A Lecture on Forgiveness, Sorry

Please Click Here For Sermon Video

John 20:19-23; Mark 2:1-12

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.

  

What If Jesus Really Is God?

Text: Mark 2:1-12

Probably the most difficult move I ever had to make was the move from Marlinton, West Virginia to Caledon, Ontario, the move from “small town” to “no town”.  Marlinton had a population of 900 and was located in Pocahontas County, West Virginia and it was the first place in my adult life that I ever felt at home.  It was small town.  Everybody knew who you were even if you didn’t know who you were.  Gossip did a better job of people in line than the one town cop they had.  My church was the downtown on the main corner church and that meant I couldn’t help but get involved in local things.  I was in the Rotary Club and president of the Ministerial association.  I spearheaded a downtown youth center that involved nearly every church and civic organization in town.  I also got roped in to being part of a group that was doing some county redevelopment think-tanking.  My church was beginning to be known as the fun and fellowship, vibrant church in town.  I made some really, really good friends.  I was somebody and I was doing a lot of good in that town. 

And then divorce happened and I simply had to get out of there.  My ex-wife said she didn’t want to be a minister’s wife anymore and eventually left.  The people in Marlinton were spectacular in their care and support for me.  I will forever be indebted to a handful of the friends I had there who opened up their homes to me while I transitioned out.  Then, and this was eleven years ago, I wound up in Caledon, Ontario.  I took a small church in the hopes that we could redevelop and it would blossom, which it did but not without its tensions and it never really grew numerically.  I was in Caledon just shy of ten years. I was given a surrogate Canadian family, made a few good friends, got married again Caledon, and had kids yet though all that Caledon never really got to be home for me.  I don’t mean to be rude, but Caledon isn’t a place a person can find home in.  It’s a huge tract of land with several small communities strewn throughout.  The small towns there have transitioned into bedroom communities for Toronto area commuters.  With every estate sale the established farming community was giving way to wealthy retirees whose social lives were still in the GTA.  Good friends were hard to make because there were no ways to really meet the people, people who really didn’t have the time or energy to meet their neighbours anyway.  I went from being somebody who was pretty well connected and doing a lot of good in a small town to anonymous in no town. 

In the midst of that move I lost my home and I dare say that I’ve not known home since.  Real community is a cherished treasure that is hard to find.  Our lifestyle here in North America breeds isolation like mould in a petri dish and it’s largely due to our pursuit of comfort through wealth. You folks up here know what it is to get snowed in for a few days.  It has its effects on the soul particularly when it happens on a weekly basis but you know spring is coming.  But, imagine what its like to be in isolation and not really know that you are.  I think many to most of the people in North America suffer from that.  Anxiety and depression smoulder within and we don’t really know why.  Did you know Canada has the highest per capita rate of people on anti-depressants in the world?  Yet we don’t ask why.  For the most part we’re doing everything we’ve been told to believe we’re supposed to do in life and doing it good.  We’ve got all the stuff we’ve been told to believe we’re supposed to have and we’ve worked hard for it.  That’s nothing to be ashamed of.  We’re comfortable and we work hard, but something is missing and I venture to say that it is real friendship.  Real friendship and that’s assuming we really know what it is is hard to come by and so is the time for it.  And so we see the effects of social isolation widespread across this great nation.

Looking at our passage today from Mark’s Gospel, isolation is one of the things I think of when I meditate on this paralytic.  I imagine that isolation would have been a huge factor in his life.  He lived in a small town.  Archaeologists figure that Capernaum in that day would have been a bustling little village of about 1,200 people or about 150-175 households.  I suspect that the man was not born without the use of his legs, but rather had some sort of accident.  In the blink of an eye maybe a fall from a ladder and his life turned upside-down.  This sudden change for the worse would have of course had the superstitious religious among them wondering what unforgivable sin he had committed for God to have smitten him so harshly. 

That is certainly how the scribes would have viewed him and anyone associated with him.  They would have viewed him as “unclean” like they did lepers and anyone else with diabilities.  He would not have been allowed to come to the synagogue or to go to Jerusalem to the temple because the religious authorities wouldn’t have allowed him in the presence of God in an unclean state.  You see, the Priests and the Scribes back then pretty much viewed their faith from the perspective of sin management and determining who’s in and who’s out with respect to God and the community.  They made the man to be a social pariah.  Anyone who helped him would have incurred his uncleanness too and would have had to stay separated from synagogue and other people too for designated periods of time.  I suspect this man stayed pretty much out of sight behind closed doors or worse begging on the side of the road at the edge of town. 

Isolation would have been a huge reality in his life.  I can’t imagine what it would have been like to go in just a moment from being an honourable, working, productive part of a small community to being cut off, shamed, and forced into isolation and having to be carried on a mat everywhere you go.  Then to make matters worse, the Scribes and Priests, the people who should be pointing you to God for hope and supporting you are pointing the finger of judgement at you and saying you’ve done the unforgivable and you are God forsaken.  Your sin has become unmanageable and therefore you must be cast out.  It’s like waking up in Bible-thumper-ville.

I ponder this paralytic and what it meant to him for Jesus to say to him first, “Son, your sins are forgiven.”  If you remember from last week’s sermon Jesus saw these four friends carrying this paralytic to him so that he might be healed and in their act of unconditional love and faithfulness he saw the Day of Atonement in the Old Testament faith fulfilled.  Forgiveness isn’t an act of pardoning a list of offences nor a process of catharting anger and resentment against those who have made us victims.  Forgiveness is bearing with one another in our weakness and doing what we can to bring one another to Jesus were we might be healed of sin and its effects on us.  Jesus saw these four men doing that and stated the obvious, “Son, your sins are sent away.” 

That pronouncement brought about a dispute with the religious authorities because Jesus had done something only God could.  So, Jesus upped the ante with them and asked which is harder: to tell the man his sins are forgiven or to tell him to get up, pick up his mat, and walk.  And then just to prove his authority to do that Jesus tells the paralytic, “I say to you, rise, pick up your mat, and go home.”  And the man did.  Jesus raised him to new life.  The Greek word for rise is the same word that’s used for raising the dead.  Instead of the shame of having to be carried around on a mat, he becomes able to carry his own mat.  He can go home now.  Everything he lost due to an accident, a cruel belief in superstitions about disabilities, and the pronouncements of religious authorities was now restored.  The forgiveness enacted by these four faithful friends resulted in this paralytic becoming a sign of what it’s going to be like at the resurrection.  When we are all raised from the paralysis of sin, death, and evil and made to be truly at home.

This leads me to ask a question, a rather rhetorical question: What if Jesus really is God? And indeed, I not only believe he is, I know he is.  If Jesus really is God then we must accept that there is no unknowable God hidden behind Jesus who is really just an angry and offended God who only cares about who’s sinning and who’s not, a fickle tyrant who is deeply offended by our actions and has therefore penalized us with death yet loves us enough to kill his own son in our place provided we’re smart enough to make the decision to believe that. 

If we’ve seen Jesus, we’ve seen the Father to quote John’s Gospel.  God is forgiving, healing, life-giving.  He gives us “home”.  If Jesus really is God (and he is) then God really is like Jesus.  For us, the church, this means we have to carry on like those four friends who carried the paralytic and not like the religious authorities with whom Jesus was ever at odds and who in the end had him killed.  So much of North American Christianity comes across like we’re only concerned with sin management and who’s in and who’s out.  At least that’s what you hear when you talk to people outside the church.  WE really need to be the ones carrying people in their weaknesses to the One whom we know can heal them.  That’s the way Jesus is so therefore that’s the way God is and thusly that’s the way we are to be with each other and with our neighbours.  Amen.

Seriously, What Is Forgiveness?

Text: Mark 2:1-12

Forgiveness is a common word in our faith 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 we mean by it isn't exactly what we find in the Bible.

So what do we mean by forgiveness?  In the last 25 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 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.  Forgiveness gets defined 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."  Definitions also involve ceasing to require the repayment of debt.

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.  There's also the idea of granting or allowing.  If you go way back to the Old English roots of "forgive" or "forgiefan" it means "to give in marriage".  Thus, it goes without saying that forgiveness and marriage go hand in hand.  The word essentially means "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 trust another man and his family with that task.  When somebody wronged another, they in essence broke trust with that person and with the clan.  Therefore, to forgive was to give trust back to the offender.  Forgiveness led to reconciliation not only 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 goes back to just before the 1100's have to do with maintaining trust in communities of people.  There is a bit of a narcissistic flip.  Today, forgiveness deals with me and how I feel.  Back, forgiveness dealt with us and how we trust each other.  Keep this in mind and let's move on to the Bible.

Looking at the Bible, when the word forgiveness comes up it is usually associated with the forgiveness of sins and therefore involves our relationship with God and with one another.   This comes out in the Lord's Prayer when we say forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.  Also in our passage from Mark when Jesus said, "Son, your sins are forgiven" and then the Pharisees got upset because Jesus was doing something only God can do.  There is also our reading from the Psalms this morning, Psalm 32 begins, "Blessed (or happy) is the one whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered."   We can see here an added dimension of our own need to be forgiven not just to forgive.

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.  A long time ago the church began to use the Old English word "forgiefan" to translate into English a Latin not a Greek version of the Bible.  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 rather than as a disease in our humanity that causes a breakdown in our relationships with God and one another and destroys our God-given dignity as persons and rather makes us ashamed.

The Greek word Jesus uses 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".  Once a year the ancient Israelites had a particular day for dealing with the sins of the people, Yom Kippur - the Day of Atonement.  It involved sacrificing 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 and then it was led away into the wilderness where it was then sent away where it could be destroyed by whatever.  When Jesus told the man his sins were forgiven he meant sent away as in scapegoated out of existence.  This is of course pointing to Jesus' death on the cross.

That Greek word "aphiemi" (to send away) 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 carried away.  I like to think NASA and the space shuttle.  The Psalmist also uses a word, which means covered.  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 of sin on the people and the temple and 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 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 a process to cathart his anger at the man or that God now trusts him again?  I don't think so.  Jesus said this when he saw the faith or faithfulness or loyalty of the four men.  They had lifted 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 removing every obstacle to bring him to Jesus where they knew he could be healed.  This compassionate act by faithful, loyal friends of carrying or nasah-ing this paralytic to Jesus is why Jesus says to the man that his sins are sent away.  This fellowship of friends were showing this paralytic 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.  Remember paralytics were viewed in the same way as lepers and blind people back then.  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.  Yet, here were these four men carrying this paralytic 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.

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.  It is not pardoning a person of their ledger of offences.  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).  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 of 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.