If you could ask for a superpower, what would it be? Incredible strength? The ability to read minds? To time travel? To know the truth in all settings? It’s hard to imagine asking for the superpower of forgiveness… yet that is what Jesus gave his gathered disciples on Easter night. That is what Jesus has given us.
First, he gave them peace – he showed up as they were literally locked in by fear, and spoke peace to them: When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.”
Then he gave them more peace, and a mission:
Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”
And then he told them what that mission entailed and equipped them for it:
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.”
The Holy Spirit brings many gifts to us, and releases many gifts in us. But the first one Jesus mentions is the authority to forgive or to withhold forgiveness. That’s a lot of authority, friends. In a sense, Jesus is saying that God will follow our lead. When we refuse to release someone from the debt they owe us, we keep them bound, and ourselves bound to them. When we do release forgiveness, we bring freedom to people and systems, and to our own hearts.
In our current climate of fear and division, I often wonder what faith communities can offer. The world doesn’t really need our food banks and advocacy, as integral as they are to our mission of justice and peace; other organizations offer those. I don’t think the world needs our lovely worship and lively fellowship – people are not clamoring to join us. Maybe what the world most needs from us is exactly that superpower Jesus gave us – the supernatural ability to offer forgiveness, and to model it. Maybe what we can do best is often what we put at the end of our to-do lists: being the makers of peace Jesus told us to be.
The verb used in “blessed are the peacemakers” means to craft. We are to be crafters of peace where peace has been broken. It’s an active process of building a new thing. Often building begins with dismantling what has been broken. Our mission to give or withhold forgiveness comes into play as we address the broken systems in our world – the economic systems that have created an ever-widening income gap where some 39% of the country’s wealth is held by the top 1 percent of its people, and more and more families are sliding into poverty; the systemic racism perpetuated by laws and networks long ago designed to preserve wealth and security and benefits to “Caucasian” (an invented term) Americans, that has left communities of color particularly vulnerable to the ravages of Covid-19, that have resulted in the untimely and unjust deaths of an increasing number of black men. These men are my brothers. These women are my sisters.
Do we forgive? Do we withhold forgiveness? How do we model forgiveness if we withhold it? How do we craft peace in this world? How do we craft space for grace?
People are given superpowers for a reason. Jesus gave us ours because he wants us on the front lines, not holed up in our worship spaces. (We’re out of them now!) He wants us to cross boundaries of difference and craft peace so that those worship spaces become filled with people who do not look like us. Black churches filled with white and brown faces; white churches filled with black and brown faces. All of us together receiving God’s peace and the gifts of the Holy Spirit. That is Pentecost.
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