and imposing conditions of penance in exchange for forgiveness. Protestants note that it was apparently to Jesus’ followers in general that the authority was granted; John does not limit the number of people to whom Jesus said this to a mere eleven—the twelve minus Judas. But, John says, the work of forgiving or retaining sins is what Jesus was commissioning the disciples to do, and, in his proclaiming it to the church, John wants all Christians to know that this is the church’s work whenever and wherever the church exists and is faithful. And what the church is doing when it does so is continuing the work of Jesus—“As you have sent me into the world,” he prayed to the Father on the night before he was arrested, “so I have sent them into the world” (John 17:18, NRSV). The gift that Jesus bestows by breathing upon the disciples is the gift of the Spirit which empowers the community to continue the work of Jesus. As God’s breath gave life to our first ancestor so long ago, Jesus’ breathing upon his disciples gives the church its life. A new, second creation has come into being, and it is sustained not by its own initiative, not through its own ingenuity, but only and always as Jesus’ doing. Jesus shares with his followers the life-force that dwelled in him and brought him forth from the grave.
What Jesus’ disciples are to do is no different from what he did. And that is to speak and do the words and signs that cause people to believe, if they but choose to do so. At the beginning of the Gospel of John, we are told that John the Baptist’s role was to testify to Jesus, so that all might believe through him. At the original ending of John, just a few verses after today’s reading, John tells us that what he has written is so that people might come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing they may have life in his name. In John, sin is not specific acts of transgression, but blindness to the revelation of God in Christ—failure to see in Jesus the person and personality of God. Jesus’ commission to the disciples, and their empowerment with the Holy Spirit, to forgive or retain sins, is the authority and assignment to continue what God sent Jesus to do. And that is the work of love. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life” (John 3:16, NRSV). The mission of each disciple and the whole church is to reveal God by showing God’s love.
To reveal God’s love the way that Jesus did is a daunting task. Just think of Jesus turning water into wine, of feeding five thousand with a few loaves of bread and even fewer fish, of crossing barriers of ethnicity and respectability and even religion, of giving sight to people long blind, of raising the dead back to life again. As we read of Jesus’ activities in John, each successively reveals more profoundly God’s power, and each successively deals more assertively with sin as John understands it—blindness to who Jesus is, the Son of God fully endowed with the Holy Spirit. “Very truly, I tell you,” Jesus had said to his disciples the night before his crucifixion, “the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father” (John 14:12, NRSV). It was as he was going to the Father that Jesus breathed the Holy Spirit upon the church to continue his work on an even broader scale. Who was still unforgiven? Who was still joyless? Who was still hungry? Who was still discriminated against and outcast? Who still could not see? Who was still bound and shut up in a tomb? The mission Jesus was giving his disciples—not just the few huddled in a house fearful and uncertain on the evening of the day Jesus’ burial place was discovered to be empty, but all of us—was to love the world into joy, to love the world into fullness of stomach, to love the world into community, to love the world into clear vision, to love the world into eternal life—to reveal God. An impossible task, you say? Not when the church is breathing in the Holy Spirit—the Spirit which is given us not to tear down, but to build up, not to separate us, but to unite us, not to condemn, but to save—the Spirit that enables us to show the whole world that God is love!
In the 1960s, a popular television show began each week’s episode with the words, “Your mission, Mr. Phelps, should you choose to accept it . . .” The mission of the disciples of Jesus Christ, week after week, day after day, is always the same—to cure blindness by giving witness to the light that reveals God in the continuing ministry of Jesus Christ and thus to raise people to eternal life. Not just attending worship, important as that is. Not just being a congregation member, significant as that is. Not just giving financially, necessary as that is. But being fully and always engaged in the mission of love. “As the Father has sent me,” Jesus said, “so I send you” (John 20:21b, NRSV). Peace be with you.
Trinity Sunday
Spanish Springs Presbyterian Church, Sparks, Nevada
May 30, 1999
Genesis 1:1—2:4a
2 Corinthians 13:11–13
Matthew 28:16–20
“The Creator’s Delight”
Imagine that you had been there when the unthinkable had happened—pagan soldiers from a foreign land had invaded the little place that God had given to your ancestors long ago with a promise that it would always be yours. Your fields had been devastated. Your capital city had been laid waste. The best and brightest of your fellow citizens had been carried off to a distant exile, perhaps you along with them, refugees in a program not so much of “ethnic cleansing” but national dismemberment. Finally, you hear news even more horribly incredible than the conquest itself: the temple of God built by King Solomon centuries ago has been reduced to rubble, looted and burned and toppled stone from stone.
The triumphant nation that has dismantled your worldview and ridiculed your hopes worships a whole encyclopedia of gods, and undoubtedly they are loudly attributing their military success to the power of their idols. And in time, as you sit bewildered in a strange land far from home and watch the workings of this other society, its continued successes in brutal battle and the lavish treasures that its generals bring home and parade arrogantly through the streets, you begin to wonder, is there maybe some truth to the claims they make about their gods? Are the names they worship indeed more powerful than the God of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and Rachel? They tell you that their gods shine in the sky, some of them—the sun by day and the moon and the stars by night. Mortals are subject to their whims, they say, for they are not emotionally involved with humankind or much interested in what happens to them; men and women are but meaningless pawns on some divine chessboard. The best that human beings can hope for is to appease their silly fancies. What happens to us and to the world around us is not even guided by fate, really, but by divine caprice, softened perhaps by the expectation of amusement or profit. And, over time, it begins to sound plausible, for why else would a Babylon be victor over an Israel?
Some such questions must come to the minds of any people who feel defeated—defeated by an army, defeated by an illness, defeated by poverty, or defeated by slander. Of course, the prophets had warned the Israelites that their unfaithfulness would have consequences, but the expediencies of the moment always seemed so much more important—or at least so much more rewarding—than proper attention to worship, to justice, and to the poor. They had been taught from infancy that they were God’s people, after all, and didn’t that surely mean that no idol-worshipers could ever really threaten them, much less defeat them? And even if a righteous God might permit the people to be punished for their disobedience, why would a powerful God ever allow the humiliating destruction of the temple?
Fortunately, by the power of the Spirit, faith stirred in some of the exiles from Israel as they were held captive in Babylon. They recalled that God had promised never to abandon them. They reaffirmed that no human army could defeat God’s purpose of redeeming creation. They reasserted that the claims the Babylonians made for their gods were absurd. And they began to give new voice to their faith. They retold the ancient stories. They remembered the ancient truths. They sang of their trust in the one true God whose promise is steadfast and whose care is dependable in spite of every temporary evidence God’s enemies could claim.
“In
