John 20: 19-23   

On the evening of the first day of the week the disciples had barred the door against the Judeans (Jews). Yet, Jesus arrived and stood among them and said, "Shalom." Then he showed them his hands and his side. The disciples were filled with joy when they saw it was he. Jesus said to them again, "Shalom. As the Father has sent me, so I send you." When he had said that, he breathed on them and said, "Take some of the Unseen Force. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you do not release them from their sin debt, they remain in debt."

(Translated, condensed and paraphrased by Harry T. Cook.)

[This text was dealt with in this series for Easter II-A, Sunday, May 1, 2011. That analysis will be repeated here, though it covers eight more verses of John 20 than are assigned for Pentecost - A.]

It is unfortunate that far fewer people show up for church during the weeks following Easter Day itself. The post-resurrection appearance stories that are read out give some needed texture and scope to the raw proclamation of the resurrection which is heard over and over again on Easter. Since the four canonical gospels skirt the issue of a direct resurrection account, what else each includes about the aftermath is important -- not to finding ways to validate the stories, because that is impossible, but to gain some understanding of the gospelers theological agenda. We see some of that agenda in the Johannine passage at hand.

It is helpful to remember that Luke and John had different ideas about what the church came to call "the holy spirit," often referred to in this series as "an unseen force." John places the advent of the spirit/force on that "evening of the first day of the week." Luke includes a roughly parallel version of John 20: 19-31 at 24: 36-42. Some commentators, seeing clearly its close parallel to the Johannine text, speculate that the two texts have a common source. The Lukan version does not reference the spirit/force except to depict Jesus as promising its coming in highly metaphorical phraseology at 24:49: "Stay here in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high." In different ways, both Luke and John connect the coming of the spirit/force with the forgiveness of sins -- Luke saying  that "repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations."

It is important to understand that the literal translation of the Johannine text is "receive a holy spirit" rather than the holy spirit, indicating that a doctrine of the spirit was a matter for Christians of a later general to form more fully.

Are we to understand from John's depiction of the scene between the disciples and Jesus that the former, having been given the spirit, were thereby empowered to remit or retain the sins, i.e. consequences of others' wrongdoing? Or is it a statement of the merely obvious: that wrong is done to human beings by other human beings, and that the aggrieved party may or may not be disposed to forgive the wrong doing and its consequences. If so, they are remitted. If not, they are retained. Maybe the sense of the passage is this: a spirit/force/power conferred by one upon whom enormous wrongdoing was committed enables those upon whom it is conferred to forgive as he forgave, enabling Shalom.

When you envision the house in which the disciples are said to have taken refuge, what do you see? Try not to see the surviving 11 disciples. Try to see a late first century CE community of Jesus Jews afraid of what may be done to them by synagogue Jews. See further a Eucharistic setting with members of the community gathered intentionally to "re-member" Jesus and do so as the president of the liturgy says, "Shalom." See (and hear) the community engage in a mutual sorting out of grievances, mindful of the "spirit/force/power" they believe they have received by virtue of their participation in a community gathered around the ethical teachings of a Jesus now dead and gone for more than 60 years. See a certain member or members of that community expressing reservations about the validity of their existence and purpose.

Imagine the church's first major disagreement between those who insisted the Jesus was fully human as well as fully divine and those who held that Jesus only "seemed" to be human. This was the "docetist" position -- from the Greek root δοκ�ω -- "to seem." That was akin to the position that John depicted Thomas the Twin as espousing: "Unless I myself see the mark the nails made and the hole in his side, I refuse to believe ..." John's Thomas wanted to see actual signs of humanity.

The problem for the earliest followers of Jesus was not persuading people that he had risen from the dead. Plenty of suffering and dying sons of the gods in antiquity were reputed to have experienced resurrection. The problem was where Jesus had gone, where he was. There was no possibility of habeas corpus. There was no body to have, only remains surely in such a state of desiccation that, if somehow located, could never be positively identified. If Jesus was crucified and died while thus hung up, his remains when cut down could have been consumed by feral dogs -- a terrible but regular occurrence in those times. The solution to that problem came over time in imaginative stories of Jesus sightings, of which the Johannine passage at hand is one. Those stories represent the didactic method of "re-membering" Jesus. The liturgy provided a material method: "This is my Body ... This is my Blood."

Meanwhile, there would go on to be characters like Thomas in the life of the church in every age. Their contribution to the good of the order has been to force the church to vouchsafe dependable signs of its humanity, even of its suffering. If the gospel is real and real-life, then where are the wounds, where the sign of sacrifice that takes the gospel from words to action, from theory to practice?

* * * * *

To read what systematic theologians write is to enter a world of broad, long thoughts often articulated in highly technical, almost Gnostic language -- Gnostic only in that their tomes might as well have been encoded in order to confound readers. The preeminent Protestant theologian of the 20th century, the late Paul Tillich, took three volumes over 921 pages (including indices) to get from the "Ground of Being" to "The End of History."

Brooding over it and everything else seen and unseen is supposed to be "the Holy Spirit" who or which, besides the general brooding, is assigned the responsibility for inspiring, correcting and sanctifying such things as the election of bishops, vocations to the priesthood and decisions of parish councils about whom to accept as the next rector or pastor.

Moreover, the Holy Spirit is characterized as the imminence of the numinous and transcendent, everywhere and always present as the unseen force, like the wind blowing where it listeth with audible sound but invisible to the eye.

John's Jesus confers "some holy spirit" (as the Jesus Seminar folk translate it). Its purpose is singular: the empowerment or impetus to forgive offenses, leaving the option of not doing so. Maybe it is more a statement of the obvious: if one does forgive an offense, it is forgiven. If he or she does not, the offense remains unforgiven. An "if-then" proposition.

But the Jesus of Matthew, while anticipating John's thesis concerning the remission or the retention of offense (see Matthew 18:18), picks up the Q saying about forgiving seventy times seven, meaning, obviously, as often as it takes. Luke puts it in a different light, saying that the offender must apologize, and any number of times he does so, he must be forgiven.

Either way, then, a case can be made that the gift of "some holy spirit" is intended primarily to bring about forgiveness. The author of the Gospel according to John must have realized both the enormous possibilities of forgiveness and the dire consequences of its absence. I think John was saying that whatever and whoever Jesus was, his continuing presence as "another Comforter" was to be the catalyst of forgiveness.

The trouble is that some offenses are perceived rather than real, imagined rather than experienced at the hands of another. The late Osama bin Laden could not manage to forgive the West for its perceived dishonor of his Muslim brothers. The inability and unwillingness to muster what it took to discharge that perceived moral indebtedness cost the lives of almost 3,000 people on Sept. 11, 2001, and those of tens of thousands of others in the aftermath of the U.S. incursions into Iraq and Afghanistan. Finally, it cost bin Laden his own life.

Forgiveness, then, may be the whole point of a religion that has its roots in the Bible and beyond.