Certain passages of Scripture seem to be all about recognition. In Luke 24: 36-48, the risen Jesus comes among His disciples when they are gathered in Jerusalem, and the issue at first is how they can be brought to recognise that this is really the Lord.

It would seem that recognition is hindered not only by the fact that they know Him to have died, but also by some change in His appearance. The Risen Lord gets His disciples to recognise Him by doing things that were characteristically His actions, such as taking bread, saying a blessing, breaking it and giving it to them, or by showing them the marks of crucifixion on His body.

It is important that they recognise Him not as a ghost, but as possessing flesh and bones. Then there was the whole matter of the recognition of the truth of His teaching. When He was among them He had attempted to teach them many times that He would suffer and rise again, but their minds had always been closed to this.

Now that it had happened, they needed to recognise His teaching in the events of their experience.

So the first issue of recognition was how they could be brought to recognise Him, both His Person and His teaching.

Another issue of recognition was how they themselves might be recognised as God’s people.

In the same chapter of St. Luke, the Risen Lord teaches that the characteristic action of those that are His is to proclaim repentance and forgiveness of sins in His Name to all mankind. No doubt there are as many ways of proclaiming that wonderful release as there are Christians. But in 1 John 3: 1-7 St. John focusses on the recognisability of the people of God.

St. John teaches that sin disfigures God’s people and makes them unrecognisable as such. Therefore there must be a continual intention in God’s people to remove sin from themselves.

St. John says that our destiny is to be like God, to be like Jesus. We are children of God even now on earth through our baptism and identification with Him, but even so, what we are now does not compare with our destiny, to be like Him when He appears, when He comes again.

“Everyone who thus hopes in Him,” St. John says, “purifies himself as He is pure.” Purification is spiritual cleansing involving the removal of sin. Without that our destiny to be like Him cannot be accomplished.

So whether we are thinking about the proclamation of the Faith to those still outside Christ, or the advancement of the Faith within the body of God’s people, the issue of sin and cleansing is highly important.

In Acts 3: 12-19, we see St. Peter adopting Christ’s commission to proclaim repentance and forgiveness of sins in His Name. We see St. Peter telling the Jerusalem crowds: “Repent therefore, and turn again, that your sins may be blotted out, that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord.”

And first, Peter has said to these descendants of Israel, what they need to repent from is that they had delivered up Jesus, the Holy and Righteous One, the Author of life, and denied Him in the presence of Pilate, when he had decided to release Him. They had acted in ignorance, but that sin would continue to disfigure them as the people of God unless and until they repented of it.

Coming down to our world today, we have to say that the world is pretty much convinced that the removal of sin is not all that significant. Certainly the world in general considers it is necessary to deal with the person who acts in an unacceptable manner, and the solution to that, it is commonly considered, is re-education or rehabilitation.

For this to occur there must be a system of rewards and punishments, so that by means of external pressures the offender learns that a modified behaviour makes for a more comfortable life.

One can say behaviour modification operates from the outside in, while the repentance and forgiveness of sin that is the Good News of Christians, works from within the heart or core of the person, leading then to an outward change.

The perspective of the Christian Faith about our destiny and our path to it shows us how significant and important the issue of the removal of sin is.

Our true calling, and all those to whom Christ is proclaimed, is that we will be like Him. The wonderful thing is that in spite of sin, we can indeed become what we are called to become, because of the grace of the Father and the Son. The repentance and forgiveness of sins being preached in His Name to all nations can be ours indeed. And walking in that hope and purification, we are becoming like Him at His appearance.

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