Part Three AUTHORITY, PRIVILEGE, RESPONSIBILITY, BENEFIT

Chapter Eight THE CHRISTIAN AUTHORITY

We come at long last to the central concern of this book, which is to understand the nature and significance of Christian forgiveness, that is to say, of the practice of forgiveness by Christians. 

When Jesus walked the earth, he was the only one who could forgive the sins committed against God; he was the only one who could absorb the divine harm resulting from the sinful behavior of people towards one another.  As we have seen, that was why, as Christ incarnate, he could forgive the sins of the paralytic in Capernaum and the woman in Simon’s house.  He was simply manifesting as a man the same authority he had always exercised as the heavenly Christ, and his authority, in that regard, was unique to him.

And then something changed.

The sixteenth chapter of Matthew’s gospel records an account of an event that is sometimes referred to as the hinge of Jesus’ earthly ministry.  Having brought his disciples to the region of Caesarea Philippi, Jesus confronts them with the question of his own identity, and Peter, either speaking from his own private revelation or perhaps as the spokesman for the others, provides the hinge response: 

You are the Christ, the son of the living God.(v. 16)

It is not our present intention to explore the magnificence and manifold meaning of Peter’s words and of Jesus’ response to them.  Suffice it for now to say that Jesus welcomes that recognition, and does not dispute its truth.  And from that moment on, his ministry moves into its concluding phase.  That’s why the moment is called the hinge.

But for our purposes, the important teaching that comes immediately after that recognition is what matters.  The very first thing Jesus does after Peter becomes the first to acknowledge our Lord’s true reality, is to confer on his disciple a special authority.  What is that authority?  Here is the passage in full:

And Jesus answered him, ‘Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven.  And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. 

I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.’

Then he strictly charged the disciples to tell no one that he was the Christ. (vv.17-21)

The authority given Peter, an authority before this moment belonging only to Jesus himself, is to act with respect to sinful behavior on heaven’s behalf: to bind and loose in heaven.

Matthew’s account gives us several examples of Jesus delegating divine authority to his followers.  He gives them authority to preach on his behalf, sharing the same divine message of his own proclamation: And proclaim as you go, saying, ‘The kingdom of heaven is at hand.’ (10: 7)  He shares with them his own divine authority over spiritual and physical affliction, even over death:  Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, cast out demons. (10: 8)  He authorizes them to render God’s judgment of approval or disapproval on those who are receptive or otherwise to the Gospel good news:

 And whatever town or village you enter, find out who is worthy in it and stay there until you depart.  As you enter the house, greet it.  And if the house is worthy, let your peace come upon it, but if it is not worthy, let your peace return to you.  And if anyone will not receive you or listen to your words, shake off the dust from your feet when you leave that house or town. Truly, I say to you, it will be more bearable on the day of judgment for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah than for that town. (10: 11-15)

But it is the authority to forgive that marks the turning point of Christ’s ministry with respect to his followers, a fact emphasized by Jesus immediately before he confers it on Peter: 

And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” (18-19)

Commentators and theologians wrangle, of course, over the extent of Peter’s authority, and whether it is exclusive to him.  But the authority to loose and bind in heaven, following immediately as it does upon mention of the keys to the kingdom of heaven, surely implies that that authority, if not exhaustive of, is central both to the stewardship of heaven’s prerogatives (the keys) and to the project of building up the earthly church (the rock).

To loose and bind in heaven.  What more natural interpretation of these images could there be than that of providing or withholding heaven’s forgiveness?  Whom you forgive on earth is forgiven in heaven; whom you refuse to forgive, remains in heaven’s debt.

And of course, those are exactly the terms Jesus uses in John’s gospel, in addition to extending the authority to all his other disciples.   On the very day of his resurrection, after breathing his Holy Spirit upon them, Jesus immediately gives them the same authority earlier conferred upon Peter, this time explicitly in terms of sharing heaven’s power to forgive:

Jesus said to them again, ‘Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.’ And 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 withhold forgiveness from any, it is withheld.’( 20: 21-23)

Before moving on to discuss this authority in more detail, let’s pause a moment to consider the true wonder of what we are learning here.

As we’ve established in our earlier discussion of forgiveness in general, all people, Christian or otherwise, have the opportunity to forgive another for the harm suffered at that person’s hands, which is to say, to absorb the harm, to accept its full burden.  That’s simply what it means to forgive.  Difficult it may be to do so, sometimes very difficult indeed, especially to absorb it fully, to forgive completely.  But the possibility is there for everyone, at least as a spiritual destination. 

But on the witness of scripture the follower of Christ is given an additional opportunity, an additional project.  It is the project of rising above the realm of merely human accomplishment, and participating in the divine.  The authority Jesus confers on those who receive his own spirit is unlike and far greater than any available to the rest of humanity, no matter how elevated their worldly status might be.  It is the authority – and the privilege, and the responsibility – of acting as a divine representative of Almighty God, in the matter of forgiveness.

Even the least of these Christians, one might almost say, is in this regard greater than all those who had gone before.

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Having taken that moment to wonder at God’s gracious condescension to the followers of Christ in granting them the authority to forgive on heaven’s behalf, we must immediately make clear that such authority does have a limitation that Christ’s own authority does not.

When Jesus forgave the paralyzed man, he was forgiving the sins of a stranger. Jesus was forgiving the man for harm he caused to others, not to Jesus himself.

And similarly for the immoral woman in Luke’s account. Jesus was, again, forgiving her for harm she had done to others, not to Jesus.

As we have discovered, Jesus in these two separate events was acting as God Incarnate. The harm these two had done had in fact also been done to Jesus, as God incarnate. That’s why Jesus could forgive them, even though he had not humanly participated in whatever their sinful behavior had been.

But it goes without saying that Christians are not God incarnate. Our authority does not extend to the forgiveness of strangers. How could it, since we by definition have not been harmed by them?

The magnitude of the human privilege of extending divine forgiveness is staggering, but its scope is limited. It is limited to the forgiveness of those who have done us harm.

The Christian privilege of forgiving sins is not innate to them because of who they are – as it was innate to Christ – but rather an authority vested in them by virtue of something they have done, namely, accepted Jesus as the Christ, and as their lord and savior.  In the spiritual nature of things, a Christian does not suffer from the behavior of strangers, as Jesus did.  Christians, like non-Christians, suffer only from the harm done to themselves, and can forgive only that harm.  We Christians are the ambassadors of God’s forgiveness for the harms done to us, not the harms strangers do to each other.i

Having noted the limitation of its scope, we conclude this chapter by re-emphasizing how nonetheless extraordinary this authority is that Christ has bestowed on His followers. Christians are allowed to enter into God’s own activity, to participate on the spiritual plane in the ongoing evolution of God’s plan of salvation. The authority to forgive on heaven’s behalf is a privilege unique to Christians among all of God’s children.

But having said that, we must now become clear about the special and solemn nature of that privilege. 

At least in olden times, as children mature within a household, they gradually begin to assume some of the responsibilities previously borne by their parents and perhaps their older siblings. They begin to participate in the functioning of the household, not simply as carefree children, but as chore-sharing members. They begin to help bear the burden of running the house.

When Christians practice forgiveness, they are exercising the privileged burden of helping to manage the household of heaven.

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i           . Readers of this investigation, especially those of the Catholic faith, will certainly have found points of comparison in it to the longstanding practice of granting the authority of absolution and the remission of sin to the priesthood of the Catholic faith, particularly since both that practice and our argument make fundamental appeal to the same Biblical texts. 

            While it is not within the scope of this treatise – or perhaps the ability of its author! –  to resolve the differences  between our application of those passages and their application in Catholic tradition, it will  be useful here to point out what those differences are, with the hope that future investigation and debate will at least have a shared focus.

            The differences are twofold.  The first is that we affirm that the authority to offer divine forgiveness of sins is conferred in those passages upon all Christians, and not only, as was asserted in the Council of Trent, to the Apostles, and to their lawful successors, where lawful successors includes only the Catholic priesthood.

            The second is that, whereas the Catholic tradition claims for the priest the authority to forgive behaviors from which the priest has received no personal harm, our position is that Christian forgiveness can coherently only be extended where personal harm has been experienced. 

            It will be seen, therefore, that in our way of thinking, Christian forgiveness is in one sense more extensive, and in another more restrictive, than is postulated in the traditional Catholic practice of priestly absolution.  It is more extensive, in that it is an authority extended to all Christians, rather than to a particular credentialed class.  And it is more restrictive in that it may be extended only by those Christians who have suffered sinful personal harm, and only to those who have been the sinful perpetrators of that harm.