“The Peace of Forgiveness”

“Then, the same day at evening, being the first day of the week, when the doors were shut where the disciples were assembled, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood in the midst, and said to them, ‘Peace be with you.’”

The disciples were locked behind closed doors that first Easter Sunday. What we know as a day of great joy and gladness was for them a day filled with confusion, sorrow, excitement and, most of all, fear. Fear of the Jews. Fear of death. Fear that all their hopes where now dashed and broken beyond repair in the broken and lifeless and missing body of their Lord. Fear of God’s wrath. Fear that their sins still went unforgiven.

And into that den of fear, Jesus suddenly materializes. I use that word ‘materializes’ purposefully, because it’s probably the best one we could use. Jesus didn’t just appear to the disciples as some disembodied phantom. He was there, fully there – body and spirit. The disciples handled him and had fellowship with a real, living person. St. John writes, “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, concerning the Word of life – the life was manifested, and we have seen, and bear witness, and declare to you that eternal life which was with the Father and was manifested to us.”

They’d been running around the Judean landscape searching for the dead body of Jesus. Then suddenly there He was, but alive and standing in their midst. It was He who found them in their tomb of fear. Death’s pall lay so heavily over that room that they might as well have been dead. But now Life was standing there speaking to them, and His first words raise them back to life: “Peace be with you.”

This is no mere formal Jewish greeting. This is Christ’s declaration of peace and reconciliation with God. How do we know that? Because as He declares their peace, He shows them His wounds. He lifts his nail-pierced hands. He reveals the laceration of the spear-thrust in his side. These are the wounds that declare their peace. “The punishment that brought us peace was on Him, and by His wounds we are healed,” said the prophet.

The disciples rejoiced to see the wounds of Christ, because they weren’t the wounds of the dead man they expected to find. These were the wounds of a living Man who’d died and rose again. These are the wounds that Jesus eternally presents before His Father in heaven, the wounds that eternally plead our peace with God. “If any man sin we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the Righteous, and He is [currently] the propitiation for our sins.” Because He lives, never to die again, his wounds eternally propitiate, eternally turn away the wrath of God from us. “Therefore,” says Paul, “having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.”

Jesus shows them His wounds and declares to them the objective peace we have with God – the reconciliation we have with Him by Christ’s sacrifice. And on that basis the disciples inner, subjective peace in believing. They rejoice and are glad when they see the wounds of Jesus. So he says a second time, “Peace be with you.” But this time the peace comes with a commission attached: “As the Father has sent Me, so send I you.”

It is not enough for the followers of Christ simply to enjoy his peace behind the closed doors of the Church. The peace that Christ gives us—the comfort we have in his wounds, the reconciliation we know with God through them –obligates us to go beyond our own doors and to minister His peace in a hostile world. We are to show His wounds to the world. We are to minister His forgiveness just as we have been forgiven.

And so it’s in this context we see Christ ordaining His apostles to be ministers of the Gospel of peace. “Receive the Holy Spirit,” He says, “Whosoever sins you forgive, they are forgiven him; Whosoever sins you retain, they are retained.”

We oughtn’t try to trivialize these words by interpreting them in such a way that they’re emptied of their power. These are radical words. How could mere men forgive sins? Who but God alone can forgive sins? This is what the Jews demanded of Jesus when He declared the paralytic’s sins forgiven. But Jesus said, “That you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins (He said to the paralytic), Arise, take up your bed, and go to your house.”

God the Father sent his Son into the world to forgive His people of their sins. He came in the authority of God himself. And He exercised that authority on earth. But you know Jesus still has authority on earth to forgive sins. He exercises that authority now through His Church—His Body, His continued incarnation in the world. He breathes His Holy Spirit into His ministers without which they cannot do what he commands them to do. It is not they who forgive sin, but Christ who sends them in His name, Christ who breathes on them, Christ who gives them the Word of reconciliation, the Gospel of peace.

Christ institutes here what we call the Office of the Keys of the Kingdom, and He fills it with His Spirit and with His authority.

But still, how could it be said that any fallible human being, even an apostle directly chosen by Christ, has the authority to forgive sins? On what basis can a man declare your sins forgiven? On the same basis that Christ declares you sins forgiven—that is, if you renounce your own righteousness; if you call your sin “sin” and don’t try to sweep it under the carpet or justify it in any way; if you return to God and seek His mercy to you through faith in Christ; and if you’re then willing to turn away from your sin and to seek the power of the Holy Spirit to amend your life, you can be assured that just as surely as the minister declares the absolution of all your sins, Christ Himself absolves you.

It may be surprising to most protestants that Martin Luther, the leader of the Protestant Reformation, believed so strongly in the absolution that he considered it a third sacrament of the Gospel. Even a man of such strong protestant convictions as R.C. Sproul says that what he misses most as a protestant is someone to stand before him and say, “In the name of Christ, Te Absolvo – I absolve you.” What comfort there is in those words.

We know there were abuses in the Roman Catholic Church—absolving people on the basis of the merits of the saints or on their own works of penance. But do we have to react so far from those errors that we end up in the opposite but equal error and denying the great comfort Christ desires to give us through the ministry of reconciliation? The Anglican Reformation didn’t react that far, but continued in the true protestant, biblical faith.

When I stand before you and declare your sins forgiven, what am I really saying? I’m saying, in the words of Luther:

“I declare thee free from all thy sins, not in my own name, nor in the name of any saint, nor for the sake of any human merit, but in the name of Christ and by the authority of his command, who has commission me to say to you that all you sins are forgiven. Hence, not I but he himself by his own mouth forgives thee thy sins, and thou art under obligation to receive this and believe it firmly, not as the word of man, but as if thou hadst heard it from the lips of the Lord Christ himself.”

You see, when the Bishop or I make the sign of the cross and declare you forgiven, it is Christ Himself who shows you His wounds and declares your peace. Blessed are those who do not see, and yet believe.

On this Low Sunday, let us challenge ourselves to receive the peace of Christ through the ministry of the gospel of peace as surely as if Christ stood here Himself. For Christ our crucified and resurrected Lord is in fact present in his Church. Then let us rejoice and be glad in His peace. But let us also challenge ourselves to take his peace beyond our own doors and to minister His forgiveness through our witness to the gospel. May the peace of God be with us as we minister His peace. +