In the beginning, God had great expectations. God had created all things good. Everything was beautiful and fresh. With creative potential manifest everywhere, God had reason to feel self-satisfied. But creation did not live up to God's expectations.
We all fail to live up to expectations - our own and others and certainly God's. In some ways, sin can be summarized as the failure to live up to God's expectations. That goes back nearly to the beginning.
God's creation took that goodness that God gave it. It bent that goodness with selfish effort and twisted it all out of shape. When God saw the mess that was left where beautiful creation was meant to be, God got all bent out of shape and God's tears of frustration drowned the world.
Except that the Heart of Love could not stand to completely destroy what had been so right to begin with. So, God snuck Noah and his family - and a family of all creatures into an ark.
God started over again - but with lowered expectations.
After the flood, Noah made a sacrifice to God. But Genesis 8:21 reports that Noah's sacrifice didn't lull God into idealistic dreaming. God concluded that "the imagination of the human heart is evil from youth." Humanity would fail again. So, God pledged to keep the seasons in order and to provide food and protection. God also provided a few simple rules.
Instead of getting harsher with wild humanity, God decided to impose self-restraint. God set a bow in the cloud - stretched taut as though ready to release an arrow. The bow pointed not toward humanity but straight at heaven as if to hold God hostage. (I wish I could remember who pointed this out to me.) It would remind God not to give free reign to frustrated divine wrath again. For us the rainbow became a sign of God's grace.
Throughout the Hebrew scriptures, we see God's grace growing. Despite ebbs and tides of anger, God more and more turns away from dealing with sin by destroying the sinner. Increasingly, God works to transform erring humanity.
Those of us who are Christian find in the Christian scriptures the culmination of a trajectory (at least in our faith experience). There, God brings together the perfectly created but perpetually failing humanity with the fullness of divinity. In a final attempt to deal with human evil, God becomes human and reveals the falseness of the divide. In Jesus Christ, we see all our worst failures taken care of. In him, we see our brightest potential expressed. We find the implications of that profound reality in the story of Jesus imparting the Spirit to his disciples (John 20:19-23).
Again, we hear divine promises. Jesus offers the disciples peace and grace. The promise of grace, however, is more sobering - no rainbow, but five open wounds. These wounds of God tell us that God now shares and bears the terrible consequences of creation's mistakes and humanity's warped selfishness.
In Noah's time, God seemed to accommodate the perception that the human heart is "evil from youth." In the disciples' time, God raises expectations.
"As the Father has sent me even so I send you."
Like our Savior, we are sent out into the world to serve, to love, to offer life, and to die. God now expects us to be fully responsible human beings.
But won't this just start the terrible cycle over again? What happens when we fail - like all creation before us - to live up to expectations?
Looking carefully at the story, we see that something has changed. True we are asked to share God's burden. Like Jesus, we must take on the world's hostility and imperfections. But this no longer hangs over us like a sword of Damocles. Instead, it comes to us as a privilege, for Christ now grants us the power of grace with the gift of the Holy Spirit.
"Receive the Holy Spirit," Jesus breathed on his disciples. But how will that help us change the world?
The mission has changed. We no longer must go out to spread God's demands. Certainly, we must act in character with the grace we have received. We are not sent to act irresponsibly. But the gift of the Spirit makes one major difference.
After breathing the Spirit on them, Jesus says, "If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained."
In Noah's day, God had also made provision for dealing with sin. "Whoever sheds human blood by humanity shall that person's blood be shed." God had long ago given humanity the power to retain or punish sin.
Now God gives us something new - the power to forgive.
We have the opportunity to spread the divine option of forgiveness. We can be instruments of God's grace in the world. We may act toward others as God has toward us. We may become the frontline of God's grace and forgiveness.
God gives us the option, as mature beings. We may, indeed, retain sins - as humanity has always tended to do. But we also have the choice to spread forgiveness and to let all people know that God forgives them.
Interestingly, this leaves the burden of guilt in our hands. For when we choose not to forgive, when we choose to retain the sins of others, the responsibility shifts to us. We can no longer point a finger or blame the other. God gave us the opportunity to move toward reconciliation. Only our own hard-heartedness holds us from moving toward the world of understanding that Jesus went to the cross to achieve.
Forgiveness will never be easy. We only need to join Thomas in touching the wounded hands and side to be reminded of that. Forgiveness does not erase the scars. It does not change the past. Sometimes it cannot entirely change the future.
Forgiveness will seldom come naturally as a swift, smooth process. We may need to persist over time when pursuing forgiveness for the unforgivable. But the grace of God, that breathed great expectations into creation, is sufficient to propel the process forward - fast or slow.
As we pursue it, we may find ourselves lightening our burden of failure to fulfill expectations. As we forgive others, we more fully grasp, how God has forgiven us. As we restore to others the goodness of creation, we notice a restoration of goodness in ourselves.
The twisted disfigurement of creation relaxes toward original goodness. As it does, we come to understand God's great expectation is rather simpler than we'd imagined: to open ourselves to the power of God's blessing, to rest along with the rest of creation in that original goodness.