The following are some notes on Jon 20:22-23 in two books I read this week:
. . . the command to forgive and
retain is something new, unlike the instruction to preach the gospel.
Consider that Jesus sent out the apostles to preach the gospel years before
when he first called them. Mark records:
And [Jesus] called to him the
Twelve, and began to send them out two by two, and gave them authority over the
unclean spirits . . . So they went out and preached that men should repent.
(6:7, 12).
According [to the common
Protestant interpretation], the apostles would have been “forgiving and
retaining” sins (people having their sins forgiven or retained depending in
their response to the call to repentance) way before Jesus ever commissioned
the apostles to forgive and retain sins in John 20:23.
But that’s unlikely because what
Jesus commissions the apostles to do in John 20:22-23 is presented as something
new. At no other time we are told that Jesus “breathed” on the apostles. Also,
we’re never told Jesus communicated the Holy Spirit to the apostles before this
moment. Nor did Jesus ever use the words, “If you forgive the sins of any, they
are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” Jesus already
gave the apostles the ole of preaching the forgiveness of sins. Here, Jesus
is giving the apostles a role that they have not heretofore had: forgiving and
retaining sins. (Karlo Broussard, Meeting the Protestant Response: How to
Answer Common Comebacks to Catholic Arguments [El Cajon, Calif.: Catholic
Answers Press, 2022], 152)
On the very occasion when the
risen Jesus simultaneously appears for the first time to his assembled
disciples and also takes his leave of them, he bequeaths to them this word.
Till that moment the disciples had been shut away in anxiety and loneliness;
now joy reawakens within them, because the risen Lord gives them peace’. He
breathes into them his own Spirit, and commits to them his own authority:
‘Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if
you retain the sins of any, they are retained.’ Easter and Pentecost have
become one. Jesus has not left his own desolate, like ‘orphans’; for the power
of his Spirit remains with them to ‘help’ them, and in that power they
themselves can now bestow forgiveness and achieve dominion over sin.
The inversion which John has made
in his traditional material is significant. In both versions in Matthew the
‘binding’ of sin comes before the ‘loosing’. The effect of this is to emphasise
the disciplinary aspect of church authority, that which is concerned with
protecting the community against the sinner. By contrast John puts the right of
forgiveness first, and the retaining of sin remains in undiminished force only
as, so to speak, the reverse of this. It should not be supposed that this was
because John was ‘liberal’ in his attitude to sinners. On the contrary, it was
his wish that Christians should not even exchange greetings with one who denied
the truth about Christ, ‘for he who greets him shares in his wicked work (II
John. 11)’. But in the power to forgive, John sees something to which the
Church must attach supreme value, because she herself lives by the power of
forgiveness. It is not merely particular individual sinners who needs
forgiveness, but all Christians; and they are continually instructed to receive
it. The power of the keys is the primary authority of the Christian Church in
general.
One further small alteration is
perhaps worthy of attention. According to Matthew sins forgiven on earth shall
be forgiven in heaven—the saying is here looking forwards to the coming
Last Judgment. For John, however, sin, as soon as it has been forgiven here, has
already been forgiven in heaven. Inasmuch as the eschatological
decision is hereby transferred into the present, this corresponds to a
universal characteristic of Johannine theology, and calls for no further
notice; but the perfect tense is significant none the less. It underscores the
contemporary relevance of the consoling word of grace for the tempted, who
yearns not for assurance as to the future but for actual forgiveness, and thus
‘boldness’, in the present. It is a matter of inward, spiritual distress, not
of the fulfilment of wishes for the future. (Hans Von Campenhausen, Ecclesiastical
Authority and Spiritual Power in the Church of the First Three Centuries [trans.
J. A. Baker; London: Adam and Charles Black, 1969], 139-40)
That Joh. 20:23 is simply a
variant form of Matt. 16:18; 18:18, follows from the similarity of meaning and
structure, and cannot be disputed. All that has been dropped in the semitisms. Κρατειν in the sense which it must have
here is, in any case, quite unusual. (Ibid., 139 n. 72)
What is emphasised is the
immediacy of the decision, and the fact that it applies without question and at
once; it is not implied that the human sentence is linked with a divine
judgment that has already taken place . . . (Ibid., 140 n. 82)