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Forgiveness is a common word in our Christian vocabulary much like the words grace, faith, truth, love, and even the word God. These words reflect foundational elements in our faith, yet, I think we readily use them without really knowing about what they mean. This morning I want to look at what we mean by forgiveness because I think what we think forgiveness means isn't exactly what we find in the Bible. It’s important we understand forgiveness rightly because it is central to the ministry Jesus has entrusted to us and empowered us for by the gift of the Holy Spirit, the Presence of God, in and among us.
If people were to ask a congregation, “Why the church? What are you here for?”, well Jesus gave us an answer to those questions when he appeared to his disciples on the evening of the day of his resurrection. As per last week’s message, he appeared and spoke a creating word upon his disciples to make their fellowship the place on Earth where peace/Shalom exists. He gave them the ministry of healing reconciliation that God the Father sent him to carry out saying: “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” Being the place on Earth where there is peace requires we be about the work of forgiveness. So, with that weight on our shoulders, what is forgiveness?
First, before we get into what the Bible says forgiveness is, let’s trace our culture’s understanding of it back more than a few centuries because the meaning of words tends to change over the years. In the last 30 or so years something called forgiveness has made its way into the world of emotional therapy and healthy lifestyles. Several studies were done that demonstrated that forgiving can contribute to our being happier and healthier whereas not forgiving and bearing a grudge can do quite the opposite. So, it seems that there is something cathartic or soul cleansing about forgiving. This is why if you look the word up in a more recent dictionary you will find that the subject of feelings comes up. They tend to define forgiveness as a process one goes through in order to stop feeling anger or resentment towards another or to stop feeling like you need some sort of retribution for a wrong done to you. You've heard people say, "Just let it go."
When looking up what it means to forgive in older dictionaries you often find the topic of pardon, to grant pardon to one who has wronged you, to let them go without exacting punishment. There's also the financial side of things too by ceasing to require the repayment of debt. There's also the idea of granting permission or allowing things to go forward.
If you go way back to the Old English roots of the word "forgive", we come across the word "forgiefan" which means "to give in marriage". Thus, it goes without saying that forgiveness and marriage go hand in hand. In Old English, the word essentially meant "to give completely". It is the act of giving with a huge sense of finality to it. You can apply that to wrongdoings, to debts, and so on. It is to relinquish a rightful claim to something forever, to utterly give it up.
If I were to philosophize on this a bit, I would say that forgiveness and trust go hand in hand. When a father gave his daughter's hand in marriage it wasn't just an exchange of property as some want to see it. He was letting go of any claim he had to rightfully be the one who provided for and protected his daughter and in turn completely trusting another man and his family with that task. “Forgeifan” was the act of giving total trust to another. When somebody wronged another, they in essence broke trust with that person and with the clan. Therefore, to forgive was to give your trust back to the one who broke it. As doing something that breaks trust with someone involves breaking the trust of a community of people, forgiveness meant not only reconciliation or restoring trust with the one offended but also with the whole clan.
Summing this up, our modern idea of forgiveness has to do with the cathartic process of letting go of anger and resentment. The Old English roots of the word, which go back to just before the 1100's have to do with maintaining trust in communities of people. If you don’t see it, there has been a bit of a narcissistic flip between yesterday and today in the definition of forgiveness. Today, forgiveness deals with me and how I feel. Back then, forgiveness dealt with us and how we keep trust among ourselves. Keep this in mind and let's move on to the Bible.
Looking at the Bible, when the concept of forgiveness comes up it is usually associated with how we deal with sins which are offenses in our relationship with God and with one another. When we sin against one another, or rather break trust with and hurt one another, the Bible reveals that it also affects our relationship with God. God is aggrieved. God feels it when we hurt others and others hurt us and thus, our relationship with God is negatively affected by sins. The biblical work of forgiveness also emphasizes not only our need to forgive but also our responsibility to seek it. And on top of it all, we mysteriously find God in the midst of forgiving and seeking forgiveness.
To get our English translations of the Bible we have to find words in our language that carry the same or similar meaning as the words in Greek or Hebrew. This is rarely an exact science and it quite often happens that essential meaning gets lost or corrupted as the meanings of words change over time. As I demonstrated moments ago, forgiveness does not mean today what it meant in Old English. How we came to use the word forgive to translate the Bible’s conceptual world of how to deal with our sins against God and one another is a rabbit hole to Wonderland worth going down.
A long time ago the church began to use the Old English word "forgiefan" which meant “to give completely” to translate into English a Latin not a Greek version of the Bible. Thus, there was already a conceptual jump from Greek to Latin. The Latin word they were trying to translate was perdonare, which means to pardon. This had the unfortunate side effect of getting the church to think of sins being a ledger of offences for which we are guilty that needs to be wiped clean rather than as a disease in our humanity that causes a breakdown of trust in our relationships with God and one another and that destroys our God-given dignity as persons by making us feel ashamed.
The Greek word Jesus used which we translate as forgiven does not mean a cathartic process of doing away with anger and resentment nor does it mean pardoning a person of a ledger of offences. The word is "aphiemi" and it simply means "to send away" and sometimes “to pick up and carry”. He used that word because it accurately reflected how the ancient Israelites dealt with sin in their once a year day of fasting and sacrificing, which they called Yom Kippur - the Day of Atonement. On that day they sacrificed a bull and two goats. One of the goats was called the scapegoat. It was called this because the priest would lay his hand upon its head and whisper the sins of the people into its ear so that it would then carry them in and upon himself. Then, it was led away into the wilderness where it was then sent away where it could be destroyed by whatever. In our Mark reading when Jesus told the man his sins were forgiven, he meant carried off, sent away as in scapegoated out of existence. This is of course pointing to Jesus' death on the cross when he would be the Scapegoat for humanity’s sin.
That Greek word "aphiemi" (to send away or to pick up and carry) is the word that the Jews in Jesus' day were using to translate a particular Hebrew word, which we also translate as forgive. The Hebrew word is nasah and it means to lift up and carry. Think scapegoat as well. The scapegoat carries away the sin of the people. Our sin is born away. I like to think NASA and the space shuttle.
The Psalmist also uses a word, “kophar”, which means covered, for forgiveness. This refers also to the Day of Atonement. A bull and a goat were killed and their blood, which represented their life, was taken. The blood now represented life that had passed through death. The high priest sprinkled it all over the temple and the priests and even the ark of the covenant to do two things: to cover over or cleanse the stain which sin leaves on the people and the temple and also to unite God and his people in the blood, this life that had passed through death. This is why the Psalmist says blessed is the one whose sin is covered over. This sprinkling of blood of course points us to Jesus’ death and resurrection and also our union with him in the Holy Spirit.
So, with all that in mind, what was Jesus telling this paralytic when he said, "Son, your sins are forgiven". Was he saying that God had gone through some cathartic process to let go of his anger at that man so that God now trusts him again? I don't think so. Jesus pronounced the man’s sins forgiven when he saw the faith or faithfulness or loyalty of the four men. They had lifted him up and were carrying the paralytic on his mat to bring him to Jesus. Jesus saw that they were nasah-ing this man and, moreover, along the way they were removing every obstacle (the roof) in order to bring him to Jesus where they knew he could be healed.
This act of faithful love by loyal friends of carrying or nasah-ing this paralytic to Jesus is why Jesus says to the man that his sins were sent away. That love, that fidelity bore his sin away or covered it over or cleansed it away. These friends through their hands-on bond of fellowship with the paralytic showed him unconditional love and acceptance by lifting him up and carrying him, bringing him to Jesus to be healed and removing every obstacle on the way. Jesus pronounced him forgiven and healed him and thus restored him to “normal” community.
Remember paralytics were viewed in the same way as lepers and blind people back then and much like addicts are today. They were called unclean and cast out of the community because people believed them to be cursed by God for some horrible hidden sin that he or his parents had committed. People would even refuse to touch them for fear of becoming unclean themselves.
But these four men forgave this paralytic by carrying him on the mat of his disease to Jesus and willingly taking his uncleanness upon themselves because they knew Jesus could and would heal the man. Jesus saw their unconditional love in action and that's why he said, "Son (meaning you're one of my people), your sins are forgiven." Whatever was keeping this man cut off from loving community was obviously gone, sent away by these four men lifting him up and carrying him. He was forgiven.
So, seriously, what is forgiveness as far as the Bible is concerned? It is not the cathartic process of letting go of anger and resentment though I think that happens. It is not pardoning a person of their ledger of offences though that happens as well. Forgiveness is what happens when a small group of people unconditionally love and accept a sin-sick person, bearing with him in all his weaknesses, bringing him to Jesus, removing all obstacles on the way so that he may know unconditional love and acceptance in Jesus’ name so that he is no longer outcast (though he may have deserved it for what he had done). Small groups of Jesus' people unconditionally welcoming and loving others in their brokenness and helping them to find wholeness in Jesus is what forgiveness is. If there is a cathartic process of letting go of resentments, it is found while being nasah-ed by faithful Jesus people. If there is such a thing as having the ledger wiped clean, it is found in the unconditional acceptance by faithful Jesus people. Welcoming people into community where the unconditional love of Jesus rules the day and helping them to find peace in him is true forgiveness. So let our way be the way of those four unnamed men. Amen.
