If you forgive…

John 20:21-23

Again Jesus said, “Peace be with you! As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.” And with that he breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive anyone’s sins, their sins are forgiven; if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven.”

John 20;21-23 NIV

εἶπεν οὖν αὐτοῖς ὁ Ἰησοῦς πάλιν· Εἰρήνη ὑμῖν· καθὼς ἀπέσταλκέν με ὁ πατήρ, κἀγὼ πέμπω ὑμᾶς. καὶ τοῦτο εἰπὼν ἐνεφύσησεν καὶ λέγει αὐτοῖς· Λάβετε πνεῦμα ἅγιον· ἄν τινων ἀφῆτε τὰς ἁμαρτίας ἀφέωνται αὐτοῖς· ἄν τινων κρατῆτε κεκράτηνται. (John 20:21-23 SBL Greek Testament)

Therefore Jesus said to them again, “Peace to you. Just as the Father sent me off, so also I am despatching you.” Having said this, He breathed into them and said, “Receive Holy Spirit. Whoever’s sins you should loose, they (the sins) have been loosed for them; whoever you should master, they have been mastered.”

(John 20:21-23 in a more plausible rendering)

A couple of introductory comments, and then the main point.

Why does Jesus speak peace to them “again”? He has just shown them His hands and His (pierced) ribs; the disciples are filled with joy to see Him, but Jesus clearly sees the need to calm them before imparting what He has for them. I have been asking myself why, earlier in the chapter, Peter and John saw an empty tomb, but Mary sees and hears angels – and Jesus Himself. I suspect the answer is this – Peter and John (we assume it is John) are trying to work out what had happened, and the writer says “for until then they had not understood (known) the scripture that it was necessary for Him to rise from the dead.” In other words, they are grappling with a huge tectonic shift in their thinking, which may be why they didn’t see anyone. Mary on the other hand is just weeping (and try seeing straight when your eyes are swollen with tears); she just wants to know where the body is and no big thoughts blind her to what is actually there – two figures in white in the tomb who ask her why she is crying; and another behind her who asks the same question. And all it takes for her to see clearly is Jesus speaking her name. Likewise the disciples now, shut away in their room: they are understandably excited to see Him, but Jesus needs them focussed in order to receive what He gives and what He tells.

Which suggests that what follows might be important. (As an aside, it also suggests to me that hearing and fully receiving what Jesus has to say to me is always going to be way more important than me working it all out.)

Secondly, a question. Jesus uses two different verbs for sending – ἀποστέλλω and πέμπω; is this significant? As the Father ἀποστέλλωed me, so I πέμπω you (as it were). We would be more comfortable if Jesus had used ἀποστέλλω for both, not only because of the symmetry but because of the obvious connection with their being apostles (someone who has been ἀποστέλλωed). Which of course might let us ordinary, non-apostlic, folks off the hook (which I don’t believe for a moment, of course: what Jesus says is for all those who follow Him and receive His Spirit). Maybe there is no significance in the choice of words – they do overlap significantly in their usage. The nearest might be that ἀποστέλλω is more like “sent off” or “sent away”, whereas πέμπω is just sent; Jesus was sent away from Heaven to earth, we are sent out into what is already our world.

Thirdly, that wonderful word ἐνεφύσησεν. “Breathed upon” seems fairly unlikely; this is a word for blowing into a flute or blowing in to inflate a bladder or other skin bag. If so it would appear that Jesus didn’t just stand in the middle of the room and go “whoooofff” (try it; it is hard to do without seeming rather odd). Rather He must have done something like the Maori hongi – come close to each one and shared His breath with them. And of course Λάβετε πνεῦμα ἅγιον is untranslatable in English – it is at both and the same time, all permutations of “receive Holy Spirit” and “lay hold of sacred breath”.

So then what? The loosing and retaining of sins? That is how everyone from Jerome onwards seems to have read verse 23, in particular the last phrase: “if you retain the sins of any they are retained.” One of the reasons – the other reasons constitute so many cans of worms we would bring the internet to its knees trying to mention them all – one of the reasons everyone has translated it this way is that they have taken the last two phrases as a balanced pair. The last phrase lacks most of the features of the previous phrase, but they supply those missing parts to make it “if you loose the sins of anyone…/if you retain the sins of anyone”. The first problem with this is that in the Greek text, there are three phrases, separated by the Greek equivalent of a semi-colon (a period above the line, so: “·”). The first is “receive Holy Spirit”. The second is “should you of anyone their sins loose or remove, they are removed from them.” The third phrase is admittedly a puzzler, but the commonly accepted reading seems to me the most vanishingly implausible option, for many reasons, including everything else Jesus ever said; but the obvious one would be that Jesus had at His disposal other words which would have made His meaning plain if this was actually His intention – for example δέω, I bind.

Let’s look at those last two phrases in parallel:

ἄν τινων ἀφῆτε τὰς ἁμαρτίας ἀφέωνται αὐτοῖς·

ἄν τινων κρατῆτε κεκράτηνται.

If we decide that the last phrase should be read as including the missing parts from the former phrase, it would then read

ἄν τινων κρατῆτε τὰς ἁμαρτίας κεκράτηνται αὐτοῖς.

That still wouldn’t be “whosoever’s sins you retain, they are retained.” It would be one of the following:

Whomsoever’s sins you conquer, they are conquered by, for or to them.

Whomsoever’s sins you repair, they are repaired by, for or to them.

Whomsoever’s sins you prevail over, they are prevailed over by, for or to them.

I hope you see my point.

And in fact, “the sins” and “by, for or to them” are omitted from the Greek, so I am not sure we should be reading them at all.

What does that leave us with? κρατέω is the verb “I am strong or powerful” – hence conquer, master, prevail over, and so on. We are looking for a meaning which allows us to use it with the genitive, τινων, and a number of such meanings exist. That is why I used “whoever you should master, they have been mastered” in the opening translation of the passage above. Achieving mastery over others doesn’t fit very comfortably over other things Jesus said about lording it over one another; but of course, while forgiveness in the previous phrase refers to people, this last phrase may reference powers and principalities – in which case conquer / have been conquered would fit very well.

My personal favourite (and it is no more than that, but to me it does fit with the words of Jesus elsewhere, and the notion that we are sent just as He was) is this:

“And of whomsoever you lay hold, they have been firmly grasped.”

Which sounds a lot like John 10:28-29 – “all whom the Father has given me… no one can snatch them out of my hand…(because) no one can snatch them out of my Father’s hand.”

So to summarise, somewhat freely but for sense:

Therefore Jesus said to them again, “Peace to you. Just as the Father sent me off, so also I am despatching you in My service.” Having said this, Jesus breathed into each of the disciples and said to them, “receive Holy Spirit; whoever’s sins you release, they have been set free; whoever you lay hold of, We’ve got them.”