Easter 3 Repentance to forgiveness

Today’s gospel ends, “Then Jesus opened their minds to understand the scriptures, and said to them, "Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things.”

In both gospels, St. John and St. Luke, Jesus appears to offer “Peace” and the forgiveness of sins. We share the peace of Christ, and in Christ’s peace receive his grace and his power to be forgiven and to forgive. Our justification by grace through faith includes both receiving and offering forgiveness. We are forgiven sinners and because we are forgiven we receive the truth and power of the Holy Spirit to be repentant sinners.

In his lectures on the Epistle to the Galatians, Luther said, “Thus a Christian man is righteous and a sinner at the same time (simul iustus et peccator), holy and profane, an enemy of God and a child of God.” Luther calls this a paradox. A paradox is a true statement that appears to be logically inconsistent.  The Christian church affirms that Jesus is both fully and completely God and fully and completely human. We affirm that we worship one God in three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Spiritual paradoxes remind us that life includes more than one dimension of existence. Literal-minded people find life difficult; things are never quite what they seem. I talked last week about forgiveness, and I want to do that again.

The Biblical Hebrew and Greek words we translate forgive have the common meaning of “take off” or “let go.” For a children’s talk I used to put a backpack on a child and one by one fill it with bricks until the child could barely stand. Then I’d lift the back pack off and ask the child, “How does it feel?” One child obliged with, “I feel like I could fly!”  That’s the feeling we hope for in being forgiven ourselves, and in forgiving others.

Christian forgiveness is turning over to God. We give up feelings of condemnation, both self-condemnation when we are forgiven and condemning others when we forgive them. 

Let’s not confuse forgiving with condoning. By God’s grace we can forgive bad behavior, our own bad behavior and others’ bad behavior, but by God’s justice bad behavior remains bad behavior, subject to divine and human righteous judgment. Because God is infinite, God offers us immediately a restored relationship of love and trust. But we are limited, limited by time and space. Restoring human relationships takes time and effort. Trust, once broken, is not easily or quickly restored. We have the obligation of prudence in restoring relationships. We do no one any good by confusing forgiving bad behavior and condoning bad behavior.  We have done what we have done and we have to live with the natural consequences of our behavior – and the natural consequences of others’ behavior toward us. 

Repairing relationships requires repentance. Repentance is turning away from sin and turning to God and to God’s will for our lives. Repentance is the proper response to forgiveness. We are forgiven sinners and therefore we are repentant sinners.  I close with a story.

In Jerusalem the Holocaust museum YadVaShem is surrounded by trees, “the Garden of the Righteous.” Each tree has a plaque with names of those who sought to save Jews. One so honored is a Dutch woman, Corrie Ten Boom. Her family hid Jews, were betrayed by a neighbor, and sent to Ravensbruck where Corrie’s sister Betsie died. After the war Corrie offered a home for former prisoners and wrote a book, The Hiding Place, from which I quote (pp 214-215).

“It was at a church service in Munich that I saw him, the former SS man who had stood guard at the shower room door in the processing centre at Ravensbruck. He was the first of our actual jailers that I had seen since that time. And suddenly it was all there – the roomful of mocking men, the heaps of clothing, Betsie’s pain blanched face.

He came up to me as the church was emptying, beaming and bowing. “How grateful I am for your message Fräulein”, he said “To think that, as you say, He has washed my sins away!”

His hand was thrust out to shake mine. And I, who had preached so often to the people in Bloemendaal the need to forgive, kept my hand at my side. Even as the angry, vengeful thoughts boiled through me, I saw the sin of them. Jesus Christ had died for this man; was I going to ask for more? Lord Jesus, I prayed, forgive me and help me to forgive him.

I tried to smile, I struggled to raise my hand. I could not. I felt nothing, not the slightest spark of warmth or charity. And so again I breathed a silent prayer. Jesus, I cannot forgive him. Give me Your Forgiveness.

As I took his hand the most incredible thing happened. From my shoulder along my arm and through my hand a current seemed to pass from me to him, while into my heart sprang a love for this stranger that almost overwhelmed me.

And so I discovered that it is not on our forgiveness any more than on our goodness that the world’s healing hinges, but on His. When He tells us to love our enemies, He gives, along with the command, the love itself.” 

Then Jesus opened their minds to understand the scriptures, and said to them, "Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things."

Easter 2 18 Peace and forgiving

“These are written that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.” 

 

In Easter Season our first lesson is from the Acts of the Apostles. The second lesson this year is from the First Epistle of St. John - last year from St. Peter, next year from the Revelation to St. John.  The theme of St. John’s epistles is light and love. “God is light” and “God is love.”  “. . . if we walk in the light . . . we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus God’s Son cleanses us from all sin.”

“But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous; and he is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.” In the old Prayer Book tradition this is one of the Comfortable Words after Confession and Absolution. Jesus Christ is our advocate, the one who speaks for us on judgment day. Jesus speaks for us - we are guilty and pardoned. By his death Jesus has set us free from sin and God’s judgment for all our sins – “for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.”

Jesus’ death and resurrection was not only for Jesus’ disciples, but for every one in every place and every age who admits sin and claims the pardon. I’ve sat in court and heard the state’s attorney offer a plea bargain. The defendant pleads guilty to a lesser offence and the more serious charges are dismissed. The judge says to the defendant, “Do you accept this agreement, and are you in fact guilty of the crime to which you plead?” The required answer is “yes, I am guilty.” So say we all. We all are guilty of willful disobedience of God’s law in some respect at some time. But “if we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.”

One of the major problems of our society and church is pervasive denial of the reality of personal sin. We all want to focus on our good intentions and ignore our morally ambivalent and sometimes egregiously evil actions.  The Jesus Prayer in the Eastern Orthodox tradition is “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”  Only as we become aware of our own sinfulness can we accept the wonderful grace of our risen Savior. “We have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous; and he is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.”

In today’s gospel Jesus comes to the disciples gathered traditionally in the upper room where they had celebrated the last supper. The doors were locked; the mob was still out there looking for more blood. Jesus comes; he offers the disciples his peace, and in that peace Jesus shares his power to forgive sins.

By Jesus’ death and resurrection, and by the power of the Holy Spirit, our sins, and the sins of the whole world, have been put away forever. Our sins are washed away by the blood shed by Jesus on the cross.

Baptism is the beginning. The water of baptism washes away sins and every time we confess our sins we renew the spiritual effect of our baptism. And where water baptism is not possible we recognize a “baptism by desire.”.

The risen Jesus shared with the disciples his authority of the cross to forgive sins against God, and he  shares with all Christians his essential power to forgive sins committed against ourselves. “If you forgive the sins of any (against you), they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any (against you), they are retained (to you).” We all sin against God’s presence in our own lives, and we sin against God’s presence in the lives of others. We are all sometimes sinned against. Evil has been done to the dignity and honor of God’s creation in our lives. Jesus gives us the choice. We can hold to the memory of being sinned against, or we can forgive. We can continue to resent, or we can forgive. We say in the Lord’s Prayer, “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” The contemporary version of the prayer has “sins” – “forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.”

The gift of being able to forgive sins against us, to let go of resentments, is a gift of the Holy Spirit by the resurrected Jesus. It is also hard spiritual work.  G.K. Chesterton once said, “Jesus commands us to forgive our neighbors and forgive our enemies. Frequently they are the same persons.”  We need to forgive over and over again, as often as the resentment comes back to bother us. When we have forgiven the sins committed by others against us we also can forgive the sins we have committed against ourselves, the things we have done to harm ourselves even when we knew they were wrong when we did them, When we forgive God gives us his peace, and in his peace  the wisdom, the grace, and the power to change, to do things differently. For that we thank God.

          The peace of God in Jesus made possible Thomas’ radical change from skepticism to belief, from “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe” to “my Lord and my God!”

           “These are written that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.”