So often Jesus said to the people who came to him, “Your sins are forgiven.” They hadn’t asked for forgiveness. They asked to be healed of some physical, emotional, or spiritual ailment. And more often than not, the religious leaders of the community cried, “Foul!” They asserted that only God could forgive. Then Jesus would refute their assertion by telling the supplicant to walk, see, speak, be clean, or be free of the demon that oppressed them.
The underlying notion of disbelieving religionists was that forgiveness had to be earned. The proper rituals had to be performed, the right sacrifices made, the correct words spoken. The word of forgiveness which Jesus spoke was summed up in his affirmation that the kingdom of God had come near, had interposed itself between the rituals and the reality. Jesus – the Son of God, the anointed one, the Messiah – was present at the behest of God to be living forgiveness for all who needed it. And everyone did need it.
Human repentance does not evoke divine forgiveness. Divine forgiveness creates the response of human repentance.
The psalmist in Psalm 32 begins at that point:
The one whose wrongdoing is forgiven,whose sin is covered over, is truly happy!The one the Lord doesn’t consider guilty—in whose spirit there is no dishonesty—that one is truly happy!The psalmist had experienced this for himself. God had vacated the judgment against him. The psalmist’s spirit was renewed and its strengthening would allow him to keep on living at a higher level of faithful service than previously. The psalmist is human. We know that he will fall into sin’s trap many more times before his days come to an end. But because God’s forgiveness is always there, the psalmist can pick himself up, dust himself off, and start afresh.
Psalm 32 has a penitential tone to it. It is an appropriate psalm for the first Sunday in Lent. As we move down the mountain from the heights of God’s affirmation, we run up against the reality of the world. The temptation scenes with Jesus in the wilderness remind us where we are. Who of us wouldn’t want to do something and feed the world? Who of us wouldn’t want to be able to do something so spectacular in the name of Jesus that every believer would be affirmed and strengthened in their faith and every unbeliever would cry out, “I want Jesus to be my Savior!”? Who of us wouldn’t want to be able to have the power to direct everything towards God’s rule?
As Jesus quickly realized, as good as these aspirations are, the methods do not justify the outcomes. Yes, God wants everyone to have food security and a sufficient life, God wants people to know and worship the divine being, and God wants the world to fully directed towards the divine purpose of worship and service. However, Satan’s methods are corrupted, divisive, counter-productive, and contrary to God’s will that all should call on God’s name, not in fear and subservience, but in joy and thanksgiving.
The psalmist starts with that joy and then moves on to remembering everything that went on in his life while he was under the sway of sin.
When I kept quiet, my bones wore out;I was groaning all day long—every day, every night!—because your hand was heavy upon me.My energy was sapped as if in a summer drought.The psalmist gives an aching description of the physical and emotional turmoil he endured before finally confessing his sin and seeking God’s forgiveness. He says that his body was wasting away under the constant weight of sin. He felt its consequences in everything he tried to do. The writer may have had some debilitating illness that he believed was divine punishment for whatever he had done wrong. Medical science is aware of the reality of psychosomatic illnesses brought on by mental distress which could be the inner torment of sin.
Today we know that illness is brought on by germs, bacteria, microbes that require the body’s immune system to go into action. We also know that allergies, genetics, and the absorbing of certain chemicals through breathing, touch, or ingestion will also create life-threatening illnesses. These maladies are often beyond our control or knowledge. The only way we can blame illness on sin is if we engage in risky behaviors.
One message of the Lenten journey with Christ is that sin is a disabling force in our lives. Unchecked, sin can indeed eat away at our souls, leaving us feeling weak and deformed, less than our true selves. The reality of the descent from the mountain of the transfiguration is that the farther down we go the more noxious the sin gets. It is like cresting a mountain pass and entering a valley where the smog of a thermal inversion with a dangerously high air quality index grows worse the farther down we travel. It oppresses, it chokes, it kills.
Sin confuses our minds and darkens our hearts. Sin can have physical consequences; one example is substance abuse, an addiction to drugs or alcohol that poisons the body along with the soul.
The dynamics of addiction provides one way to understand the power of sin in our lives. Some forms of addiction begin as healthy desires. But then they are taken to extremes. An addiction to money or success may begin with the honest desire to provide for one’s family. An addiction to power or fame may begin with the desire to share one’s gifts and talents to make a difference in the world. A natural longing for love and intimacy may mutate into a propensity for unhealthy sexual behavior or inappropriate relationships. A desire to be rid of chronic pain can become a enslavement to opiates.
Addiction results from a lack of temperance and moderation. Too much of a good thing becomes a bad thing. Will power takes a hit and the quest for more of what the addiction makes possible further weakens internal restraints. We become trapped in patterns of denial and justification. Escape gets harder and harder. It becomes all too easy to keep silent, as the psalmist says, and to learn to live with the consequences.
Psalm 32 suggests that sin operates like an addiction and is just as enslaving. That’s nothing new. The biblical narrative tells us the same thing. Paul said it best in his Letter to the Romans: “I don’t know what I am doing, because I don’t do what I want to do. Instead I do the thing I hate....But now I’m not the one doing it anymore. Instead it’s sin that lives in me” (Rom. 7:15, 17).
The psalmist could very easily have gotten into a deep despondency about his sin. But he doesn’t.
So I admitted my sin to you;I didn’t conceal my guilt.“I’ll confess my sins to the Lord,” is what I said.Then you removed the guilt of my sin.It’s the guilt that immobilizes us to the effects of sin. Guilt so addles our thinking that we can’t see straight about stepping away from the sin that enslaves us. Guilt is like the security chain on a door that keeps it from being opened more than a crack. The opening is not big enough for us to reach through to grasp the forgiveness that is on the other side. In Revelation, John reports Jesus saying to the Laodiceans, “Look, I am standing at the door and knocking. If any hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to be with them” (Revelation 3:20). Guilt bars the door and keeps grace out. Forgiveness is there for the taking if we can break the chain of guilt.
The psalmist ends,
The pain of the wicked is severe,but faithful love surrounds the one who trusts the Lord.You who are righteous, rejoice in the Lord and be glad!All you whose hearts are right, sing out in joy!We are never completely done with sin; we still have moments of weakness, and we are always surrounded by temptations. Overcoming sin is a lifelong effort. To paraphrase Martin Luther in this 500th anniversary year of his Wittenberg 95 Theses, at one and the same time we are saved by God’s grace and still subject to sin. In the language of addiction, we are always recovering sinners.
The good news is that Lent is the time to embrace the joy of forgiveness and to be painfully aware of the power of sin. Jesus went from the affirmation of being God’s beloved to condemnation by the sin-filled world as its greatest nemesis. May we follow him in recognizing not only the depth of our addictive sinfulness but also the height of his recovering forgiveness. May our journey of Lent be a journey of self-reflection, confession, and, ultimately, joyful redemption.
General Resource: John D. Rohrs, “Psalm 32 Homiletical Perspective,” Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary, (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010) Year A, Vol. 2, 33-37.
Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com.
Copyright © 2017 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.
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