminal apprehension and rushed jurisprudence and
crude execution and door-slamming entombment.
It had been a lifetime of a weekend, during which just that morning some
from their number had found the tomb empty and others had reported an
encounter, and now here they were all huddled in a room behind bolted doors and
an illusion of safety.
And now
Jesus – the arrested Jesus, the convicted and executed and buried Jesus – was
somehow standing there among them at the end of all these hours inviting
peace. “Peace be with you,” he said to
them. Twice. And after a few moments of confirmation to
let the reality of it sink in, he did something and said something that make
this story especially relevant for today when we can still feel the breeze of
Pentecost.
What he did
was breathe on them the very breath of God.
As when God breathed on the formed but motionless bodies of Adam and Eve
and brought them into life; as when the wind of God blew down upon the valley
of dry bones and animated, while the prophet Ezekiel watched, what was
into what might yet be. In what could be
described as a brand new act of creation, Jesus looked into the eyes of what
could fairly be called this lifeless remnant of disciples and breathed on
them. Life, where only the thinnest
definition of it had glimmered before.
And then, in
as close to a Pentecost moment as John’s gospel reports, this is what he said: “Receive
the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you
retain the sins of any, they are retained.”
To you, in other words, is a given a
gift that, like most of any consequence, comes with a responsibility. “Receive the Holy Spirit, and then use it to
deal with sin.” And all of a sudden we
are wondering if it might be simpler to box this gift back up and mark it
“return to sender.”
In this “live and let live,”
postmodern world, do we really want that much responsibility? Haven’t we long since mothballed the days of
pinning scarlet letters on the Hester Prynnes of this world and agreed to take
care of our own moral backyards and leave others to tend to their own? What does it mean to “forgive” or “retain”
the sins of others?
Some have
argued that this authority and these instructions were intended only for the
leadership – you know, the priest and bishop types; certainly not for garden
variety disciples. But that’s not really
how the story is given to us. The
prerequisite doesn’t seem to be a title or an office, but God’s own Spirit
acting in us – and among us.
Others
would argue that this is precisely what they have been trying to do: pointing out the moral turpitude of
individual and collective behavior; decrying the behavioral erosion threatening
the very foundations of our culture.
But Jesus
didn’t come that we might stop chewing gum in class and spitting on the
sidewalk. Jesus did not come as the
great enforcer to bend us all into legal compliance. Jesus came that we might have life, not a
certificate of obedience. He came that
we might know the truth, and in knowing, be set free. He came that we might find ourselves in the
center of God’s own hope for the world, as instruments of its appearing. He came that we might be awakened to our own
self-destruction that is dragging down ourselves but also everything our
insatiably selfish and consuming spirits can touch, that we might be co-creators
rather than destroyers. He came that we
might become the children of God we were made in God’s image to be.
And
Pentecost represents the gift of God’s Spirit to the Church that, as Christ’s
own body, we might continue that redemptive work.
As, then,
Christ’s people, with God’s own breath within us, what might it mean to both
forgive and retain the sins of the those around us? What will it mean for the work of Jesus to be
our own? I am still coming to imagine
the breadth and depth of that responsibility, but a few beginning thoughts are
clear.
It will
have less to do with pointing out people’s moral flaws than about contagiously
embodying divine possibilities. It will
ultimately be less concerned with people’s sexual proclivities and orientations
– the likes of which seem to perennially distract us – and more concerned with
how our loving is oriented toward God and neighbor – the kind of concern with
which Jesus was so clearly preoccupied.
Forgiving
sin will have almost nothing to do with social labeling and virtually everything
to do with removing the barriers between people and God.
And what
about the second task? What does it mean
to retain sin? Does it mean donning the
robes of the Grand Inquisitor and banging the gavel of moral determination? Does it mean dangling twisted souls by the
thread of their vile depravity over the great chasm of eternal torment? Well, I rather don’t think so.
What I believe the church is charged
with retaining is the memory of sin – the evidence and comprehension and
imprint of what it means to be estranged from God’s mercy and imagination. “This,” we keep vivid in our collective mind,
“is what it looks like and what results from our estrangement.” Retaining, in my interpretation, means
remembering, and remembering why it matters.
Or, to slightly tamper with the adage, “those who forget their sins are
doomed to repeat them.”
That, I
think finally, is what it means to be Pentecost People: people enlivened by the Spirit of Christ who
remember the chasm and all the brokenness it represents, and who build the
bridges that reach beyond it into the shalom of God’s own choosing. That’s the kind of Savior that drew people to
his side. That’s the kind of church I
would feel drawn to join. And that is
what I believe it means to be the church…
…at least
the church that Christ ordains and empowers and calls us to be. Receive,
then, the Holy Spirit. And go to be the healing, hoping, transforming presence
Jesus taught us how to be.