Psalm 32; John 20:1-10
Easter 2014
With
great humility, love and joy I have wonderfully good news to share with you all
this morning. It’s the good news of why we are faithfully gathered
this hour. It’s the good news that forever
forms and reforms us as Christians. It
is quite simply, yet also profoundly, this – in Jesus Christ you are wholly
forgiven!
You are totally and completely forgiven of the
sin you spiritually inherited as part of the human race. You are
forgiven for worshipping false gods, for living in self-righteousness, for
failing to daily demonstrate what you faithfully profess. You are forgiven of that which you feel
convinced you can never forgive about yourself or about another person. Every aspect of sin’s rebellious influence
on your heart and mind and unique soul has been ultimately covered and
conquered by the amazing grace and endless love of God in Jesus Christ. You are wholly forgiven, and thus, you are called
upon to live a holier life after the example of our Lord.
This blessed
gift of forgiveness did not at all come about according to our understanding of
“fair play.” We can thank Shakespeare for first putting the
words “fair” and “play” together in print.
It was used to convey a courteous
rapport between opponents in a confrontation.
It went on to influence the rules of conduct expected of Medieval Knights. They were, for example, never to attack an
unarmed enemy or the weak and innocent.
It suffices
to say that what the powers of the Roman Empire and the Jewish Temple did together
to Jesus of Nazareth was not fair play.
He had not led an armed rebellion.
He had fulfilled, not forsaken, the ancient laws of Israel. Yet he was arrested and did not get any kind
of fair trial. And adding insult to
injury, what his closest disciples did at the end of Jesus’ life was also not
fair play. They denied ever knowing him
and thus sold out his message of God’s kingdom come on earth as it is in
heaven. The absence of fair play led to
Jesus being arrested, flogged, mocked and crucified.
Had
you been there when they crucified our Lord, wouldn’t you have expected Him to
have decried this grave injustice from the Cross? To openly lament, dare I even say “preach”
about how unfairly he’d been treated? Don’t
we all do this when we are even slightly wronged?
Yet
there is no written record of such words.
Instead, heard from the Cross were words that convey the very heart of
our Savior’s work, the very words that should be forming and reforming all
aspects of our lives. These are the
words found in Luke 23:34 – “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they
are doing.”
Didn’t
know what they were doing? Really? It sure seems the Roman soldiers and the
self-satisfied religious leaders knew what they were doing. It sure seems their plan had gone quite
perfectly. But Jesus wasn’t referring
to what they knew of their plan and how very well they had executed it. He was referring to the fact that none of
them, nor any of the disciples up to that point, had truly known God’s
plan. They had not fully understood their sin or
Jesus’ identity. Nor had they recognized
that their actions were helping inaugurate the Messiah’s reign. They’d been too lost in sin, too obsessed
with their self-righteous, self-aggrandizing notion of fairness. The only fairness they could see was to do
away with the man so offensively challenging their steadfast traditions, their
entrenched authority, their violently successful power plays.
Jesus
alone knew the devastating depths of holy judgment against all the accumulated
sin of humankind. Instead of executing
it according to His authority as the Son of God, he chose instead to empty himself
of holy power and allow himself to be executed for it. He sacrificed Himself for your salvation and
of all humankind. So it was that with
his final breaths, and with supremely selfless love, Jesus spoke aloud of forgiving
our sin.
It’s really
important to realize that this meant more than giving humankind an eternal
mulligan for all that had ever been done against God. As prominent Bible scholar N.T. Wright has
pointed out, to be forgiven of sin is the same as being released from death.[i] Jesus’ prayerful proclamation from the Cross announced
that he was in the process of personally securing our release from all that
causes spiritual and physical death. And
so when Mary Magdalene, Simon Peter and another disciple Jesus loved found
Jesus’ tomb empty, they realized he’d risen from the death-grip of sin and the
Good News became wonderfully clear – all God’s children had been wholly
forgiven.
As
Jesus’ followers, fair play goes beyond our abiding by long standing cultural
rules about how to treat one another equally well. The measuring stick for what is fair and
what is unfair in all our human relationships and for God’s relationship with
us is the Cross of Jesus. As Easter people, as people who believe in
the forgiveness of sin, in life beyond death and in Christ’s kingdom here on
earth as it is in heaven, how are we to apply this eternal measure to our
everyday lives? Through our Lord’s
ongoing saving grace and through our steadfast faith, we will do so by striving
to live holier lives that above all exhibit our belief in the forgiveness of
sin. Again, this means more than
absolving guilt, it means helping ourselves and others experience spiritual release
from the constantly present, life-oppressing, fear-inducing and destructive power
of death. In the love of Jesus Christ, when we say “I
forgive you” it’s really the same as saying “I release you to be more alive.”
I dearly
wish this Easter Good News meant that none of us on this earthly plain would
ever again have to suffer sin and its consequential spider-web ways that cause
us to die a little every day. I wish
our holy release was complete, that we all were not stuck waiting for a final culmination
when our Lord comes again in glory. We
are in the great company of every Christian in the world over the past couple
thousand years on this count.
What I
believe can help us all is to feel a kinship with the earliest followers of Christ. Theirs was a very pregnant expectation of the
Risen Lord’s return. But time passed on
and on. Rather than growing in
disappointment and resentment, instead of daily decrying that the delay just
wasn’t fair, they instead kept striving to live holier lives. They kept increasing their faithful trust in
the Holy Spirit driven, living and liberating presence of the Risen Lord. They perhaps realized, as I encourage us all
to do today as well, that’s God’s eternity can’t be measure by our sense of
time and that Jesus Christ is indeed the same yesterday, today and forever
(Hebrews 13:8). Indeed, as the Psalm 90
declares, a thousand years in God’s sight are like a day just gone by.
And
those first church members understood that being forgiven, released from sin
and it’s ultimate consequence of death, was about more than just getting
“individual sinners right with God.”
They understood Easter as a “whole way of life, the new covenant way of
life in which the restoration which God offered to all who believed in Jesus
was to characterize families and communities, worldviews and life-paths.” When coming upon “anything amiss in human
relations or society” they expected one another to “move heaven and earth to
put it right, to restore things to the way they should be.”[ii] One of my favorite N.T. Wright quotes says
it this way – “Jesus’ resurrection is the beginning of God’s new project not to
snatch people away from earth to heaven but to colonize earth with the life of
heaven.”[iii]
Practicing
forgiveness as we’ve been forgiven is never easy. We are generally more adept at holding fast
to our hurt and grief, at fearing and avoiding the topic of death then accepting
and feeling degrees of release from it all with faith and love. I promise that you’ll have a front row seat
to the myriad of complex human emotions and ways they can deeply complicate our
relationships, especially with family, if you attend our upcoming production of
the play Lost In Yonkers.
Yet
what Marjorie Thompson in her Lenten study on the topic of forgiveness says is
also most definitely true. She declares that
if we care to listen, there are countless stories of forgiveness all around us
and that “we are resilient creatures, capable of throwing off shackles of
bitterness and discovering more about ourselves and others over time.” She further affirms that we can all “begin
to see that rage, grief and lust for retaliation can easily trap us in a
self-imposed prison of hate that corrodes our soul’s energy and peace” and that
“choosing forgiveness is one of the most freeing and healing choices we can
make in life.”[iv]
Hear
again the Good News that makes every single day Easter day. He is Risen!
You are released! In Jesus Christ
we are all wholly forgiven. May we
joyfully depart from this gathering with spring in our steps, eternal hope in
our hearts, a desire to be in constant worship, and eager to express our
gratitude for this most holy gift of forgiveness through daily life-affirming,
Lord praising words and actions. Amen!
