The Spirit He Breathed He Breathed on Us (easter 2 a)

Given by the Rev. Canon Lance Beizer, Mar. 30, 2008

John 20:19-31

This morning’s Gospel reading – unlike most of the others that we hear – reappears every year rather than only once every three years.  So the preacher surely has to be grateful that there is so much meat in it to talk about. Most often when we encounter this passage it is the marvelous story of Thomas that draws our attention. I certainly identify with Thomas, a man whom I’d love to have had as an investigating police officer when I was still with the District Attorney’s office – a quintessential skeptic – just the facts, Ma’am, just the facts!  

And yet it is Thomas who has what I often liken to a born-again experience as he exclaims “My Lord and my God,” as he looks into the wounds in Jesus’ hands and side. A powerful moment for Thomas! But also a powerful story about Thomas! For we today can encounter Jesus ourselves only through such stories. The Word of God, as I have said on other occasions, is available to us now only through the words about God, since we don’t have the same opportunity see Jesus face to face as so many did during his ministry, or as the Risen Christ, as Thomas and the other disciples did in the upper room. In that fact there is an interesting kind of pattern. What those who followed Jesus knew of God the Father was obtained from their observation of Jesus himself – from Jesus, who was the window through which they could see the Father as well, since it was Jesus’ words and works that showed the true nature of his Father. But what we may know of Jesus today has got to come from the stories told of him by those who knew him. So, in a syllogism that should please Socrates, what we today know of the Father is primarily through what we can read and hear about Jesus. 

Which brings us to another significant sentence in this morning’s reading: “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” The disciples are essentially being delegated to represent God the Father in lieu of Jesus, now that he is gone from his ministry. To assist them in that work he breathes the Holy Spirit into the disciples, telling them: “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” One could read this exchange between the Risen Christ and his disciples in a very narrow way – that is, that they, the disciples, alone are being commissioned to confront others with their sins – to forgive those who repent but to withhold forgiveness from others. That would be a literal way of approaching the reading, but it would be inconsistent with the thrust of the later, most important sentences that Jesus speaks to Thomas after his declaration of Jesus’ divinity: “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”  

If that narrow reading were correct, then Christianity could never have taken hold, since after the disciples passed from their earthly existence there would have been no one left to carry out the mission. That that is clearly not what the author of this Gospel intended is put in “bold” and underlined in the next paragraph: “Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written so 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.”  We need to remember that the percentage of literate people in the world in which this Gospel was written was really very low – perhaps 10% of the whole of the Roman-ruled world. Books without readers, without people who can explain and promote and inspire, simply aren’t enough. So many people will have to succeed the disciples for the good news to make it throughout the world. We can’t stop with the disciples alone. 

And so, perhaps the next possible interpretation. Is it possible that the sentence that admonishes the disciples to forgive some sins and not others is really describing the work of subsequent clergy, the descendants of the disciples, clergy like us, who may listen to confessions and grant absolution if we deem it appropriate? In other words, is it a justification for the working priesthood? Well, from my perspective it would, of course, be nice to think that such was the intention. But that’s simply not what this Gospel is all about. Last week, Maundy Thursday, we commemorated the institution of the Eucharist service, the Lord’s Supper as it is called in some traditions. It is a celebration of the Resurrection that in our church is presided over in its fullness only by a bishop or priest. I’m not about to take issue with that rule, and get myself in any kind of trouble, but I would remind us all of the sentence from Matthew’s Gospel in which Jesus is quoted as saying: “For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.” He does not add “as long as one of them is a priest.” 

I’m not talking to you about these matters to take issue with any of the rules of our church, but because I think it important that when we read about what is essentially a commission to the disciples similar in intent to the great commission that we read about in Matthew’s Gospel, or, in fact, to the commandment earlier in John’s Gospel that the disciples love one another as Jesus has loved them, we not think about it as only about the activity of those ten disciples that were apparently present at the time of Christ’s appearance to them (with Thomas gone for the first appearance, and another, Judas, no longer part of the group), or as historically understood in the Catholic tradition, as applying to clergy. Rather, just as John’s Gospel is written to engender belief among those people who have not had the opportunity to have an immediate physical experience of Christ, so also the sending forth that Jesus speaks of here also applies to us all. Well, how then ought we to understand the discussion about forgiveness and retention, if not about confession and absolution? Frankly, I don’t think it’s about our right to withhold or grant forgiveness at all. Instead, it can be thought of more appropriately as about the spreading of the Gospel – the good news – of God’s forgiveness, and about our inclination either to accept the offer that is implicit in the message, or to reject it…. 

If only we would say “yes” to that offer! Our lives would certainly become more bearable, more fully Christ-like, more like the life of the one who asked his Father to forgive those who would kill him. Yet most of us spend enormous amounts of psychic energy letting old wounds fester, unable to let go of the sins that we perceive others as having committed against us. We even let ourselves be consumed on occasion by the guilt we feel for our own sins. 

If we could only get by those stultifying times in our lives! If only we could, we could get on instead with carrying out the commissions we have been given. We simply can’t carry them out while hung up on our own sins – or those of others. So it’s not only good psychology to free ourselves. It’s good Christianity. Then we can get going on proclaiming the good news – by words perhaps, but much more importantly by what we do. For, no matter what religion we represent, ultimately it’s our cooperation with God that will produce a world worthy of Christ’s return when the Easter promise is finally fulfilled. The Sufis tell a tale that puts that responsibility as well as anything I know. So I’ll close with it:  
 

Past the seeker, as he prayed, came the crippled and the beggar and the beaten. And seeing them, the holy one went down into deep prayer and cried, ”Great God, how is it that a loving creator can see such things and yet do nothing about them?”

And out of the long silence, God said: “I did do something about them. I made you.” 

AMEN

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