Matthew 4:1-11; Romans 5:12-19
February 26, 2023
- Forgiveness is or it isn’t.
Forgiveness is or it isn’t. There is no shortage of guilt in the world. This is a major driving factor for people struggling to be the people they wish they were in life. Just when someone just might feel special enough to be loved by God, there is that voice reminding us of all the failures in our life. This is the heart of the struggle. On the one hand, all have sinned and fallen short the glory of God. We are children of Adam, the first sinner, the first human, the beginning of life and shame. Once our original parents had eaten of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, those first people knew they were naked and something in them knew to be ashamed of it. I wonder if the real shame there was the feeling of being exposed for who they really were – here in a literal sense of being exposed and laid bare – but we all find ourselves lacking and at fault.
We even have to blame our blame on someone. This is how deep that guilt and shame go. That Adam and Eve, it’s all their fault that we have our fault. If they had just listened to God in the first place, then life would be grand and guilt-free. And yet, we know that is a farce. Even if we want to read the Genesis story of the first humans literally, it is ridiculous to place our guilt in their hands, but their story does explicitly present the real and enduring conflict for us of living in a world of rules but being so incredibly rule-challenged. I am an eldest child. I have forever thrived to please those in authority in true eldest child fashion. I was tasked with being the responsible one among my siblings and given the role of watching over them when we were young. I have always felt compelled to try to earn the trust placed in my hands – to live up to the expectations. I believe you have known or heard similar thoughts from other firstborn children. Of course, this is not exclusive to oldest children. Anyone in this boat has felt an extra burden to live into the expectations of responsibility, following the rules placed on us all. I would love to say I never got into trouble, that I never disappointed my parents or other authority figures, but that is a joke. I’m sure I got into some kind of trouble regularly, and I still fail to be the person I wish I was. Each and every one of us sharing in this moment, hearing my words, can say the same thing. Adam and Eve didn’t make me do anything. The devil didn’t make me do anything, either. I make poor, selfish, weak-hearted choices all the time. No matter how much I might try and sometimes even succeed at being better, I still I see in Adam the same heart laid-bare for all to see. We all need deep and profound forgiveness.
Forgiveness is or it isn’t. The Law of God ever since the fall of humanity into sin has been trying to plug leaks in the dam or push the flooding river back into the riverbed, but just as those images suggest, that is a fool’s errand. It is not that the Law is a waste, but there is no way the law can fix the love of sin. There is no way the Law can change our hearts to love God. There is no way the Law can make us holy. The Law cannot free us from the sin of this world and restore us as God’s good creations. Today’s prison system is more than enough proof of this kind of thinking. Forcing people to be good cannot last. No matter how much it hurts, every time we barrel headfirst toward the wall of guilt, we just cannot slow down. The wall will not make us stop no matter how big or strong or scary it might be. What we need is a different path.
When Jesus marched off into the wilderness to be tempted to sin, he may or may not have known what was coming, but I cannot imagine he knew just how hard it would be to stick to God’s heart. The text from Matthew makes it sound like he had a fairly easy time choosing what was right, but he was literally at his weakest possible place. He would have been completely exhausted from food and sleep deprivation. If you don’t eat, you don’t sleep either. I know I am most prone to wander from God’s ways when I am tired or cranky or feeling weak. Then, Satan hit him in three powerful moves all trying to give Jesus the quick, easy fix to what he most wanted. It would be so easy to feed himself…. It would be so easy to show everyone how blessed and holy and from heaven he was…. It would be so easy to be king of all creation. Jesus could skip the years of heartache and torture and accusations and stupidity and struggle and frustration to show us all that he is the Christ, the Lord, the King of all. Pull back the curtain in front of everyone all at once. He could have done it right there at that time to show everyone who he is, but that was cheating. And it would not have fixed anything, least of all our hurting hearts. We needed a new path, not a prettier or more special wall.
Adam had everything and lost it in a choice. Jesus had nothing hanging on that cross but gained everything in his choice – his choice to do God’s will, not the easy way out. There is not even a fair comparison between Adam and Jesus. Sometimes Jesus is called the New Adam or the New Man. In the movie, the Matrix, the Jesus figure’s name is Neo for this very reason. He is the New man, the New savior, but Jesus is so, so, so much more than Adam 2.0. Jesus takes the entire world of sin that in this Romans passage Paul says Adam introduced, and Jesus disarms the whole thing. You hear again and again in Paul how Jesus’ work is so much greater, so much more expansive, so much more powerful than what began in Adam. Just in this one respect you can see what he means: sure, we continue to sin whether we are in Christ or not. People sinned before Moses, the great law-giver; they sinned between Moses and Jesus; they sinned from Jesus’ time to today; AND PEOPLE WILL CONTINUE TO SIN FOR THE REST OF TIME; but what Jesus did in his one life, even over just a few days, overturned all of the sin that has ever happened or will ever happen. He has already taken the sin that has not even happened yet and given us freedom in return.
Forgiveness is or it isn’t. Every Sunday we recognize the presence of sin in our lives and our ongoing feelings of guilt and failure, especially in our Prayer of Confession, but the promise of forgiveness, the power of the gospel, our freedom in Christ is so, so, so much greater. There is nothing we have done or could ever do, any of us, that could make God love us any less. In other words, God loves us so much that God forgives us everything.
I fully realize that even making that statement is tough for some. We want accountability. We want punishment. We want someone to suffer for the suffering we share in this world. Remember “an eye for an eye?” Yes, we like that system better if we are honest with ourselves. You may have also heard that an eye for an eye leaves the entire world blind. Not the wall, friends, but the path. We need the path, and Paul shows us the path. There is accountability; there is punishment; there is suffering. That is all on Jesus. Just before the verse in Romans today, Paul said that when we were enemies of God, we were saved. God grabbed us by the scruff when we were kicking and screaming and pulled us out the burning house that we were fighting to stay in. To come face to face with the gospel is to meet some hard-to-hear truths.
Forgiveness is or it isn’t. The truths may be hard to hear, but hopefully, just hopefully, they are welcome to hear. There is absolutely nothing that I can do to earn my place in God’s family. I will never be good enough or right enough or holy enough. I will continue to fail at so many things and will continue to confess those things every Sunday, but we have a different path today. We have been placed on the path of life, given freely and lovingly and joyfully. While I may still look like Adam sometimes, with clothes, thankfully, I am completely forgiven and freed in Christ Jesus. You are completely forgiven and freed, too. When we receive this gift, we change. The path is really part of us. I love God for this grace and freedom and complete forgiveness, and I don’t want to sin. I want to try to honor what God has done for me in the lives of others. We should all want to try to reflect the radical, zero-sum forgiveness that we have received.
We are either forgiven or we aren’t. There is no halfway with God, no partial or mostly. Either God in Christ has completely and amazingly forgiven us or it is all a lie and we are creatures swamped in guilt and failure. Zero-sum means it is all one way or another. Jesus took everything we have ever done and all that we will ever do to defy God. He took it all from us, all of it from all of us. Forgiveness is for us all. Complete forgiveness is for us all. And if we have been forgiven, we can also forgive. To God be the glory. Amen.