You know the scene. The whole movie, the bad guy has gotten the best of it. He’s hurt the good guy’s family, shot his partner, and wreaked mindless havoc on a terrified city. Then, finally, we see the two locked in an epic battle on top of a skyscraper as a getaway helicopter circles. They’ve knocked each other’s guns to the ground and punched each other mercilessly for about five minutes. And just as the bad guy has our hero backed up to the edge of the building, a fall and certain death immanent, miraculously, the positions are switched. The bad guy loses his footing and goes over the edge. But the good guy reaches his well-muscled arm out to grab the villain before he plummets unceremoniously to his death. Our hero strains to hold onto the bad guy with all he has. And the villain says something like, “You don’t have the guts.” By this time, of course, we think—almost viscerally—“Yes, he does! Drop that jerk!”

And it rarely occurs to us that we’ve been had. Hollywood has subverted us again—made murderers out of friendly ordinary people. We killed him in our minds, just as sure as if it had been our hands to which he had been clinging. But something about it felt so right, didn’t it? Justice is involved. You get what you deserve. What goes around comes around. If you want to dance, you have to pay the piper. The Bible even talks about it: “Anyone who maims another shall suffer the same injury in return: fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth; the injury inflicted is the injury to be suffered (Lev. 24:19-20).

Of course, the world has worked that way from the beginning. But it’s not quite adequate, is it? Intuitively, we know that straight, eye-for-an-eye, retributive justice isn’t very effective. As Martin Luther King, Jr. pointed out, a society that relies entirely on an eye-for-an-eye justice only winds up producing a lot of blind people.

But sometimes, we rise above the pettiness of the tit-for-tat. In our better moments, we act differently. We teach it to our children and call it The Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

The Synoptic Gospel writers—Matthew, Mark, and Luke—carry on some variation of this theme. Of course, in the mouth of Jesus, The Golden Rule sounds something like: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

To be honest, that feels like quite an improvement in a civilized society, don’t you think? In our most idealistic moments, we believe it to be at least better than a Hammurabi-like lopping off of body parts.

Still, though, as an ethical system, it does have the drawback of relying entirely on me as the reference point—which, frankly, feels like something of a flaw in the system. I mean, what if I don’t love myself very much at all? What if I happen to be self-destructive? Does the golden rule relieve me of my duty toward another person beyond what I might expect from myself? The golden rule doesn’t work for nihilists.

That’s a problem, isn’t it?

Jesus, seeing that more is needed for the ordering of a new world, comes up with a different standard. No longer do I get to treat people the same way they treat me or even treat them the way I’d like to be treated. He raises the ethical bar on us. According to Jesus, I’m duty-bound now, not to love my neighbor as myself (which is inadequate, given the many ways we fail so often to love ourselves), but to love my neighbor as Christ has loved me.

There, of course, is the catch.

And why is that?

Well, how did Jesus love us?

Now, you see the giant tree that’s fallen across our path on the way to living the way Jesus lived, right?

Take a look at our Gospel this morning. It’s only been a few hours since Jesus’ remaining followers received the shocking news that his body was missing. From their reaction, we get the sense that news about Jesus having been raised from the dead either hasn’t sunk in or has met with a great deal of skepticism from everyone who hadn’t gone to the tomb that morning.

As it is, Jesus’ followers are all gathered in a house with the doors locked—like they just got done watching Sleep Away Camp Massacre IV. Huddled together, everybody’s shooting furtive glances around the room, trying to figure out the next move. Remember, to the Romans, these followers are likely considered accomplices to a failed revolutionary, whom the state has just executed as a cautionary tale to any enterprising political subversive with ideas of freedom-fighter glory.

That Jesus’ followers are on constant watch for the Po-Po doesn’t make them faithless; it makes them smart. They know their faces are plastered all over every Post Office in Palestine. If they hadn’t gone to ground, Jesus’ followers would likely have found themselves staring down at a world that had gone mad from the loft heights of a cross.

It’s into this fraught atmosphere that Jesus walks unannounced. He somehow finds his way in through all the locked doors, and the first word out of his mouth is “Peace,”—which is fitting, given that peace is so far down on everybody’s list of current emotional states at this point that peace is something they’re pretty well convinced they’re never going to feel it again.

Then Jesus says something interesting. “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.”

What does that even mean?

Jesus is putting everyone else’s forgiveness into the hands of his followers?