Newsletter May 2011

Our churches teach that those who have fallen after Baptism can receive forgiveness of sins whenever they are converted and that the church ought to impart absolution to those who return to repentance.”
Augsburg Confession article 12

On the Sunday after Easter every year we read in church about the Lord’s appearance to the apostles on the evening of Easter day. The account in John 20 says that Jesus “breathed on them and said, ‘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.” This is a great responsibility given to the apostles – the power to loose and to bind sins. The next question is how does a man, even an apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ, decide whether to loose or to bind those sins in any particular case?

The short answer is that the apostle does not make that decision. It is the task of the apostle to know the mind of Christ as best he can and to announce the forgiveness that Christ grants to those who repent and believe in him. The distinction that the Lutheran church makes is that the pastor who speaks a word of forgiveness today is not deciding who is worthy of forgiveness or whose repentance is sincere, but is simply announcing what Christ has commanded the pastor to announce.

Every Sunday in church we hear “As a called and ordained minister of the church of Christ, and by his authority, I therefore declare to you the entire forgiveness of all your sins….” (ELW page 118) The important word here is the word “declare.” The pastor is speaking on behalf of Christ who is the one who accomplishes salvation and grants forgiveness. Even in private confession when the pastor’s words are “___name____ in obedience to the command of our Lord Jesus Christ, I forgive you all your sins…..” (ELW page 244) the emphasis is on how the pastor is speaking for the one - the only one - who truly brings forgiveness.

And yet, when the pastor declares that sins are forgiven for Jesus’ sake, this is to be taken as gospel truth. In Luther’s Small Catechism it says, “we receive absolution or forgiveness from the confessor as from God himself, by no means doubting but firmly believing that our sins are thereby forgiven before God in heaven.” The great scandal of Jesus’ ministry was his forgiveness of sins. In Mark 2:7 the astonished reaction of some people to Jesus is recorded in the question “Who can forgive sins but God alone?” True enough. Jesus is divine, the Son of God. But God has appointed certain ordinary mortals to declare his divine forgiveness.

The first week of Easter along with my Karlstad Assembly of God colleague, I have been reading Eric Metaxas’ new biography “Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy” in which he recounts Bonhoeffer’s valiant efforts to roust the church to oppose the Nazi movement. Part of that effort was writing a paper in the spring of 1937 in which he said, “Christ has given his church power to forgive and to retain sins on earth with divine authority (Matt. 16:19, 18:18, John 20:23). Eternal salvation and eternal damnation are decided by its word. Anyone who turns from his sinful way at the word of proclamation and repents, receives forgiveness. Anyone who perseveres in his sin receives judgment. The church cannot loose the penitent from sin without arresting and binding the impenitent in sin.” (page 292). In the context of the church struggle of his day and his well known criticism of what he called “cheap grace” this was a call to condemn sin as well as to preach forgiveness. The Nazis mercilessly persecuted Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, and homosexuals, and this must not be forgiven until there is repentance.

But when there is sorrow over sin and a sincere desire to amend a life, forgiveness must be spoken just as Jesus spoke during his earthly ministry. To the adulterous woman in John 8, Jesus said, “neither do I condemn you; go and sin no more.” To the paralyzed man in Mark 2, Jesus said, “take heart, my son, your sins are forgiven.” And Jesus’ charge to the church in Luke 24:47 is that “repentance and forgiveness of sins should be preached in [Christ’s] name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.”

This is as much the mission of the church today as it was on that first Easter, during the Reformation, or in the 1930s. As the saying goes, the church is in the forgiveness business.