Within this emphasis, Good Friday becomes the central moment in the history of justification. But the focus has shifted from Easter to Good Friday, from Resurrection to atonement, even from present vitality to mere remembrance of the past. We can observe that Paul's lightning-rod connection of new resurrected life with the justification of sinners represents an aspect of justification that has been subordinated to the atonement emphasis, and in some ways neglected in our Reformation tradition. Justification, the mark of a living Church, moves quite rapidly in the later decades of the sixteenth century from an electric word for the here and now to an assertion based primarily on memory. Justification anchored principally to Calvary threatens to become a talisman tied up to the past without being pivoted to the future.
Forgiveness is the fulcrum for a new life.
This is as true in everyday life as the fact that the sun shines. When you confess your sin and are truly forgiven and know it, then there is a potent awakening of hope in the human spirit. I could stop here and give dozens of examples of this from personal pastoral experience. I could witness from my own life. In The Sun Shines Bright , there is one central act of forgiveness in a small Kentucky town that is riven with divisions stemming from the Civil War.