Today is Divine Mercy Sunday. It is the culminating day of the Easter Octave—the “eighth” day of the first week of the New Creation: a day beyond perfection, as it were; for if “seven” denotes perfection, “eight” denotes “perfection-beyond-perfection”, absolute perfection, divine perfection.
And the Gospel portion for today is one of the most extraordinary things ever written—something that we human beings could not have “made up” because it is simply off our moral grid and beyond our spiritual ken, never mind our “imagination”. If ever you have doubts about scripture being revealed and inspired by God as its true author, read John 20. We could not have made it up … we hardly understand it, even with repeated readings over two millennia.
But a word of warning: you may need to read it in Greek!
“If you forgive”—say most (modern) English translations—“the sins of any, they are forgiven them; and if you retain the sins [they add] of any, they are retained.” And while that may be a fair enough translation, it can lead us, with our vicious, violent and self-righteous imaginations, to a false conclusion: namely, that we (or some of us at least) get to forgive the sins of some people and NOT to forgive the sins of others; or worse still, that those we forgive will be forgiven by God (presumably), while those we refuse to forgive will not be forgiven by God (presumptuously!).
Now, that can’t be right. Not only would that be a flat contradiction of what the Risen Lord just did to his own (terrified, treacherous and cowardly) disciples, it would be to sin against the commandment that says “Thou shalt not abuse/misuse/profane the name of the LORD thy God”—meaning, act in God’s name as though we were God, arrogate God’s identity to ourselves; in short, the Luciferian sin of pride and grab for power.
But a closer reading of the original Greek yields quite a different possibility. Here it is, [with a very literal translation in brackets]:
ἄν [if] τινων [of-any] ἀφῆτε [ye-may-untie] τὰς ἁμαρτίας [the sins], ἀφέωνται [they-are-untied] αὐτοῖς [unto-them]; ἄν [if] τινων [of any] κρατῆτε [ye-may-retain], κεκράτηνται [they-are-retained]
The Greek word αφεσις [aphesis] literally means untie, loose, let go of, release, remit, unbind, and even abandon or forsake; and so, figuratively, forgive. In Greek the prefix α operates like the English “un”, “dis”, “mis”, meaning not; and English words derived from Greek like atheist or amoral or anarchic, still retain the same sense of “not” (not-theist, not-moral, not-in-control, etc.).
The Greek word for “retain”, κρατεω [krateo], is derived from κρατος [kratos] meaning “strength”, “power” or “force”, and is part of words like aristocracy, democracy, and theocracy. It means to “grasp”, or “grab onto”, and hence “retain” or "hold".
What Jesus is telling his disciples—all of us—is that we are commissioned, just as he was commissioned, to “un-bind” people from their sins, to “re-lease” them from their bondage to everything that harms them; because if we do not, if we “retain”, “hold on” to other people’s sins, it is we who end up “holding on” to them, carrying the burden of sin ... which Jesus came to take away from us, from our hearts, minds, souls and bodies:
"Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world."
Far from giving us some kind of autocratic power to keep “sinners” tied up in knots of guilt and shame, Jesus commissions us to do for others what he does for us: set them free … because that is his own divine mission.
"As the Father has sent me, so am I sending you ..."
Divine Mercy is absolute mercy, unconditional mercy, Christ Himself. Perfect Mercy, Perfect Love, beyond all our conceptions of “perfection”.
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