“I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth; and in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried. He descended into hell; on the third day, he rose again from the dead. He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of God the Father Almighty. From there he will come to judge the living and the dead. I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic church, the communion of saints...” And now we're ready to say something else. The next thing we add is a statement that we believe in “the forgiveness of sins.”
Before we're ready to talk about “the forgiveness of sins,” we have to talk about “sins.” Sin is a reality we all live with, sadly enough. The first time the word is used in the Bible, it's God talking to Cain, telling him to be on his guard because “if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door: its desire is contrary to you, but you must rule over it” (Genesis 4:7). Alas, he doesn't! How did Sin, that dark power, get to Cain's door to crouch there? Paul tells us that “sin came into the world through one man,” and that was Cain's father Adam (Romans 5:12). And ever since, it has stained us from our very origins. David confessed in his famous psalm of repentance, “I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me” (Psalm 51:5). Sin, that dark power, leads us to commit sins and to be sinners. And “all wrongdoing is sin,” John teaches us (1 John 5:17). Wrongdoing on purpose, wrongdoing by negligence, wrongdoing we're oblivious to – those are sins. They miss the mark of the reason why God made us – it wasn't to do wrong, it was to do right; it wasn't to be chained to the darkness, it was to leap in meadows with the Lord. But sin makes us guilty, burdens us with added obligations to set things right; and sin stains us morally, makes us unclean and redefines us. Nor is sin just for some people – we do not find the nearest sin by pointing out the window into the world. “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). That's a problem, since “sin reigned in death” (Romans 5:21), and “the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23). And “whoever makes a practice of sinning is of the devil, for the devil has been sinning from the beginning” (1 John 3:8).
When God formed his people, he gave them his Law, and “through the Law comes knowledge of sin” (Romans 3:20). But the Law also can be abused by that dark power Sin: “When the commandment came, sin came alive and I died,” is a line Adam might have said or Israel might have said (Romans 7:9). And Israel proved it by making that golden calf. Moses told them they'd all “sinned a great sin” – but in the same breath, we have Moses planning to approach the LORD in hopes that he can “make atonement for your sin,” so that it can be forgiven and covered over (Exodus 32:30). When it comes to the guilt and stain that sin causes in our lives, that's what we need: we need forgiveness. We need the guilt to be removed by undoing the harm, and the stain to be washed away so that our slate is clean.
Throughout the books of the Law, God lays out plenty of instructions for how to be forgiven for the sins they commit. Now, someone who sins with total awareness of what sin is and that what they're doing is sin – that's called sinning “with a high hand.” It's a form of blasphemy, “reviling the LORD” and “despising the word of the LORD,” and the Law actually says nothing about forgiveness in connection with that. It only mandates that “that person shall be utterly cut off; his iniquity shall be on him” (Numbers 15:30-31). But clearly, a lot of the everyday sins that people commit aren't included in that basket, or that's all that would be said on the subject. When it comes to unintentional offenses against God's holiness, there's a provision for forgiveness. First of all, the person obviously has to realize what he's done. Then, the person has to “make restitution.” Not only that, the person has to “add a fifth to it,” a 20% extra charge over whatever holy thing he messed up (Leviticus 5:16) – and beyond that, the person has to bring “compensation” to God “for a guilt offering” (Leviticus 5:15). Then “the priest shall make atonement for him with the ram of the guilt offering, and he shall be forgiven” (Leviticus 5:16). We get the same story for regular property crimes against your neighbor. First, the person has “realized his guilt.” Then, the person must “restore what he took” (Leviticus 6:4). Not only must he “restore it in full,” but he must “add a fifth to it” to make satisfaction (Leviticus 6:5). Then the person has to bring “compensation to the LORD... for a guilt offering” (Leviticus 6:6). “And the priest shall make atonement for him before the LORD, and he shall be forgiven for any of the things one may do and thereby become guilty” (Leviticus 6:7). Remember Zacchaeus, the tax collector who said to Jesus, “Look, Lord! Half my goods I give to the poor, and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I restore it fourfold” (Luke 19:8).
There's a well-known philosopher at Oxford, and a few decades back, he wrote a very incisive book on the nature of responsibility and forgiveness.1 It's a very detailed study, and in it, he suggests that there are four basic parts to making up for something you've done wrong against someone else. The first step is that the wrongdoer has to have an honest realization of guilt. The second step after that is that the wrongdoer has to express this sense of guilt or shame in an apology, which is an outward declaration of repentance, a resolve to do differently, a distancing of the self from the harmful action. The third step is that the wrongdoer must make reparation, or give a compensation, so as to undo the harmful action to the greatest extent they can – that step is atonement. Finally, the wrongdoer can do penance – some added costly expression of sincerity.
So, for an example: let's say I forget my anniversary. My wife is mad, and justly so. What do I do? First has to come my honest and inward realization of guilt – the thought, “Oh no, our anniversary is past, and I didn't do anything for it. I messed up, and that was bad! I'm guilty!” Second, I absolutely have to go to her with an apology: “Dear, I'm so sorry for forgetting our anniversary!” Third, I should make reparation to undo the harm caused to her, emotionally and socially, from my fault: “Hey, I've made us reservations at your favorite eatery so we can have a belated anniversary date – the night's all yours.” And fourth, ideally I should bring forth some act of penance: “Oh, this bouquet of flowers I've been holding behind my back? Yes, they're for you.” And that sets the stage (hopefully!) for her to forgive me, as she sees I've done all I really and reasonably can to get right.
And not only do these four steps – realization, apology, atonement, and penance – map pretty well onto our real lives today, but they also map very well onto what Leviticus is saying: Inward realization of guilt leads to a public approach to both the victim and the priest, bringing the victim restitution of the harmed good and the priest a sacrifice for atonement; and then the added fifth is given as an act of penance.
In society today, though, we find a culture caught between two mistaken lines of thinking, and that's one reason why we run into so much conflict. On the one hand, there's a strain in our culture that believes in cheap pardon – at least whenever it's convenient to. Sometimes, in today's America, we think that apology is the only element necessary, no matter the offense. Honest realization of guilt only sometimes matters, we say. Acts of reparation or atonement or restitution aren't thought necessary. Penance is definitely out of the question. And this strain can be summed up in the phrase, “I said I was sorry, what more could you want?” Any suggestion that there ought to be more is caricatured as 'whining' or as 'political correctness.' We don't take wrongdoing seriously.
On the other hand, there's a strain in our culture that believes that in many cases, there can be no pardon. Part of this is the growing redefinition of offenses – our culture has invented its own canon of sins, so that things that just six years ago would have been considered normal interactions are now cast as irreparably stained, and that stain is seen as attaching not just to what people do but to derive from who they are – the wrong race, the wrong sex, the wrong class, the wrong party. When it comes to these offenses – some invented, some authentic – this strain in our culture often no longer distinguishes between intentional and unintentional offenses. Nor does it retain an awareness that both the offender and the victim are persons, sinners in need of grace. Often, in fact, this strain in our culture deems more and more offenses as unforgivable, deserving only the cancellation of the whole self – in other words, to be “utterly cut off,” executed socially if not physically.
In our Creed, when we say we believe in “the forgiveness of sins,” we're holding back from both strains. We're saying that we believe there are real sins, which need to be taken seriously, and that the guilt and stain that they produce in us has to be dealt with. But we're also saying that they can be dealt with – that forgiveness is a live possibility for anyone and everyone. We do not believe anyone needs to be utterly cut off. But nor do we say that a cheap and easy 'sorry' covers over all wrongs. We know, in the words of Hebrews, that “without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness of sins,” at least not in the sight of God (Hebrews 9:2). And yet we also know, in the words of the same author, that “it's impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins” (Hebrews 10:4). Back in the Old Testament, all those guilt offerings and sin offerings – they were sort of like IOUs, placeholders that drew any power they had to cover over sins from the strength of a greater sacrifice then yet future that would not only cover over but take away. And we've talked about that already: how the sacrifice for Jesus is the once-for-all atonement, and how no new sacrifices (in that sense) have to be made. All we need is to take that sacrifice and apply it to our situation, as the atonement for our sins. Jesus saves!
But how do we do that? How do people go from dirty to clean? Well, a good bath should do the trick – if it's the right one. Where we believe in “the forgiveness of sins” in the Apostles' Creed, the Nicene Creed is more particular in saying that “we confess one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.” Is that biblical? You bet! Even John the Baptist, dunking people in the river, was administering “a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins” (Luke 3:3), and that was accompanied by confession of sin (Mark 1:5). Jesus himself tells Nicodemus that the only way to get free is to be “born of water and of the Spirit” (John 3:5). What Jesus is saying there – that has always been understood as a reference to baptism. Baptism is where we are born again. And so Peter preached, in the original Pentecost sermon: “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins” (Acts 2:38), and only when the people listening to him were “baptized” were they then “added” to Christ (Acts 2:41). Later, confronted with signs that God was willing to accept non-Jews who heard this message with faith, Peter exclaims, “Can anyone withhold water for baptizing these people?” (Acts 10:47). And in his famous letter, the Apostle Peter explains that baptism is no tame affair. It's a safe passage through lethal judgment. He compares it to the Flood that drowned the world! He says that baptism is like reliving the story of Noah and his family, whom the ark gave safe passage through the flood. In baptism, we accept the Flood, our old selves drown and die, but something new is born and, in the Ark of Salvation, rides through and thrives. “Baptism, which corresponds to this, now saves you” (1 Peter 3:21).
And the Apostle Paul is in total agreement. When he encountered Jesus and repented of his former persecution of the Church, one of the first messages he heard was, “Rise and be baptized and wash away your sins, calling on his name” (Acts 22:16). Learning from that experience, Paul says that we are each “baptized into Christ Jesus” so as to “no longer be enslaved to sin,” because baptism is the death of who we used to be and the birth of somebody new (Romans 6:3-7). You were “buried with [Christ] in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the powerful working of God who raised him from the dead” (Colossians 2:12). “As many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ” (Galatians 3:27). Paul says that Jesus cleansed his Church “by the washing of water” as the word of the gospel was pronounced over her – and that's baptism (Ephesians 5:26). It was at baptism, as Paul knew it, that a person would “confess with [his or her] mouth that Jesus is Lord” and so “be saved” (Romans 10:9). That baptism marked the break with sin, when “you were washed... in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God” (1 Corinthians 6:11). Baptism, according to Paul, is “the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit,” through which God “saved us... according to his own mercy” (Titus 3:15).
In other words, when we're baptized, we repent of our sins and make a decisive break with them, and this holy bath absolves the guilt of sin by uniting us with the death of Jesus on the cross (which is perfect atonement), and it washes away the stain of sin like a purging flood, and it allows us to be born again into a new identity that's no longer tied to the old one – and the death of the old self is penance enough. This is the entryway into the Body of Christ, into the Church: “In one Spirit, we were all baptized into one Body” (1 Corinthians 12:11). So there really isn't such a thing as an unbaptized Christian – just a person who, hopefully, wants to become a Christian. And a person can only ever be born again once, baptized once, and never again. There is, Paul says firmly, “one baptism” (Ephesians 4:5). Whether it happens in infancy or the prime of life or old age, it never can be repeated. And in baptism, the full power of Jesus is at work: sins are totally forgiven. What a relief!
And that, by all rights, should be the end of sin in our lives. Paul says that a baptized person is “set free from sin” (Romans 6:7), is “dead to sin” (Romans 6:11), that “sin will have no dominion over” someone who has been baptized (Romans 6:14). John says that “everyone who has been born of God does not keep on sinning” (1 John 5:18). “No one who abides in [Jesus] keeps on sinning” (1 John 3:6).
But the reality of our lives is a messy place. How many of us can say that we've lived sinlessly since we were baptized? The Bible is aware that baptized people do sometimes sin, as befuddling as it is (“How can we who died to sin still live in it?” [Romans 6:2]), else Paul wouldn't have to tell baptized people not to “present your parts to sin as instruments for unrighteousness” (Romans 6:13). And the Bible is clear that serious post-baptism sins should not be winked at or tolerated, as if they were covered in advance by baptism, as if they were already paid for. “The righteous shall not be able to live by it when he sins” (Ezekiel 33:12). Paul is actually deeply upset when he finds some of his churches tolerating certain sins in their midst. “Let the one who has done this” – and he's talking about somebody baptized, somebody who had been born again – “be removed from among you” (1 Corinthians 5:2), “deliver[ed] to Satan for the destruction of the flesh so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord” (1 Corinthians 5:5).
By the third and fourth centuries, the Church had to seriously wrestle with how, exactly, to deal with serious sins people committed after baptism, especially sins like betraying your fellow believers during persecution, or lapsing into idolatry. Some people thought that serious sins after baptism were all unforgivable: no chance for repentance, it was just a one-way ticket to hell. Other people thought that serious sins after baptism were unforgivable on earth: you were cut off from the Church, but if you repented and spent you entire life doing penance, then God might pardon you after death and say you'd done enough. Still other people thought that serious sins after baptism could be forgiven, but only once in a lifetime – there was a second chance, but not a third. All three of those prospects terrify me! But there were also people who believed that serious sins after baptism could be forgiven, if you were serious about making amends, by the authority of the Church – and, thank God, the Church settled on that idea, not one of the others! Yet I've found no early Christians who agreed with popular modern ideas where sin after baptism is no big deal, or that Christians never need to repent since it's paid in advance, or that cheap grace can make up for sin easily and, well, cheaply on our part.
So what if we sin? We have to run back to Jesus! “If anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father: Jesus Christ the Righteous” (1 John 2:1). But what do we run to him with? We run to him, first, with our grief over our sin. Paul talks about this in 2 Corinthians, when he's reflecting on an earlier situation in the church at Corinth where a baptized believer had done some serious sin – probably slander against Paul – and the church had said nothing, so they all shared the offender's guilt, and Paul had to confront them with a painful letter (2 Corinthians 7:8). But when he called the Corinthian church's attention to that sin, that guilt and shame and stain – well, they felt a “godly grief,” or sorrow according to God (2 Corinthians 7:9). They felt real contrition, just like when David declared, “A broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise” (Psalm 51:17). And that's the first step. We begin by running to Jesus with our godly grief, our contrite and sin-broken hearts.
Paul observes that this “godly grief” produced “fear” – fear not of him, but fear of sin, because they knew that the consequences of sinning were real and serious for them (2 Corinthians 7:11). Paul also says that this godly grief “grieved” them “into repenting” (2 Corinthians 7:9), “for godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation without regret” (2 Corinthians 7:10). And that was necessary. Paul worried that baptized believers had “sinned earlier” and yet “have not repented” of what they had “practiced” (2 Corinthians 12:21). We are not really grieving our sins if we have no determination or desire to stop, no resolve to be done with sin! If we understand what Jesus has given us, love for him will teach us to despise sin, to want desperately to never sin again – and so godly grief will cut to the quick and will spur repentance.
This godly grief and repentance leads, Paul says, into an “eagerness to clear ourselves” (2 Corinthians 7:11). And that means confession – it means apology. The Bible is full of commands for God's people to confess their sins: “When a man or woman commits any of the sins that people commit by breaking faith with the LORD, and that person realizes his guilt, he shall confess his sin that he has committed” (Numbers 5:6-7). “I confess my iniquity, I am sorry for my sin” (Psalm 38:18). And “if we confess our sins, [God] is faithful and just to forgive us our sins” (1 John 1:9). But ideally, this confession isn't alone; it's in and to the Church. “Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed” (James 5:6). So that isn't merely the way we talk to God on our own. We need help from the Church.
So remember that Jesus gave his apostles, foundation of the Church, the authority to extend or withhold their forgiveness for sins – Jesus delegated that to them and promises to honor it: “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you withhold forgiveness from any, it is withheld” (John 20:23). So it's understandable if those who later stood in the apostles' shoes in the churches were the ones who prayed powerfully as believers would confess to them, because they could actually say, “Your sins are forgiven!” and trust that the debt and chains they'd loosed on earth were indeed loosed in heaven.
So that takes us through realization, apology, and of course there is no atonement for sin but Christ's. But there is that last point: acts of penance, or punishment. The author of Hebrews similarly says that, precisely because through baptism we've become God's children, God will treat us like his own kids: He “disciplines us for our good, that we may share his holiness,” and while this discipline is painful, it trains us for righteousness and yields “peaceful fruit” (Hebrews 12:10-11). And Paul mentions that to the Corinthians: “This godly grief has produced in you... punishment!” (2 Corinthians 7:11). Literally, the word he picks is 'avenging' – they avenged the sin on themselves to “punish every disobedience” (2 Corinthians 10:6). It's just like Paul himself says: “I pummel my body and keep it under control, lest... I myself should be disqualified” (1 Corinthians 9:27). And because of passages like these, the Church in those early centuries developed ways to guide believers through restoration from sin by suggesting appropriate acts of penance, through which God might train us and build us back up taller – often in the form of abstaining from certain privileges and taking up extra giving, extra fasting, and extra praying. God invites us to penance, to this extra cost, out of love: because he wants to share his holiness with us – he loves us too much to not want to train us better! And every act of penance we can do, it's only the Spirit of God helping us, strengthening us, gracing us, so that we can gain more distance from sin which we hate. This sort of well-rounded repentance, Paul says, will “lead to salvation” (2 Corinthians 7:10).
Alongside all this, we regularly – as the Church – pray the Lord's Prayer, which we'll explore in detail later this year. Part of the Lord's Prayer is a request for God to forgive our sins – it's a sort of catch-all, which we each mentally are filling in with things we've done. And all the sins that plague our daily living, this prayer catches them up, realizing our guilt and implicitly apologizing to God. And God is faithful to hear that prayer. Then, we cap it off when we come to the altar, where Jesus pours out his death and his life onto us. We usually call it 'Communion,' but historically the Church has called it 'Eucharist' – that's Greek for 'Thanksgiving.' Jesus says that his body is broken and his blood is poured out “for many for the forgiveness of sins” (Matthew 26:28). If we've taken our sins seriously, and we then humbly approach this altar and eat from it, then we enter the death and life of Jesus all over again. The New Covenant is renewed to us, sin is obliterated in us, and forgiveness is fresh for us. We taste that God really is “faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). And that right there is the bottom line!
See, we sin – we sin plenty. We sinned a lot when we were outside of Christ, and sadly, we often fool ourselves into thinking sin is no big deal now that we have Jesus to fall back on. That's wrong. Sin was and is a big deal – a big raw deal. But not only is God ready to forgive sin, he's ready to forgive all sin, every sin, as often as it takes! And he's willing to give us everything we need to be healed! We need to realize our guilt and stain – so he sends his Holy Spirit to awaken us with conviction; and as we pray for eyes to see and examine ourselves, that sin comes to light. We need to confess and apologize – so he inspired psalms and prayers that guide us in knowing what to say and how to say it, and he gave us a church to listen and hear and pray. We need to atone, to make restitution to God for what we've done; and we could never do that, so he sent his son Jesus to sacrifice his own life as an atonement. Nothing else could suffice, and nothing else ever needs to try! And we receive that atonement, we apply that atonement, when we enter Christ's death in baptism, and we run back to it as we pray and cry out, and as we eat his death from the altar. And then, for our own benefit, God invites us to penance, to added costly gestures that train us to receive holiness, all of which derive their power from God's grace at work in us and not from our own hands. For all we've done before baptism, our penance is the death of the self who did it; and for all we sin after baptism, Christ and his Church guide us through and walk with us on the journey. No matter what we've done, God promises it can be handled and healed! No matter what stains we gain, he's faithful to cleanse them; no matter what guilt we take on, he's faithful to forgive it. For God is the God of forgiveness and help. Thanks be to God for the forgiveness of sins in Christ Jesus' name! Amen.
1 Richard Swinburne, Responsibility and Atonement (Oxford University Press, 1989).
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