John 20:19-23

We’re gathered in a house on Easter Sunday night with all the disciples, (Thomas of course the notable exception) and we’re afraid of the religious authorities. The rumors of the resurrection and the events of the weekend have begun to circle in the city, and we’ve seen what happens when you stir up trouble with the religious authorities… and it’s not pretty. So we’re hiding… and the doors are locked. We have to keep everyone out.

Maybe we’re talking with Mary about how Jesus appeared to her outside the tomb… or maybe we’re talking about how long we’ll have to be in hiding… but one thing is for sure, everyone is wondering “what just happened?… And what does this mean?”

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And just then, Jesus walks right into the middle of them… I like to imagine that he played it cool… no smoke and mirrors, just kinda saunters into the room like, “hey guys… whatcha doin?”… and then they kinda lose their minds so he says, with a serious look on his face, “Peace be with you.” After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Then Jesus, sensing their excitement and their nervousness and their questions says 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.”

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What a crazy thing to say… If you forgive the sins of any they are forgiven… and if you don’t, they aren’t…

The first few times I read over this passage, the structure of this verse really stood out to me. It is parallel to some other verses in the gospels where Jesus is giving rabbinic authority to his disciples. Twice in Matthew in fact, once at 16:19 and again at 18:18, Jesus tells his disciples “whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” And here in John Jesus seems to up the anti by giving his disciples the divine power, through the Holy Spirit, of actually forgiving people.

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This is serious business, and I think we as the church would often prefer to pass the buck back to Jesus rather than live into our own Spirit-filled responsibility. We like to leave the hard, sometimes nebulous, spiritual work to Jesus… or at least to the professionals, or the artists, or the poets, or someone more qualified than ourselves… And that’s the biggest lie we believe… that we don’t have the power to change the world, when actually, we are changing it whether we know it or not.

More about that later.

First, a bit about binding and loosing…

Then a landownership dispute in Numbers…

then a bit of French philosophy…

and finally a wedding…

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Binding and loosing, put most simply, means to forbid or to allow something by an indisputable authority. There were Jewish courts around the time of Jesus who claimed to operate with the authority of the heavenly court and whose decisions about what the community could and couldn’t do were considered final and unquestionable. There were also rabbis who were writing their own commentaries on the Torah, expounding on it and interpreting it for their followers and their communities. When they talked about what the Torah allowed and what it didn’t allow, this was called that rabbi’s yoke. And that decision about what was and wasn’t permissible on the Sabbath, for example, that was called binding and loosing. So twice in Matthew Jesus says what you decide is permissible is permissible, and what you deem forbidden is forbidden. And then Jesus says who you forgive if forgiven, and who you withhold forgiveness from… it’s withheld…

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I don’t know about you, but that seems like a lot of pressure…

I’d rather Jesus just give us his lists of what is and isn’t allowed… wouldn’t you? That might take some of the pressure off… But he doesn’t. He doesn’t give a us a new list of do’s and don’ts. Instead he breathes on us the Holy Spirit, the same creative spirit that was breathed on creation from before time, empowering us to make the hard choices. The thing of it is, there’s a reason we are left with this open-ended decision making ability. There’s a reason that Christ, after he is risen, passes along this responsibility to us, his disciples.

We have the responsibility and the power, through the Holy Spirit, to make decisions… to live faithfully in our own time and place… as Brian McLaren puts it “to make the road by walking…”

And this isn’t a new thing…

 

In the 27^th chapter of the book of Numbers there’s a dispute over landownership, and the daughters of Zelophehad stood before Moses, Eleazar the priest, the chiefs, and the entire community at the entrance of the meeting tent and said, “Our father died in the desert. He wasn’t part of the community who gathered against the Lord with Korah’s community, and he had no sons… Why should our father’s name be taken away from his clan because he didn’t have a son? Give us property among our father’s brothers.”

You see, according the mosaic laws of property ownership, land was only passed on to a male heir, and these young unmarried women were about to be left for dead, outside of society with no way to grow food or make a living. Their father’s possessions and land would be folded into other relatives’ families, leaving his daughters with nothing.

So bravely, and boldly, they come to Moses, the hearer and recorder of the law and they make their case. They need this law to be reworked. It doesn’t work for them. It doesn’t take them into account. They need it to be loosed and rebound…

I’ll pick it up in verse 5…

“Immediately, Moses brought their case before the Lord. And the Lord spoke to Moses, saying: The daughters of Zelophehad are right in what they are saying; you shall indeed let them possess an inheritance among their father’s brothers and pass the inheritance of their father on to them.”

By the leading of the Lord, The Law of Moses is changed, reinterpreted, lived faithfully under new and different circumstances. Isn’t that what we’re called to do? This binding and loosing… this forgiving or not… this is the work that Jesus calls us to as his disciples… “As my father has sent me, so I am sending you,” he says to us. We are here in Decatur, in 2015 to live faithfully under new and different circumstances….

The 20^th Century French philosopher Giles Deleuze (I know… hear me out) He once said, “Suppose we consider the possibility that there is more to our world than we can perceive, and more than we can conceive.”

For many us, that may seem obvious. Of course there are imperceptible realities… but the argument he makes is stronger than that. Things that are virtual, like your thoughts, do not have less effect than things that are actual, like a table. You can bump in to a table. You can chop a table up into tiny pieces. You can rest your head on a table. It can hold up your mason jar of iced coffee on a Thursday morning… In the same way possibilities, problems, not-yet realities, these things have just as concrete of effects on the world around us as that table. I guess what I’m trying to say is that forgiveness has just as much effect in the real world as wind, or water… and it is just as necessary….

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The week before our wedding, my family and I stopped by the venue a few different times throughout the week. I was just so nervous, and I wanted everything to go well. I didn’t want Lauren to have to worry about a thing. We swept, and dusted. We imagined what the space looked like. We went over the time line of events with the church’s coordinator….

And the Friday before the wedding, I decided to have one last look around the place to see if I had missed anything. I walked up the stairs with a few of my groomsmen to the area where the reception would be, and I nearly passed out when I saw it… It looked like Christmas had exploded all over the front half of the hall. There was glitter everywhere… There were giant decorative gift boxes, two white plastic Christmas trees, paper snowflakes in the rafters, a real Christmas tree whose needles had decided that the floor looked like a much more attractive option that the branches to which they belonged! I was in shock.

The first thing I said was, “No one. Tell. Lauren.” I asked the director of the preschool if they knew anything about it. I texted the pastor to let him know about the mess. He said, “send me some pictures of the space. Maybe I’ll recognize the stuff.” And so I snapped a few pictures of the yuletide warzone and hit send… only to immediately realize that I had just sent the pictures to Lauren!!

 

Lauren texts me back and says, “You have GOT to be kidding me!” But in calm, cool fashion, I assured her that everyone knew what was going on, and that everything would be alright…. And you know what?

It was.

Our parents and our friends and all our loved ones were gathered. We worshipped, we prayed and we danced… and we were married.

And we realized that it wasn’t the spotless reception hall, or the food, or the perfectly timed events of the evening that made us married. It wasn’t magic words that the preacher said. It wasn’t the rings on our fingers. It was the movement of the Holy Spirit in our lives, through love and support of our loved ones and our love for one another that bound us together.

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A friend of mine recently referred to this passage John’s great commission… and I think that’s right on. It’s here that Christ calls us to the work of reconciliation, forgiving those who need forgiveness, loving those who need love, binding what needs bound, and loosing what needs loosed. So don’t believe the lie, that you’re not changing the world, you are. We are, here, together.

The work that we are called to; it has the power to overcome violence. It has the power to overcome death. Jesus has done it, hasn’t he? He has overcome death, broken through the locked doors of our churches and our world. He has shown us his hands and his side and breathed on us the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Love that empowers us to change the world.

Amen.