John 20:19-31

The news this week has been filled with reports of mining tragedies in China and then in Montcoal, West Virginia. The incident in Montcoal claimed the lives of 29 people and was quickly followed by reports of the numerous safety violations that had been cited, but not corrected in that mine and earlier incidents in the same company that caused other deaths, also due to ignored safety violations.

Whenever tragic deaths occur, especially ones that apparently might not have happened if industry regulations had been followed, it leads to feelings beyond simple sadness at the loss of life to anger at the short-sightedness that led to those deaths, and to feelings of disgust at the possibility that those regulations were ignored simply to pad the bottom line by avoiding the added expense of following the rules.

But that wasn’t the only part of this tragedy that was deepened by the presence of human sinfulness. A report made the news on Friday in which the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas decided to step into the mining disaster picture.

Westboro is the church which made national headlines when a young man named Matthew Shephard was murdered because he was gay. At that point, Pastor Fred Phelps took a group of members from his Westboro Church congregation to picket the victim’s funeral, carrying signs that said things like “God hates fags” and “Matt Shepard rots in Hell”.

Clearly those were provocative slogans designed to make a political point — I refuse to call that a theological point — with utter disregard to the additional pain and suffering their words and actions were causing a family that was already struggling with the needless death of their loved one. Not to mention that there is no possible way to biblically justify the actions that the Westboro Church claimed were being taken in the name of the Father of all grace.

The group has also picketed funerals of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, claiming their deaths are signs of God’s judgment on the USA for its rampant sinfulness. So they carry signs that say, “Thank God for Dead Soldiers” outside military funerals.

Now Westboro Church has stepped into the latest tragedy to claim that the recent mining accident was God’s way of responding to someone who sent the church threatening emails, warning them not to picket in West Virginia.

Picking your way through that twisting trail of hatred and illogic is almost impossible simply on its own terms. But it becomes so much worse when you add in the fact that these terrible things are being done in the name of Jesus, the one who taught us not to judge, who told us to respond to a slap on the cheek by turning the other cheek and who was said to be so gentle that he wouldn’t even break a bruised reed.

All of this is relevant to our gospel lesson today which tells the story of Christ’s first resurrection appearance to the gathered group of disciples. The story then becomes an ordination service in which those disciples are empowered to do Christ’s work of forgiveness.

Now remember who those disciples were. If there was ever a chance to misunderstand or disobey or fail Jesus, they were the ones who managed to find it first, although we later disciples have been very good at following in those footsteps. As Don Hoffman describes it:

“These people have not exactly covered themselves with glory. All through Jesus’ ministry they have managed to DO the wrong thing, SAY the wrong thing, get the wrong idea, and make his job harder rather than easier. When he needed them to stay awake, they went to sleep. When he needed their support, they ran away. If they were given an opportunity to speak up on his behalf, they claimed they never knew him.

“[Now] It’s Sunday evening, and the house is locked, and the disciples are inside, being punished. […] They are being punished by guilt. They are being punished by fear. They are angry with each other. They are plagued by the ‘if only’s’: If only you had done this. If only I had done that. If only we hadn’t done something else. Each one is deeply aware of their own inadequacy. […]

“Each one of these losers is painfully aware that God can never forgive them. If it turns out that Jesus really IS alive, as they’ve heard, really WAS brought back from death by God’s power, they know that JESUS can never forgive them. […]And suddenly Jesus is there. […] If there was high tension before, all the safety valves have just blown. What’s going to happen to me now?! Jesus is really here! Now, we’re gonna get it! If Jesus has the right to be angry with anybody, it’s these bozos. If Jesus has the right to PUNISH anybody, it’s these bozos.”

But instead, Jesus offers them his peace — that is, his complete and unequivocal forgiveness. More than that, he shows that he trusts them by empowering them to offer the same sort of absolute forgiveness to others. What he actually tells them is, “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” But what he’s really offering them is a chance to remake the world in the image of grace.

That sounds like a wonderful thing, but in fact, it can be very hard. How do you forgive people who put profits over safety, resulting in the loss of 29 lives in a single incident? How do you forgive people who warp the teachings of our Lord, transforming them into weapons to further batter those who are already suffering? Is it even right to forgive someone without holding them accountable?

We’re only human, so we are much more comfortable with dreaming up ways to inflict punishment on those we consider guilty or creating methods to get even. We do that in spite of Christ’s injunction that we can receive forgiveness only to the extent that we extend forgiveness. In fact, the act of building a world based on forgiveness and grace, which — on the face of it — sounds hopelessly idealistic, turns out to be quite practical and pragmatic. Humans are designed in such a way that we are hard-wired for grace.

Columnist Tom Harpur explains, “[…] Christ was aware that there is a powerful spiritual law according to which we tend to become like the object of our hatred. […] one must be careful who or what he/she hates because somehow, in this hot fixation of emotions, the hatred recoils on the hater.

“In other words, the resentments we hold, the hanging on to old hurts and injustices, provides our mind with negative thought-food. And we become what we think. It cycles back on us. Maybe we act, even subconsciously, in hateful and angry ways towards others who have nothing to do with what makes us angry. The behavior is misplaced, but it creates more antagonism and animosity in our life.

“We lose sleep, our stress levels rise. […] Loving our enemies means putting an end to this cycle of hatred, violence and revenge that our world seems locked into. It frees others, and it frees ourselves. It stops that destructive cycle of resentment, and instead opens us to the freedom to choose from a number of different futures. It places real power back in our hands — the power to love.”

In other words, when we “retain the sins” of anyone — to use Jesus’ words — in a very real sense, we incorporate their destructive power into our own lives. But when we forgive, that power is released so that it can be channeled into something positive.

Unfortunately, Christian individuals and Christian churches are rarely much better at extending grace to those who have hurt them than anyone else is. And yet that is exactly the task Christ is giving the church in our gospel lesson today.

If I may turn to Don Hoffman again, he says, “You have the power to forgive sins. You have the power to retain sins. And it’s true that down through history the church has misused this dangerous power. But Christians have done something worse. We have ignored the power of forgiving, and have insisted on the power of punishing.

“If you look at the discussions, debates, and decisions of the church, and of the church’s members, down through the last 2000 years, a great deal of this has been efforts to determine the right amount of punishment. Making the punishment fit the crime. What is the right punishment for this infraction? What is the correct punishment for this sin? It was Christians who invented the idea of Purgatory. Purgatory is an effort to make sure everybody gets exactly the right amount of punishment. It was Christians who invented courts of appeal, an effort to make sure that nobody gets the wrong punishment. It was Christians who invented the idea of trial by jury, so that every wrong-doer would be judged, and punished, by their peers. It was Christians who invented double-jeopardy: you can’t be punished twice for the same crime. It was Christians who decided that some punishments, but only some, are cruel and unusual.

“Now balance this by any efforts down through history to determine the correct amount of forgiveness. I’m not sure you can find ANY attention to this. I’m not sure you can find ANY attempt, either in the Vatican courts or in the governments of Christian nations, or the polity of any denomination […] to decide on the right amount of forgiveness. All we have is something Jesus said […] ‘Forgive them seventy times seven times.’”

That’s why we continue to be surprised when we occasionally see someone trying to live up to our high calling as builders of a world of grace.

Do you remember three and a half years ago, when a gunman entered a small Amish school in Pennsylvania and shot 10 girls — killing five of them — before killing himself? If so, you almost certainly remember how amazed the nation was when the Amish community rallied around the gunman’s widow and his parents to offer their condolences. In fact, more than half of the mourners at the gunman’s funeral were Amish.

The Amish believe that being disciples of Jesus means following his lead in everything, including the forgiveness he extended to his executioners as he was dying on the cross. So the Amish believe that they are required to extend compassion and even love to wrongdoers.

The truth is that seeing grace in action like that — following those senseless shootings — almost mesmerized the country. Grace has a way of doing just that because it tugs at our souls and opens us up to a vision of a world where hatred and violence are met with love and mercy.

That’s something which is, at times, doesn’t seem humanly possible, but that’s why Jesus gave us the gift of the Holy Spirit to do this difficult task. With God’s help, all things are possible. And since that’s true, why do so many of us have such a hard time believing in the irresistible power of grace?

Jesus trusted his first disciples with his life and his teachings. When they let him down in his moment of greatest need, he instantly forgive them and trusted them again.

We, too, have let Jesus down time after time, yet he still trusts us to continue his work of forgiving. He said, “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” Forgiveness is rarely easy, but we can do it. We can help shift the world toward grace. He’s trusting us to do that for him. Amen.

(Comments to Jim at jmccrea@galenalink.com.)