Breathe Forgiveness Sunday, April 27, 2025

I don’t know what you did in the evening last Sunday. I know some of you had time with family. After a busy morning and a lovely dinner, I took a nap and watched a movie. Back on the first Easter Sunday evening, the disciples got together and locked the door because they were afraid. And suddenly Jesus was there with them, saying, "Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you." 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."

Whenever Jesus appears after the resurrection, he always greets the disciples the same way, “Peace be with you.” But this is not just any old appearance, this meeting with Jesus is one which will change their lives for ever. He says “Peace be with you,” but then he goes on, “as the Father has sent me, so I send you.” No longer are they just his followers, his disciples, now they are ones who are sent… we call them apostles – those who are sent. God the Father sent Jesus with a special mission, he sent him to assure the world of God’s astonishing and abiding love, to assure us both by his preaching and by his actions (which cost him his life) that the very essence of God is love. Now Jesus is sending the apostles, just as his Father sent him, to let the world know that God is not just justice but that God is also love and peace.

And when he had said, “I send you,” Jesus breathed on them.

We don’t always want to be breathed on by someone else. Especially having experienced Covid. Other people’s breath is not always pleasant. But the breath of a baby, of a lover, even of a puppy, can be a very precious thing. How much more precious the breath of Jesus the Christ.

It was a special breath. The Greek word used for it is only found in two other places in the Bible. In the Greek translation of the Jewish Scriptures which dates from about three centuries before Jesus, in that ancient text this word is only used in two other places. First, when God breathes into the human he has just created from dust and he becomes a living being (Gen 2:7) and secondly in Ezekiel’s vision of the dry bones, when Ezekiel is told to prophecy to the breath.

That’s not quite as familiar as God breathing life into the first man, so let’s just remind ourselves about it. Ezekiel was a prophet at the time that Israel was taken into captivity in Babylon. He had a vision in which he saw a valley full of dry bones. God told him to prophesy to the bones. He did and the bones gathered together into people with flesh on them, but they were still dead. Then God told him to prophesy to the breath, “Come, breath, from the four winds and breathe into these slain, that they may live.” So he did and they came to life.

God interpreted the vision like this, “Son of man, these bones are the people of Israel. They say, ‘Our bones are dried up and our hope is gone; we are cut off.’ Tell them, I, God, will put my Spirit in you and you will live, and I will settle you in your own land. Then you will know that I the Lord have spoken, and I have done it, declares the Lord.’”

So we have just three times that this Greek word is used. In Genesis when the first human is formed from the dust, in Ezekiel when God promises to put his spirit in the people of Israel so they may live, and now when Jesus “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."

One of things we need to bear in mind when thinking about the Bible is that whoever wrote the gospel we call John knew the Hebrew Scriptures much better than we do. So when he used this verb enephseyseo, it wasn’t an accident. He knew it was an unusual word, and he was deliberately reminding us of how God blew into the man of dust and made him live, and blew into the dead bodies in Ezekiel’s vision and made them live.

So Jesus, in breathing on the disciples, was sharing his resurrection life. He was giving them life. And what did he say, “"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."

​That’s big.        “Here’s my resurrection life, and now, forgive.”

Reminds me of the line in the prayer Jesus Taught Us, “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.”

There are some really important connections here. And I am finally getting to the point of this sermon, so listen up!

Forgiveness is what it’s all about. I’ll say that again. It’s all about forgiveness.

Before Easter we talked about repentance and reconciliation and then rounded off the three Rs with resurrection.

But what brings them all together is forgiveness.

We repent and look to God for forgiveness and that forgiveness brings us reconciliation. And now the breath of resurrection life leads immediately to forgiveness. It’s all bound up together.

Forgiveness is letting go of all the grudges and disappointments and failures that we have experienced in ourselves and in other people and indeed, in the universe. Forgiveness is letting go of the need to explain our lives in terms of what went wrong, of the things we didn’t get or the things we got and shouldn’t have. Forgiveness is letting go of all the junk of the past so we are free, completely free to act in new ways and to experience Jesus’ resurrection life flowing through us in the movement of the Holy Spirit.

Forgiveness frees us up. We tend to think of forgiveness as something we offer someone else, “I forgive you for…” when in fact forgiveness is a gift we give ourselves. A gift that God has already given us and which we claim as our own.

Holding a grudge really doesn’t hurt the other person. It hurts us. It has been said that holding a grudge is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.

Our failure to forgive hurts us more than the other person.

At the very core of Jesus’ teaching, we find this key to life, this key to closeness with God,  “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained." If I retain the sins of any, they are retained within me where they build up walls of bitterness and fear.

Nailed to the cross Jesus said, “Forgive them Father for they know not what they do.” This is the core of the gospel. We are forgiven. Now we get to claim that forgiveness, forgive ourselves and forgive others.

As a congregation we have stories we tell ourselves about things that happened or didn’t happen that got in our way, that stop us being the church we thought we should be. Forgiveness means forgiving ourselves, forgiving each other, forgiving past clergy, past lay leaders, forgiving circumstances that created problems. The past is gone.

The gift of God is this moment, now. Freed from the claims of the past, free from self-recrimination we are free to move forward, forgiven.

The Love of God wraps us in forgiveness, reassures us that we are the people God has made, the people God has called, the people into whom Jesus has breathed the breath of life. The people blessed by the Holy Spirit.
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People of God, we are apostles, sent out into the world to proclaim and live God’s love, forgiveness and new life. Praise God!
​the Rev. Dr. Caroline Hall