Receive the Holy Spirit. Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them. (John 20:22-23)

The scene of our Lord’s first resurrection appearance to the disciples, when all of them are together, from the Gospel of John, is sometimes called “St. John’s Pentecost.” John doesn’t give the same account of Pentecost as we read in the Acts of the Apostles (2:1-13), but that does not mean that the two accounts conflict with one another. If we take them together, it seems that the disciples received a “first installment” of the Holy Spirit when they met their risen Lord, and then, after he had gone to heaven, they received the “full endowment” of the Spirit on this day of Pentecost.

The full endowment of the Holy Spirit emboldened the disciples to proclaim the forgiveness of sins, and the promise of eternal life, to everyone who would repent, believe, and follow the Lord Jesus. The “first installment” of the Holy Spirit gave those same disciples the power to forgive sins—the divine power of the risen Lord bestowed, in turn, on them: “As the Father has sent me,” Jesus told them, “so I send you,” with the power of the Holy Spirit to free mankind from bondage to sin and from the pains of hell.

Now, we cannot appreciate the value of the power to forgive unless we appreciate the magnitude of sin. Sometimes it is necessary to renew our sense of sin, as a bondage from whose consequences we cannot free ourselves without the active intervention of the Holy Spirit, given to the Church by Jesus, our risen and ascended Lord, the victor over sin and death.

There are two examples from my personal acquaintance that renewed in me a proper sense of sin.

The first is a young woman who got pregnant while she was in high school. Her boyfriend told her: “Make your choice—either me or the baby.” Her family warned her that if she had the baby, she would lose her chance to go to college. Planned Parenthood had a clinic in her town, so she went there and got an abortion. She didn’t want to do it, but she had been persuaded that an abortion was her only way to keep her boyfriend and to go to college.

Then, what happened? This young mother had to face the horror of having killed her child. That was the truth of the matter, which in her solitary moments she could not avoid. And she had to ask herself, “Is a man who would force me to choose between himself and his own child worth keeping as a boyfriend, much less having as my husband?” No, definitely not. And, she wondered, “Is it really true that I had to choose between a college education and the life of my child?” Again, of course not.

This poor young woman had allowed herself to be deceived, and didn’t want to deceive herself by trying to evade the horror of what she had chosen to do. Unless she could somehow find forgiveness, and in turn forgive her former boyfriend, and her family, and even the abortionist, her soul would be in bondage to her sin for the rest of her life, into eternity.

The second example is a police detective, the head of his division, who was in charge of investigating the brutal murder late one night of a young woman in his town as she was walking home. His department had been badly damaged by the recent indictment of some of its members on corruption charges.

The detective felt he must try to restore the police department’s reputation by catching the murderer soon. But he refused the offer of help from the state police because he wanted to get full credit for the arrest. In desperation, after only a few weeks, he called a press conference and named a suspect. His  grounds for identifying this suspect were circumstantial:  the man had known the victim, had been seen arguing with her recently, lived on the street where her body had been found, and had no witnesses to where he was (alone at home) on the night of the crime.

The police had no physical evidence, and no credible motive, so there could be no arrest. But of course the reputation of the man they named to the media (a respected teacher in a local college) had been ruined. Meanwhile, after several years, the case is still unsolved. The detective still has his job, but on his conscience is not just a murderer still on the loose, but an innocent man branded for life as a murder suspect. Unless he could somehow find forgiveness for these sins, of omission and commission, this detective would be bound and burdened by them for the rest of his life, into eternity.

The sins in these examples are far from uncommon. They give some sense of the true horror of sin. They could be multiplied a thousand, a hundred thousand times, and if you combine these two examples with all the others that I might have given, you will appreciate the magnitude of sin, the devastation that it causes, and the impossibility of treating sins as social problems to be solved by human means. When the moral order of creation has been violated, no one less than the creator can restore it. No one less than God can save the souls that sin destroys. His creative power to forgive sins, and restore the losses due to sin, was given to his Church directly by her risen Lord, fully and forever, and revealed on Pentecost.