Pardon

For years, Ben Affleck wrestled with alcohol addiction. A consequence, he says, of having an alcoholic father. But the actor shared that he was in a much better place now and doesn't think he will ever return to that way of life.

It is no secret that substance abuse is a pervasive problem in Hollywood. Tragic stories are common. So, how did Affleck escape this fate?

In an interview he credited his Christian faith. Affleck says his Christian faith in later life has allowed him to accept his flaws and imperfections as a man. He said:

The concept that God, through Jesus, embraces and pardons all of us - from those we admire to those we might judge or resent - is powerful. If God can show such boundless love, urging us to love, avoid judgement and offer forgiveness, it serves as a profound model of how we should strive to be.

What I truly appreciate, even as I still grapple with my faith and beliefs, as I think all people do at times, is the profound idea that we all have imperfections . . . It's our journey to seek redemption, embrace divine love, better ourselves, cherish others, refrain from judgement, and extend forgiveness.

What does it mean when the Bible says that we have been pardoned by God? Here are two classic definitions from American legal history:

First, in 1833, Chief Justice John Marshall, in a landmark decision, described a pardon as “an act of grace … which exempts the individual on whom it is bestowed from the punishment the law inflicts for a crime he has committed.”

Second, in 1866, the Supreme Court gave another famous definition of a pardon: “a pardon releases the punishment and blots out of existence the guilt, so that in the eye of the law the offender is as innocent as if he had never committed the offense … A pardon removes the penalties and disabilities and restores him to all his civil rights; it makes him, as it were, a new man, and gives him a new credit and capacity.”

Christian Philosopher William Lane Craig offers this as a marvelous description of a divine pardon. “‘If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation ….’ The pardoned sinners’ guilt is expiated, so that he is legally innocent before God.”

Jen Wilkin writes:

When my parents entered their latter years, they took up a new hobby: keeping chickens. At the height of their enthusiasm, they tended 21 chickens in a hen house—20 chickens, that is, and one noisy rooster. Roosters crow and crow. They crow every morning, and they crow all morning. They crow to announce another day, but they continue crowing as long as it is called “today.”

Roosters make a notable appearance in the Bible. All four Gospels record Peter’s famous three-time betrayal of Jesus punctuated by the crowing of a rooster, just as Jesus had prophesied. All three synoptic Gospels say Peter “wept bitterly” at the sound.

Our senses are powerful memory holders. Smells … tastes … sounds, too, attach themselves to memories. I imagine what kind of memory the rooster’s crow evoked for Peter. Every dawn after that first terrible morning of betrayal, the proclamation of his bitter guilt would have rung afresh in his ears. Carried in the crowing would have been the memory of his colossal failure. Whatever his relationship had been with Jesus, whatever his calling, it appears to be finished.

“I’m going out to fish,” he announces to his companions (John 21:3). They fish all night and catch nothing. But just as day is breaking, a sound ripples across the water. A voice. The announcement of a miracle: Try the other side of the boat. Recognition dawns. As the others haul in fish as fast as they can, Peter hurls himself into the sea and thrashes toward shore. There sits Jesus, serving up a fresh breakfast menu: Restoration. Forgiveness. It is finished.

I wonder, as the two conversed, could Peter hear in the surrounding countryside the sound of roosters? I can’t say. But … I suspect that every morning thereafter, Peter affixed a new memory to that clarion call. The sound of homecoming. Fear not. Glad tidings. Each day, the sound that had announced new-morning guilt now spoke a better word. All hail the rooster, that fine-feathered herald of forgiveness, that megaphone of new-morning mercies.

Possible Preaching Angle:

“There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 8:1). What memory of past guilt announces itself to you at every turn? Friend, hear the annunciation of your emancipation: Morning has broken, and with it, fresh mercy.

An inmate caused a mild drama in the Nigerian High Court after a judge acquitted him of all charges against him, but he refused and demanded to go back to prison. Instead of the usual jubilation that follows any ruling of "discharged and acquitted," the inmate in question headed straight back to the prison. He was intercepted by a prison guard who reminded him he was free to go home. To the chagrin of eyewitnesses, he said he was going nowhere, demanding to be allowed re-entry into the prison.

The calm of the court premises was shattered by the freed prisoner's shouts and pleas to be allowed to go back to prison, as he thrashed about and struggled with several prison officials. According to eyewitnesses, it took the effort of over six prison officials, court workers, and policemen to get the freed inmate out of the court premises.

Possible Preaching Angle:

That's a picture of us all. We have been set free in Christ, but we often find ourselves returning to the prison of our old way of life and behavior. Healthy Christians remind themselves of their settled status in God’s courtroom. We have been "approved by God" (1 Thess. 2:4) and “set free” (Rom. 6:18-22).

Via their Twitter account, the St. John Fisher Catholic High School of Peterborough posted a picture of a book that was returned to its library. How long had this book been out of library circulation? At least 32 years, according to the anonymous scofflaw seeking amnesty. An attached note read, “Sorry, just 32 years overdue. Call it Catholic guilt.”

Chief of administration Rosie Roe was the one who opened the package with the long-lost book, and was disappointed that the guilty party remained anonymous. She said, "It was a real surprise when I opened it and saw what was inside, I thought it's a real shame they didn't leave a name because I was at the school at that time and wonder if I know them.”

It’s not clear whether the anonymous former student was motivated more by guilt or by the book’s subject matter. It’s title: Manners Make a Difference. The school will not return the book to library circulation, since its content is quite outdated, and after calculating that the fine would be approximately $1100 dollars, the school announced that “all is forgiven.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

It’s never too late to come to God with your long covered up sins and mistakes. He is always ready to forgive and release you from penalty through the work of Christ on the Cross.

Author Dane Ortlund quotes Thomas Goodwin’s statement, “Christ’s own joy, comfort, happiness, and glory are increased … by his showing grace and mercy, in pardoning, relieving, and comforting his members here on earth.”

Ortlund then gave the following illustration:

A compassionate doctor has traveled deep into the jungle to provide medical care to a primitive tribe afflicted with a contagious disease. He has had his medical equipment flown in. He has correctly diagnosed the problem, and the antibiotics are prepared and available. He is independently wealthy and has no need of any kind of financial compensation. But as he seeks to provide care, those who are afflicted refuse the care. They want to take care of themselves. They want to heal on their own terms. Finally, a few brave young men step forward to receive the care being freely provided.

What does the doctor feel? Joy. His joy increases to the degree that the sick come to him for help and healing. It’s the whole reason he came.

So, with us, and so with Christ. He does not get flustered and frustrated when we come to him for fresh forgiveness, for renewed pardon, with distress and need and emptiness. That’s the whole point. It’s what he came to heal.

When Pricess Lalla Salma gave birth to a daughter named Lalla Khadija, her husband King Mohammed VI of Morocco was delighted. In fact, he wanted to celebrate. But instead of giving out cigars, he pardoned 8,836 prisoners and reduced the sentences of 24,218 others. The Justice Ministry said the pardons were a humanitarian gesture.

When God’s one and only Son was born in Bethlehem, the whole purpose was to provide pardons for condemned people. God had promised he would do so in Isaiah 55:7, “Let the wicked forsake his way and the evil man his thoughts. Let him turn to the LORD, and he will have mercy on him, and to our God, for he will freely pardon.”

Nevest Coleman resumed his job as a groundskeeper for the Chicago White Sox after an unexpected hiatus left him unavailable to work-for 23 years. In 1994, Coleman was charged and convicted of rape and murder. He spent the next two decades behind bars until prosecutors vacated his conviction after considering DNA evidence that should've ruled him out as a suspect. Several months later, a Cook County judge granted Coleman a certificate of innocence, which officially cleared his name of all related charges.

While maintaining a steadfast belief in his innocence, Coleman always looked back fondly on the time he spent working with the team, which felt very much like a family. After his release, friends and family members reached out to the White Sox organization, delighted by an official invite to come and reapply for his old job. After re-hiring him, the team issued an official statement:

"We're grateful that after more than two decades, justice has been carried out for Nevest," the team said in a statement. "It has been a long time, but we're thrilled that we have the opportunity to welcome him back to the White Sox family. We're looking forward to having Nevest back on Opening Day at home in our ballpark."

On Coleman's first day back at work, he was flanked by two of his former coworkers, and was warmly greeted by the team's head groundskeeper, Roger "The Sodfather" Bossard.

"I saved your spot for you," Bossard said. "I knew you'd be back."

Preaching angles: (1) God's justice—This is such a heartwarming story, but we all know that many times injustice still reigns. We long for the day when God will judge the earth with perfect justice, restoring what was lost, making all things right and just. (2) Justice—As followers of Christ we are also called to fight for justice on earth as it will be in heaven.

While waiting in a Nazi prison cell in 1943 a few weeks before Advent, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote a friend, "A prison cell, in which one waits, hopes, does various unessential things, and is completely dependent on the fact that the door of freedom has to be opened from the outside, is not a bad picture of Advent."

Shortly after penning those words, the Nazis executed Bonhoeffer. But he was right: the door of freedom for him and for us today is still opened from the outside by the coming and second coming of Jesus Christ.

In the early 1980s the city of Philadelphia had a huge problem with graffiti. The mayor established the Anti-Graffiti Network, committed to combatting the vandalism, which morphed into the Mural Arts Program, led by the artist Jane Golden. Golden said, "I spent the first five years of my life in Philly being told that graffiti is never going away and the kids you're working with are going to end up in jail." But she didn't give up. When police caught kids painting graffiti, program officials first asked them to sign an amnesty statement, pledging to refrain from graffiti writing, then assigned them scrub time, cleaning spray paint from walls.

Then without warning one Friday night, about a dozen guys showed up at Golden's door. As they introduced themselves, she recognized most from their graffiti tag names, like "Rock" and "Cat." Golden invited them inside. "They came in and went right for my art books, pulling out all the books on abstract expressionism," she said.

Many of them had dropped out before high school, but they had learned about art from books they had checked out or stolen from the library. Most had brought Golden their sketch books, so she could see the type of work they were doing. "They'd learned about drawing from comic books; they had an intuitive sense of color and design," Golden said. After talking with the young artists about their work, Golden explained the anti-graffiti program, and before they left her house, all had agreed to sign the pledge and commit themselves to scrub time.

Golden connected with the young graffiti writers not as "criminals," but as artists. She offered them a lifeline, a way they could be paid money to paint murals legally. The organization is now the largest public art program in the U.S, with a collection of over 4,000 murals.

Editor’s Note: The program is still going strong in 2024, you can read the latest here

Karl Barth preached regularly to the inmates of the prison in his hometown of Basel, Switzerland. Knowledge of that context adds poignancy to the sermons. Here was an audience of people who had been officially judged and condemned as guilty. One of the sermons is based on Ephesians 2:8, "For by grace you have been saved through faith; and this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God." He illustrated by retelling a Swiss legend:

You probably all know the legend of the rider who crossed the frozen Lake of Constance by night without knowing it. When he reached the opposite shore and was told whence he came, he broke down horrified. This is the human situation when the sky opens and the earth is bright, when we may hear: By grace you have been saved! In such a moment we are like that terrified rider. When we hear this word we involuntarily look back, do we not, asking ourselves: Where have I been? Over an abyss, in mortal danger! What did I do? The most foolish thing I ever attempted! What happened? I was doomed and miraculously escaped and now I am safe!

In the same way, everyone who is trusting Christ for salvation by grace alone can say, "I was in mortal danger. I was doomed but through the cross of Christ I miraculously escaped and now I am safe!"

NPR (National Public Radio) reported on a new deli in rural Maine with a hotshot chef behind the counter. "Foodies" may recognize the chef's name—Matthew Secich, the chef for famous restaurants across the country, including The Oval Room in Washington, D.C. Secich shocked the foodie world when he became a Christian and moved his family and his kitchen off the grid. (Editor's Note: He also joined the local Amish community.)

As NPR reports,

His new spot, Charcuterie, is a converted cabin tucked away in a pine forest in Unity, Maine, population 2,000. You have to drive down a long, snowy track to get there, and you can smell the smokehouse before you can see it. … There are no Slim Jims here, but rather handmade meat sticks, fat as cigars, sitting in a jar by a hand-cranked register.

Even as a hotshot chef something was missing in Secich's life. According to the Portland (ME) Press-Herald:

[Secich's] perfectionist streak ruled his actions. "I burned people," he said. As in, held a line cook's hand to a hot fire for making a mistake at Charlie Trotter's restaurant in Chicago, where Secich was a chef from 2006 to 2008. "Four stars, that's all that matters." Then he grew disgusted.

"I went home one night and got on my knees and asked for forgiveness," he said. For his lack of compassion for others, his nights with restaurant friends and a fifth of Jim Beam with a side of Pabst Blue Ribbon, for that overactive ego. "I gave my life to the Lord, which I never would have imagined in the heyday of my chaos."

New York magazine interviewed several former inmates and asked them to describe their first hours or day of freedom. These men had been wrongfully convicted, but their first taste of freedom is no different than that of the guilty—or even those who have been forgiven by Christ. So pick your favorite quote, or two, or use all three:

Jeffrey Deskovic, age 41, spent 16 years in prison. He was freed on September 20, 2006:

At times I wasn't quite sure whether I really was out and free. I felt like a finger was tapping me on the back and saying, "What are you doing? They belong out here, but you don't. They don't really realize that you don't." So I just did something that I wanted to do for a long time: I wanted to sit outside in the nighttime and not have to go inside … I could see a few stars and the lights on in some of the other houses. It was just a minor thing that had been taken away from me.

Fernando Bermudez, age 46, spent 18 years in prison. He was freed on November 20, 2009:

The first thing I did, I went running in Inwood Hill Park … where I had all these childhood memories of wanting to be a geologist. I used to pick rocks and collect insects before I became less of a nerd and more a person in trouble. I'm coming off my run, and I'm doing something I had sorely missed: I'm looking at a tree, and I'm just admiring it. I had been deprived of nature for so long … I finally got to feel the bark. I was crying hugging the tree.

Derrick Hamilton, age 49, spent 21 years in prison. He was freed on December 7, 2011:

The day I walked out, my wife, my nephew, and my son was in the car waiting for me. There was a church right around the corner. I would always listen to the bells ringing when I was in jail. I didn't even know where the church really was. But I would pray when I would hear the bells. It was my only opportunity to pray at the same time people on the outside was praying. When I got out, that was one of the first things I wanted to do, just go around and pray in that church. I went in and thanked God for my release … Going into that church, it was like being born again.

Walter McMillian was convicted of killing 18-year-old Ronda Morrison at a dry cleaner in Monroeville, Alabama in 1986. Three witnesses testified against McMillian, while six witnesses, who were black, testified that he was at a church fish fry at the time of the crime. McMillian was found guilty and held on death row for six years—all the while claiming his innocence.

An attorney named Bryan Stevenson decided to take on the case to defend McMillian. Stevenson told a reporter:

It was a pretty clear situation where everyone just wanted to forget about this man, let him get executed so everybody could move on. [There was] a lot of passion, a lot of anger in the community about [Morrison's] death, and I think there was great resistance to someone coming in and fighting for the condemned person who had been accused and convicted.

But with Stevenson's representation, McMillian was exonerated in 1993. McMillian was eventually freed, but not without scars of being on death row. One of those scars was early-onset dementia. Stevenson comments, "Many of the doctors believed [the dementia] was trauma-induced; [it] was a function of his experience of being nearly killed—and he witnessed eight executions when he was on death row." So even after McMillian was free from death row, free from prison, and an exonerated man, in his mind he was still a prisoner. When Stevenson would visit him in the hospital, McMillian was still telling his lawyer, "You've got to get me off death row."

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) Justification by Faith; (2) Prison Ministry; Racism; Prisons; Prisoners; Race Relations—This illustration also shows the lingering effects of racial injustice. In the NPR story Stevenson concluded, "One of the things that pains me is we have so tragically underestimated the trauma, the hardship we create in this country when we treat people unfairly, when we incarcerate them unfairly, when we condemn them unfairly."

George's Wright's life of crime started in 1962. On that fateful night, George and a buddy walked into Walter Patterson's gas station and demanded money. When he objected they beat the older man, until Walter finally gave up all the cash he had: seventy dollars in crumpled bills. George's buddy shot Walter at point-blank range. After the robbery and shooting, George ate two cheeseburgers and played shuffleboard.

George Wright was arrested and eventually sentenced to 15 to 30 years in prison. That was too long for this angry young man, so he connected with a few other cons and broke out, hotwiring the warden's car as the means of escape. He stayed under the radar until July 31, 1972, when he hijacked a plane heading from Detroit to Miami, eventually escaping to Algeria.

From there, he began a worldwide fugitive odyssey that took him to Germany, France, Guinea-Bissau, and finally Portugal. Along the way, George changed his name to Jorge, and somewhere in the years between then and now, miraculously, Jorge became a different man. "I've asked God to forgive me," he says now of his criminal past, "and I think God has forgiven me. But the law—the law says other things." Jorge married, had children, joined a church, and got baptized.

He turned from crime, working with his hands to provide for his family. He cleaned graffiti in Lisbon and helped to renovate an outreach center for HIV-positive children. He served dinners for homeless people. He planted public flower gardens. He raised two healthy, happy kids. He grew into a senior citizen, and in the forty years of his hiding, he didn't do anything to add to his crimes—not even a parking violation.

On September 26, 2011, the law finally caught up with George Wright in the form of six Portuguese policemen acting on an Interpol warrant issued by the United States. They found George Wright, but they arrested José Luis Jorge dos Santos. Portugal eventually denied the United States' attempt to have Jorge extradited, but during the hearings the central issue was not whether they'd arrested the right man but whether they'd arrested the same man. The question they were asking was this: Can a person actually change?

Research published in the journal Psychological Science found that people's feelings of guilt are lessened after they experience pain.

Some volunteers were asked to think and write a short essay about a time they had been mean-spirited or unkind to someone. Others were asked to write about a routine event in their lives. Then they were asked to put their hand in a bucket of water and keep it there as long as possible. Some of the buckets were filled with agonizing ice cold water while others with warm water. Then they were asked to reflect on the pain (if any) they experienced and any feelings of guilt. Researchers found that those that were feeling guilty of an unkind act inflicted upon themselves more pain—that is, they kept their hand in the agonizing ice water for longer than those who had thought and written about a routine event in their lives. The "guilty ones" reported that feeling the pain somewhat alleviated their feelings of guilt.

The Psychological Science study concluded: "Researchers explain that we tend to associate pain with justice, as a form of punishment. So when we're feeling bad about an immoral act we committed, experiencing pain makes us feel like we have rebalanced the scales of justice, and therefore it resolves our guilt."

According to the Bible, we should feel the pain of guilt when we fail to keep God's law. But punishing ourselves won't "rebalance the scales of justice." Christ alone has taken the punishment of our sin.

Skye Jethani relates a story about holding a series of meetings with college-aged students. The topics ranged across the spectrum—doctrine, hell, dating—but each conversation had three rules: be honest, be gracious, and be present. On one night the students wanted to discuss habitual sins. Although they struggled with a variety of sinful behaviors, they all agreed on one thing: God was extremely disappointed with them. One student said, "My parents were students at a Christian college in the early '90s when a revival broke out …. They were on fire for God. And here I am consumed by sin day after day." Often through tears, many other students shared similar stories about how they believed God must be disappointed with them.

After listening to their stories, Jethani asked, "How many of you were raised in a Christian home?" They all raised their hands. "How many of you grew up in a Bible-centered church?" All hands stayed up. Shaking his head in disbelief, Jethani said, "You've all spent eighteen or twenty years in the church. You've been taught the Bible from the time you could crawl, and you attend Christian colleges, but not one of you gave the right answer. Not one of you said that in the midst of your sin God still loves you."

Jethani concluded: "I did not blame the students for their failure. Somewhere in their spiritual formation they were taught, either explicitly or implicitly, that what mattered was not God's love for them, but how much they could accomplish for him.

The famous and luxurious Biltmore House in Asheville, North Carolina, was originally owned and managed by George and Edith Vanderbilt, an elegant couple known for their exceptional treatment of rich and famous guests. But today when people summarize the Vanderbilts' management of the Biltmore House, they don't just retell stories about how they treated their wealthy guests; they also point to the story of how George Vanderbilt treated a young employee named Bessie Smith.

A 2011 article about the Vanderbilts described the following scene:

Smith was a teenager when she began working at the Biltmore, and she was intimidated by its opulence. On her first day as a server, she walked into the house's grand banquet hall and, startled by the vastness of the room, dropped the tray of monogrammed china she was carrying.

George [Vanderbilt], a professorial figure with dark hair and a slightly curved moustache, rose from his chair as his guests looked on, their eyes begging: What on earth are you going to say about this distraction? But he didn't say anything. Instead, he got down on his hands and knees and helped her pick up the shards before saying, 'Come see me in the morning.'" Bessie Smith assumed she was going to be fired. Instead, [George Vanderbilt] promoted Bessie to chambermaid, so she wouldn't have to carry such heavy dishes.

A March, 2011, issue of The New York Times featured a story about a 51-year-old ex-convict named Robert Salzman. After a horrific childhood, Salzman spent most of his adult life in prison. When he was released from prison in 2001, Salzman found it difficult to enjoy freedom outside prison walls, struggling to pay rent or doing stints in homeless shelters.

Finally, in June of 2010 Salzman had a grace-like experience. While he was riding a New York City subway car, he was "found" by Rashaad Ernesto Green, a writer and director who was searching for someone to play a tough-looking former convict for an upcoming film. After an audition, Green surprised nearly everyone when he gave Salzman a key role for the film.

In the ensuing months Salzman found it hard to believe that he had actually been set free from his prison life. On one occasion, while filming with Green on location in a Long Island penitentiary, an exhausted Salzman fell asleep on a cot in the prison cell. When he woke up, he became confused and thought he was still a prisoner. Salzman started weeping in despair … until it slowly dawned on him that he was now a free man. Salzman was overwhelmed by the joy of knowing that at any moment he could walk out of that cramped cell and through the prison doors. On the other side of the prison walls he could enjoy his new life of freedom.

As those who trust in Christ, regardless of our past, we can leave our slavery to sin and condemnation as we joyfully step into our freedom in Christ.