The Authority He Breathed Into Them

Have you ever received a gift so extraordinary that your first instinct was to explain it away? Maybe someone handed you a set of car keys and said, “It’s yours,” and you immediately started looking for the catch. “You don’t really mean that. You must mean I can borrow it. You can’t possibly mean what you just said.”

We do this with Scripture more often than we’d like to admit. When the plain words of Jesus confront us with something that doesn’t fit neatly into our existing framework, we become remarkably creative interpreters. We qualify. We spiritualize. We contextualize the words into oblivion. And sometimes, in our eagerness to protect a theological system, we lose the breathtaking thing Jesus actually said and did.

I want us to sit with one of those moments today. I want us to resist the urge to explain it away before we’ve let it land.

 

The Scene

It is the evening of Resurrection Sunday. The disciples are huddled behind locked doors, paralyzed with fear. And then Jesus is simply there, standing among them, speaking peace into their terror. What follows is one of the most dramatic moments in all of Scripture:

“When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained’” (John 20:22-23, NRSV).

Read it again. Don't gloss over the words. Sit with them a minute. Let the words do what words are supposed to do.

Jesus breathes on his apostles. He gives them the Holy Spirit. And then he tells them that when they forgive sins, those sins are forgiven, and when they retain sins, those sins are retained.

The grammar is unambiguous. The action is concrete. The authority is real.

And yet this passage has generated an astonishing amount of interpretive gymnastics from people who are otherwise committed to reading the Bible at face value. Let’s be honest about that, and let’s examine why.

 

The Breath of God

Before we address what Jesus said, we need to feel the weight of what Jesus did. The Greek word here is enephysēsen, and it appears nowhere else in the entire New Testament. It is, however, deeply familiar to anyone who knows the Old Testament. The Septuagint uses this same word in Genesis 2:7, when God breathes the breath of life into Adam.

This is not incidental. John, the most theologically deliberate of the Gospel writers, is telling us that what is happening in that locked room is nothing less than a new creation.

Just as God breathed life into the first man, the risen Christ is now breathing the Holy Spirit into his apostles and commissioning them for a specific work. Whatever Jesus says next carries the full weight of divine, creative authority. This is not casual conversation. This is commissioning.

So what does he commission them to do?

He commissions them to forgive and retain sins.

 

Confronting the Explanations

Now, I have read and deeply respect many commentators who work very hard to make this passage say something other than what it appears to say. Because I take the text seriously, and because I take their objections seriously, I want to walk through the most common alternative readings and test them honestly against the passage itself.

Alternate Interpretation 1: "Jesus is just saying they should preach the gospel, and people who accept it will be forgiven.”

This is perhaps the most common reinterpretation. The idea is that “forgiving sins” is simply a metaphor for evangelism. When the apostles preach the gospel, those who believe are forgiven by God, and those who reject the message remain in their sins.

But notice what this interpretation requires. It requires us to believe that Jesus used the most direct, personal, and authoritative language imaginable to describe something indirect and impersonal.

He did not say, “Preach, and God will forgive those who believe.” He said, “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven.” The subject of the verb is “you,” the apostles. The action of forgiving is attributed to them. To turn this into a statement about preaching is to replace what Jesus said with something we are more comfortable with.

Furthermore, if Jesus merely meant “preach the gospel,” the second half of the statement becomes nonsensical. What would it mean to “retain” someone’s sins through preaching? If a person rejects the gospel, their sins are retained by their own unbelief, not by any action of the preacher. But Jesus presents forgiving and retaining as parallel acts of authority exercised by the apostles. Both are active. Both are deliberate. Both require judgment and discernment.

Alternate Interpretation 2: "This authority was given only to the apostles and died with them.”

Some acknowledge that Jesus did grant this authority but argue it was a unique, unrepeatable gift to the Twelve alone. This deserves serious consideration, but it raises significant problems.

First, the text itself gives no indication of such a limitation. Jesus does not say, “This authority is for you alone and will cease when you die.” When Jesus gives the Great Commission in Matthew 28:19-20, we rightly understand it as extending beyond the original eleven to all who would carry on their mission.

On what principle do we treat this commission differently?

Second, the book of Acts and the epistles show the apostles passing on authority to others through the laying on of hands. Paul writes to Timothy, “Do not neglect the gift that is in you, which was given to you through prophecy with the laying on of hands by the council of elders” (1 Timothy 4:14). The apostles clearly understood their ministry as something to be continued, not hoarded.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, if this authority died with the apostles, then the church has been without a gift that Christ himself considered important enough to bestow on the very evening of his resurrection, in the same breath (literally) as the giving of the Holy Spirit. That would be a strange kind of gift indeed.

 

Alternate Interpretation 3: "The forgiveness described here is just a declaration of what God has already done, not an actual conferral of forgiveness.”

This is a subtler argument. The idea is that the apostles (and their successors, if we grant successors) merely announce forgiveness but do not actually mediate it. God does the forgiving; they just report it.

But look at the text once more: “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them.” The Greek construction here uses a perfect passive form (kekratēntai for “retained,” and the parallel structure for forgiveness) that indicates a state resulting from an action.

The apostles’ act of forgiving and God’s ratification of that forgiveness are presented as a unified reality. There is no gap between what the apostles do and what heaven recognizes.

This, incidentally, is exactly the same pattern we see in Matthew 18:18, where Jesus says, “Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” The earthly action and the heavenly reality are not sequential but simultaneous. The authority exercised by Christ’s appointed ministers is God’s own authority working through them.

To reduce this to mere declaration is to do something we would never do with other passages. When Jesus says to the paralytic, “Your sins are forgiven” (Mark 2:5), we do not say he was merely declaring what the Father had already done independently. We understand that Jesus was actually forgiving the man. And now the risen Jesus breathes his Spirit on his apostles and gives them a share in that same work.

 

Why This Matters

I suspect the resistance to this passage comes from a good place. It comes from a desire to protect the sovereignty of God and the unique mediatorship of Christ. Those are right and beautiful instincts. God alone forgives sin. Christ alone is the one mediator between God and humanity.

But here is the mystery that runs through all of Scripture: God, who needs nothing and no one, chooses to work through human instruments.

He did not need Moses to part the sea. He did not need Elijah to call down fire. He did not need Peter to preach at Pentecost. And yet he chose all of them. The God who could forgive every sin with a silent thought instead chose to breathe on his apostles and say, “I am giving you a role in this.”

This is not a diminishment of God’s power. It is the ultimate expression of his generosity.

He shares his work with us. He invites us into it.

And in John 20:22-23, he invites certain men into the sacred work of mediating his forgiveness to broken, sinful, desperate human beings.

Think about what that means for the person weighed down by guilt.

It means that God, who knows we are flesh and not angels, has provided not just an invisible, internal assurance of pardon, but a human voice, speaking with divine authority, saying the words we ache to hear: “Your sins are forgiven.”

 

A Word for Your Life

Perhaps you are reading this and you have been carrying something heavy. A sin you’ve confessed to God a thousand times in the silence of your own heart, and yet the weight remains. The accuser whispers that you haven’t been forgiven, and because you’ve never heard a human voice speak absolution over you with authority, you half believe him.

Jesus knew this about us. He knew we would need more than a theory of forgiveness. He knew we would need to hear it, concretely, from someone standing in front of us, authorized by him to speak those words.

I would encourage you to do two things this week. First, read John 20:19-23 every day, slowly, prayerfully, and ask the Holy Spirit to show you what Jesus intended when he breathed on those men.

Don’t bring your theological system to the text. Bring your open hands. Let the passage speak. This really isn't a difficult passage. It only becomes difficult when we introduce our objections to it.

Second, ask yourself honestly: Have I been explaining away the plain words of Jesus because they don’t fit my framework? This is not a comfortable question. But it is a faithful one. The Bereans were praised not for defending what they already believed, but for examining the Scriptures to see whether new things they were hearing were true (Acts 17:11). Be a Berean with this passage. Test it. Sit with it. Let the risen Christ, who stood in that room and breathed on those men, speak to you now.

In my experience, if I'm objecting to Jesus' words because he isn't fitting my "system," the problem is never with Jesus' words. It's with my system. When that happens, there are really only two options: we "explain away" Jesus' clear words, which cannot be the faithful choice, or we find a different system. We either try to change Jesus (who never changes, so it's a foolish thing to do) or we change ourselves. But we must be honest about what it is that's really fueling our objection. Is it the text, our our theology? My theology has changed a lot through the years. But I'm still reading, studying, and praying over the same text. If I've learned anything in my years of study it's that I can never put God's Word into my personal "box." It never fits. It always explodes my box, and forces me to confront the fact that I've been trying to "contain" something that doesn't bend to my rules.

The gift he gave that evening was not theoretical. It was not metaphorical. It was his own Spirit, his own authority, his own mercy, flowing through human hands and human words to reach human hearts.

Including yours.

Because "forgiveness" isn't something God wants us doubting. He doesn't want us spinning our heads around wondering, "was I repentant enough?" or "did I ask properly?" or "did he hear my prayer?" God knows that guilt is an insidious thing, and that the devil is constantly in our ear trying to throw it back in our faces. So God did something better. He put his words on the lips of human instruments, he commanded them to speak His word into our ears in a way that erases all doubt, that declares it with the authority that Jesus Himself breathed upon the Apostles in the upper-room, with the power of the Holy Spirit, with the power of creation itself.

And if you've ever experienced it, it's one of the most powerful gifts God has ever given us. And knowing all of the above, how the power behind Apostolic forgiveness is the power of creation itself, it's no wonder. You see, the issue isn't "why do I have to confess my sins to a man when I can go straight to God?"

That kind of question is like saying, "why do I have to take this check to the bank when I know it's already written in my name?" I don't know about you, but I've never been given a big check then complained that it wasn't convenient to go deposit it. I never said, "but I don't want my money from the bank, I want it from you!" That's not the way it works. Even if I cash the check, I'm not primarily thankful to the bank teller. I'm thankful to the person who wrote the check to begin with.

Jesus wrote that check. He put your name on it when He breathed His authority upon the Apostles, not because it's men who forgive sins, but because Jesus does, and throughout Scripture, in His grace, God includes human beings in His most important, most amazing, most salvific actions. God could save the world without us. He could remake the world, forgive us, with nothing but a thought. But in His love, it delights Him to include us, the creature He made in His image, in His plan to save the world, to save each of us, and to restore us into a right relationship with Him.