Receive The Holy Spirit. Those Whose Sins You Forgive, They Are Forgiven…

Fr Dexter Brereton

After saying this, Jesus breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit. For those whose sins you forgive, They are forgiven; For those whose sins you retain, They are retained.“

Today, I want to celebrate my friend Cuthbert, who is ill now. Cuthbert, or Cutty as he is known told me once about his upbringing. He grew up in East Dry River. His mother had seven children with his father. When he was fourteen, his father left the family home and he grew up without a stable man in his life. He did not have the language to tell me, in so many words that it was a hard and bitter experience for him. As a young man growing into adulthood, he vowed that he would be a better man than his father was.

The years passed, and Cuthbert, grew up and met a wonderful relaxed woman named Molly who he would marry and with whom he would have a son and three daughters. As fate would have it, his father, many years later, made contact with him and with some hesitation, he managed to fashion some kind of relationship with his estranged father. The old man died. The Home for the Aged where his father stayed, called him and said that no one came to collect the old man’s body. Would he care to do so? With his wife’s permission and loving support, he dutifully buried his father, giving him a grand send-off.

The story became strange at this point since, his mother, still alive, was ANGRY with her son for burying his good-for-nothing father who left him years ago. ‘He deseve a pauper’s funeral!’ said she. And she stopped speaking to him a good little while.

I was filled with admiration for my friend as he related this story. Yes, he was abandoned as a lad, but he was really and truly free. By the time he met his father as an adult, he was no longer held captive by his past. It became possible for him to grant forgiveness to the Old Man, his father who was not there for him. In the measure that he poured out forgiveness on his own father, he experienced the grace of forgiveness in his own life. His mother’s story was a bit of the opposite. She was in some sense still captive to the past. Using the language of today’s gospel reading she ‘retained’ his sins, and his sins remained…but they also remained within her own mind and heart. Cuthbert and his mom remind me of Jesus’ saying to the disciples as he sent them out:

After saying this, Jesus breathed on them and said:
“Receive the Holy Spirit.
For those whose sins you forgive,
They are forgiven;
For those whose sins you retain,
They are retained.

We have within our hands the ability to keep other people in chains, or the ability to set them free. Jesus’ words remind me that in setting other people free, in the act of forgiveness, I also set myself free. Amen.

Jesus, you said to your apostles, those whose sins you forgive, they are forgiven, those whose sins you retain they are retained, we pray for people and nations and entire cultures which have been badly treated for a long time by others. Lord, we know that the temptation is to ‘retain’ the sins of our aggressors, to judge them as ‘forever guilty.’ Pour out your grace on those situations so that victims and aggressors may make a step toward each other and that the victims of aggression discover the truth that ‘those whose sins you forgive, they are forgiven.’