Lurking within the most well known prayer in scripture is a soul-wrenching challenge.
“Our Father, who art in heaven,” we say, and proceed smoothly along, asking for his kingdom to come, will be done, daily bread, and then, apparently we all have a moment of insanity, or we haven’t been listening closely.
“And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.”
Wait, back up. Asking God for forgiveness – right, got it. Totally normal. But there’s a condition in there that we normally just skip over. In the Lord’s Prayer, we are asking God to forgive us in the same way and to the same degree that we have already forgiven the people around us. That's what the "as" is for. And behold! As we have already forgiven our debtors - past tense!
Are you sure you want to pray that? In case we missed it, Jesus helpfully adds after the prayer; “For if you forgive men their transgressions, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive men, then your Father will not forgive your transgressions.” Matt. 6:14-15
Great. Very clear – in a "makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck" kind of way. I like F.F. Bruce's comment in Hard Sayings of Jesus: "The meaning is unambiguous, and it is unwise to try to avoid its uncomfortable challenge."
So, how are you doing at forgiveness? Well enough to ask God to follow your lead in the way He forgives you?
This theme runs all through the New Testament. Our relationship to others is the true yardstick by which we can judge our relationship with God.
“If someone says , ‘I love God’ and hates his brother, he is a liar; for the one who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen.” – 1 John 4:20
Tangent: When praying this in a communal setting, I can never anticipate whether we are going to say “debts,” “trespasses,” or “sins”, with the corresponding “debtors,” “those who have trespassed against us,” or “those who have sinned against us.” I always wait and let the first one go by before joining in for the last part. If you ever get to lead a Lord’s Prayer, you can freak everyone out by mixing and matching – start with a trespasses and switch to debtors for the closing! They’ll never see it coming!
Tangent off the tangent: In Greek, the word is literally “debt.” You know, the money kind. It can of course have the meaning of an offense, as verses 14 and 15 show, obviously expanding on "debts." In Aramaic (what Jesus was likely speaking) the word for “debt” and “sin” is the same. What a fun difference that makes in the prayer! “And forgive us what we owe you, as we have forgiven the people who owe us money.”
Ahem.
So – forgiveness. Hard to do. One reason I think we have trouble with the idea of forgiveness is that we have mistaken expectations of what forgiveness entails. We imagine it as a “once for all” deal. “I’ll forgive you, and then I’ll never think about it again.” Well, that doesn’t work even for minor offenses, much less major trauma. Similarly, we imagine that forgiveness is the same as saying, “No harm, no foul.” We think it is saying that we “pretend it never happened.” We think forgiveness is denial or willful ignorance of sin. We think it means there are no consequences.
God can forgive and forget. We his creations can approximate only the forgiveness part. Like grief, forgiveness is a process. Like grief, it may have to be dealt with on a regular basis as it continues to lessen in intensity over time. Especially when who and what we must forgive is something and someone who has caused us grief. And it does not mean that there are no consequences for sin or wrongdoing. So, what does it mean?
C.S. Lewis describes forgiveness in Mere Christianity in a way that is helpful to me, in a meditation on the parallel idea of “loving your enemies” (Matt. 5:43):
“We might try to understand exactly what loving your neighbor as yourself means. Well, how exactly do I love myself?
Now that I come to think of it, I have not exactly got feeling of fondness or affection for myself, and I do not even always enjoy my own society. So apparently “love your neighbor” does not mean “feel fond of him” or “find him attractive.” I ought to have seen that before, because of course, you cannot feel fond of a person by trying. Do I think well of myself, think myself a nice chap? Well, I am afraid I sometimes do (and those are, no doubt, my worst moments) but that is not why I love myself. In fact, it is the other way round; my self-love makes me think myself nice, but thinking myself nice is not why I love myself. So loving my enemies does not apparently mean thinking them nice either. That is an enormous relief. For a good many people imagine that forgiving your enemies means making out that they are really not such bad fellows after all, when it is quite plain that they are…
In my most clear-sighted moments not only do I not think myself a nice man, but I know that I am a very nasty one. I can look at some of the things I have done with horror and loathing. So apparently I am allowed to loathe and hate some of things my enemies do. Or, as Christian teachers long ago would say, hate the sin but not the sinner.
For a long time I used to think this a silly, straw-splitting distinction: how could you hate what a man did and not hate the man? But years later it occurred to me that there was one man to whom I had been doing this all my life – namely myself. However much I might dislike my own cowardice or conceit or greed, I went on loving myself…In fact the very reason why I hated the things was that I loved the man.
Christianity does not want us to reduce by one atom the hatred we feel for cruelty and treachery. We ought to hate them. But it does want us to hate them in the same way in which we hate things in ourselves: being sorry that the man should have done such things, and hoping, if it is anyway possible, that somehow, somewhere, he can be cured and made human again.”
And that, my friends, is precisely the way God forgives us.
“Be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving each other, just as God in Christ has also forgiven you.” Ephesians 4:32
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