RESURRECTION FORGIVENESS

Sunday, 15th April 2007 : Easter 2 : Year C
9:30am Westfield
Acts 5:27-32 : Revelation 1:4-8 : John 20:19-31

At sunset yesterday the Jewish holy day, Yom Hashoah, began. Yom Hashoah translates as The Day of the Holocaust, as western Gentiles call it. But Bishop Mark, in an address at the clergy conference in Mandurah, pointed out that Shoah really has the sense of calamity or catastrophe: "holocaust" is a mediaeval term coined from a couple of Greek words, meaning a whole burnt offering, or a sacrificial offering wholly consumed by fire.

It was out of the horrors of Ha Shoah, from the Auschwitz death camp, that the following prayer of forgiveness apparently came:

O Lord,
Remember not only
the men and women of good will
but also those
of evil will. And in
remembering the suffering they
inflicted upon us,
honor the fruits
we have borne thanks to this suffering
--- our
comradeship, our humility,
our compassion, our courage,
our generosity,
the greatness of heart
that has grown out of all this;
and when they come
to the judgment,
let all the fruits that we have borne,
be their
forgiveness. Amen.

It’s a prayer that we can well imagine on the lips of Jesus himself, who even from the torture chamber of the cross sought forgiveness for those responsible for his agony. The post-resurrection outpouring of forgiveness confirms that those words were not the delirious rambling of a man near death after suffering barely-imaginable torments.

It’s part of the scandal of the cross that even after it’s all over and God achieves the ultimate victory over what Paul calls the "last enemy", death, God does not react in a way that humankind might expect, least of all in the manner that humanity has chosen century after century, decade after decade, year after year …

After all that brutalising and torture, God does not come out fighting, hurling thunder-bolts at the major players in the drama. No all-encompassing earthquakes or tsunami swallowing or sweeping away innocent and guilty alike. In short, no acts of vengeance, even though the God who can raise a Son from the grave would have no trouble at all in sorting out the villains in a very seriously permanent way indeed!

But that’s part of the point. We humans like to scapegoat, point fingers, blame and accuse. That’s how Jesus got himself the best view at Golgotha, hammered onto a couple of pieces of wood.

But not God. Jesus began his ministry preaching forgiveness, he demonstrated that forgiveness throughout his ministry, he preached at the most dire moment of his waning life – and after resurrection he’s still urging us to exhibit the attitude and behaviour of the forgiving spirit.

And so we find Peter proclaiming the message in the temple and John reinforcing it, albeit in different form, in the Book of Revelation. Equally, the risen Jesus gives a clear, though ambiguous, instruction to the ten apostles skulking in their locked room, to be agents of God’s forgiveness.

Jesus said to them again, "Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you." When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, "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."

It’s no accident that Jesus breathes the Holy Spirit on the apostles before giving them the instruction to forgive sins because no human can achieve the kind of blanket, no-matter-what forgiveness that Jesus espouses by invoking mere will-power.

We can squeeze our eyes tight enough to pour with sweat or concentrate our forgiveness energy hard enough to give ourselves the mother of all migraines but without the Holy Spirit we will never get to the kind of radical forgiveness that, in the post-resurrection world, is the mark of Jesus’ good news avalanching upon the whole creation.

But here’s the problem and this why Jesus’ words are ambiguous. Priests in our tradition and those who’ve attended enough ordinations know those words very well because they’re an integral part of a priest’s ordination: .If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.

Almost immediately, it sometimes seems, we translated that statement into exactly the kind of power-playing, authoritarian weapon that Jesus spent so much time trying to destroy. For centuries the Church has used this power over people to terrorise them, to fill them with guilt, to blackmail and extort, to control.

Priests and bishops took Jesus’ words as a gifting of well-nigh ultimate power even though we knew that Jesus clearly forbade his followers to exercise what Richard Rohr calls "dominative power". Jesus’ terminology is more familiar – he called it "lording it over others", and he wasn’t planning to make exceptions when he told his followers, You are NOT to do that.

So that’s exactly what the priesthood did! You’re all a bunch of wormy, totally-depraved sinners – but don’t worry, chasps, just see me after the Service and I’ll take it all away from you. Until next time. (I reckon a statement like that ought to conclude with eerie church-organ music and a manic laugh!)

But here’s the good news – remember the good news? the stuff Jesus came to disseminate in wildly extravagant, prodigal container-loads? And it’s this, an interpretation I came across only recently.

It’s a reading that is exactly in keeping with the God of peace, the God of non-violence, the Jesus who refused to fight back, the Risen One who did not seek revenge for his maltreatment but offered forgiveness instead.

According to this reading, forgiveness is what I like to call the "normal and natural" demeanour of all followers of Jesus. Forgiveness is to be our hallmark, one of the qualities that distinguish us as Jesus’ own people, truly following Jesus because we are doing exactly what Jesus himself did.

For all of us it’s an enormous power. I suspect that many Christians regard forgiveness as a nice idea but deep-down nurse a suspicion that it’s actually a sign of weakness. In a sense, of course, it is – in a worldly, secular sense. Think of tough-guys like John Wayne throwing away tough-guy advice like, "Never apologise, son. It’s a sign of weakness."

Then consider Jesus’ words and realise that something apparently simple and free that we puny humans do on this planet can have a corresponding effect in heaven, however we define heaven … Consider also that if forgiveness is the normal and natural behaviour of all of Jesus’ followers, then the only way we and heaven can retain sins is if we actually FAIL in our task to spread and practise the good news of forgiveness.

Seen in this light we have an action – forgiveness – that is unquestionably consonant with Jesus’ message and behaviour from beginning to end – even on the cross, which may be the most powerful exposition of the message Jesus ever made. When we retain sins – when we do not forgive – then, far from exercising a rightfully-given power, we are actually and very illegitimately confounding and preventing the good news and the kingdom from operating.

It is only by making the authority to forgive universal, in other words, allowing all followers to access, exercise and participate in the spreading of this good news, that Jesus’ life, death and resurrection make sense and can begin to move towards accomplishment. When the authority becomes part of the power-package of a discrete sub-class then it defeats the purpose of Jesus and mangles the message something terrible.

Who in our lives, who on those streets out there, in Westfield and beyond, needs to hear a message of authentic good news today? Something to ponder deeply; something to offer prodigally. The authority is ours: let us use it with love in all places, at all times, for all people!