The Divine Cancellation--April 11, 2023

The Divine Cancellation--April 11, 2023

"...When you were buried with Christ in baptism, you were raised with him through faith in the power of God, who raised him from the dead. And when you were dead in trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive together with him, when he forgave us all our trespasses, erasing the record that stood against us with its legal demands. He set this aside, nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in it." [Colossians 2:12-15]

No matter how clearly God says it or how great the lengths God goes to in order to get through to us, we still seem to have a hard time believing that God isn't keeping score.

Seriously, there are no more red pen marks.  No tallies of demerits on the permanent record--in fact, there's no permanent record at all.  God erased it, left the paperwork nailed to the cross, and walked away.  Or like the old line about forgiveness, God buried it with a shovel--and then buried the shovel.

It's easy to lose sight of that news at Easter time. We already have a hard enough time keeping the actual resurrection story front and center when there are chocolate eggs to buy, pastel colored shirts and dresses to iron, green cellophane grass to comb out of the carpet, and new recipes for leftover ham to research.  But even when we do talk about Jesus' resurrection [you know, the actual Easter story], it's easy for us to think about it only in terms of seeing it as proof that there is life after death, or evidence that Jesus is the Messiah, or a selling point for our religion.  What we rarely do is what the letter to the Colossians lays out here--making a connection between the cross and resurrection and God's ultimate refusal to be a heavenly bean-counter. All the charges against us have been dropped, and our debts have been swept up in the great divine cancellation.

Now, to be sure, yes, the story of the empty tomb certainly does confirm Jesus is Lord and Christ.  And just as surely, the Easter story declares the power of death ultimately broken.  But the New Testament writers are never solely focused on the afterlife--they are very much concerned, too, for the difference it makes here and now to be connected to Christ.  And on that count, the writer to the Colossians says that Jesus' death and resurrection assures us that God isn't keeping score against us.  So even right here and now, we don't have to go carrying around the baggage of guilt from past failures or shame for who we've been.  

As we'll be exploring more in depth this Eastertide, that's another dimension of how God's love works.  It keeps no record of wrongs, as the line from First Corinthians says.  Our different translations in English try to get at that idea in different ways, whether saying that love "is not resentful," or "doesn't calculate evil" or "doesn't reckon bad deeds," or "doesn't hold wrongs against us," but the idea is all in that same wheelhouse.  God's kind of love doesn't tally our sins or mess-ups and keep a running tab, but rather has left the red pen and paper behind at the cross.  For whatever else Good Friday and Easter Sunday mean, the writer of Colossians tells us that there God has once and for all stopped keeping track of our trespasses and infractions, and they no longer have power over us.  Like the beautiful lyric of Jonathan Rundman's song, "Forgiveness Waltz," it means God's forgiving love is "less like math, less like a deal, more like a heartbreak beginning to heal."

So in this new day, we can be done wasting energy either lugging around our guilt for the past or holding the past against others.  And instead, we are freed to move in a new direction, and freed to let others begin again as well. We don't have to wait until we've died to taste the good that comes from Jesus' resurrection--it is ours to savor right now, since the bitterness of bean-counting is over, once and for all.

Lord Jesus, give us the faith to believe you are done with keeping score, so that we can also be done with scorekeeping against others, too.