Each of us has a “life story”: that is, a narrative we tell ourselves of who we are and what we’ve done. If you’ve worked on a spiritual autobiography, or engaged in analysis, or even worked up a resume, you know this territory: you’ve taken your internal story and brought it into the light. There’s a sense in which the life story witnesses to the continuity of who we were then (what we’ve done) with who we are now and what we aspire to be in the future. It’s that coherence of self, past, present, and future, that makes us who we are. We’re the ones who have a story to tell.
Now there’s the rub: what happens when the story we have to tell is not a pretty one? What if it contains things that we have a hard time reconciling with ourselves? Aren’t there parts of the story we would want to edit out? Is this a temptation that should be resisted? What does this mean for the story we might tell? Are there things in it that need to be forgiven?
Let’s grant at the start that every story ever told is the result of editing, even the stories we tell ourselves. Without that editing feature, our narratives about ourselves would have no plot and no characters, no narrative coherence. Our lives wouldn’t make any sense: just one thing after another, and hardly a story at all.
Socrates is supposed to have said that the unexamined life was not worth living (Apology 38): a way of saying that human beings of necessity are going to reflect on their lives and try to make sense of them. That includes the parts that are not so attractive, and harder to make sense of. Everybody’s story has the same mixed quality: I know mine does.
Our first reading today comes to grip both with sin and with forgiveness. Here’s the setting: St. Peter preaching a sermon on the Day of Pentecost, to a crowd in Jerusalem composed of worshipers at the Jewish festival. There’s been a sound like rushing wind; the appearance of tongues of fire; a babble of voices in many languages that the crowd can suddenly understand. For the disciples, these events are connected to Jesus’ death and resurrection.
It’s in this context that the preacher says, “God has made him both Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified” (Acts 2:36). Our reading says that all who heard him were cut to the heart, and wondered what they might do. Complicity in Jesus’ death, on the part of all, is assumed. Peter’s response: “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ so that your sins may be forgiven” (Acts 2:38).
Now before we assume that this is one of those narratives, carefully edited so that others are blamed, remember that one of the universal features of the Gospel accounts is the faithful narration of the apostles’ own betrayal of Jesus. Peter himself, the preacher of this Pentecost sermon, had denied Jesus three times before the cock crowed. Someone once observed that the last time the Church acted as one was when it fled from the cross. There was plenty of shame to pass around: many stories for people, especially the apostles themselves, to come to grips with.
This is the reason the proclamation of the forgiveness of sins is such a constant feature of the story of the resurrection. It’s true of Luke and Acts, from which we read this morning; also true of the Gospel of John. Remember last Sunday’s reading, where Jesus says: “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained” (Jo. 20:23). St. Peter’s “Repent, and be baptized… so that your sins may be forgiven” (Acts 2:38) makes the same point. Sin and forgiveness are key.
For the apostles and the other disciples, and for the crowd gathered in the city, forgiveness came from the one who had been crucified: the Victim himself. When the disciples met the risen Lord, they were in need of healing, and the one who confronts them on the day of resurrection is the one who can heal their wounds, by bearing his own. He announces peace, and hope for the future.
The risen Lord is also the one who greets us. Our need for forgiveness is part of the story that can’t be edited out. You might say that forgiveness through the blood of the cross removes the need for the self-justifying editing of our own story. The truth about ourselves is really the truth about Jesus Christ, and what he has done for us. Rowan Williams writes in his book Resurrection, “If forgiveness is liberation, it is also a recovery of the past in hope, a return of memory, in which what is potentially threatening, destructive, despair-inducing, in the past is transfigured into the ground of hope.” All this comes through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.
This morning our confirmands, and all of us, meet the risen Lord at his table. Like the disciples in our Gospel today, we recognize Jesus in the breaking of the bread. Our communion is a sharing in his body and blood, given for us. As we recall Jesus’ word, his blood is shed “for the forgiveness of sins.” We break the bread, at his command, for the remembrance of him. His story is our story, complete and unedited, and in him our lives are made new.