David Bahn – Reflections

“Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name.
¹⁰ Your kingdom come,
your will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.
¹¹ Give us this day our daily bread,
¹² and forgive us our debts,
as we also have forgiven our debtors.

Philemon 1:6 says (loosely), “I pray that as you share your faith you may have an ever deeper understanding of the fullness of God’s blessings in us for the sake of Christ.” This is a very rough translation, and the various English translations take us different directions. But the point is the same: we most fully experience the grace of God when we share it with others. Grace is meant to be shared. It is by nature something that cannot be hoarded.

It is very much like the mana that the children of Israel picked up each day; if they gathered too much for the day it would go bad. So too with grace; we cannot keep it to ourselves or we will find that we have something else altogether. Grace becomes something completely other if it is not given away.

So too with forgiveness. If we have been forgiven we must forgive. It is as simple as that. Forgiveness is not earned by means of our sincere repentance, acts of earnest penance, or because of the extenuating circumstances of our failures. Forgiveness is not given because our sins are little or easily overlooked. Forgiveness is given to us by God for the sake of Jesus’ perfect righteousness and sacrificial suffering.

This is good news! Nothing we do causes God to love us more or less. Nothing we have done causes God to forgive us or not. What Christ has done renders us forgiven. So when we pray, “Forgive us our debts,” we are asking for something that God has already given; we are simply appropriating that forgiveness for ourselves.

But this gift is easily spoiled by our refusal to forgive our sister or brother, or neighbor or even our enemy. If we hoard forgiveness to ourselves we discover that it evaporates, and becomes something ugly and completely different. I’m not sure what you would even call it in that case.

The fullest experience of forgiveness is in forgiving others. For we pray here, “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. These words, “as we forgive our debtors,” express a reality, not simply a wish or a even a threat.

This is the only petition of the Lord’s Prayer that Jesus comments on after the prayer is ended. He says, “For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses” (Matthew 6:14-15). Jesus warns that if we do not forgive our brother from our heart we will be treated as a hopelessly condemned debtor (Matthew 18:32-35).

We can take this as a grave warning only, or we can see here also the love of Jesus and his deep desire for our fullest experience of forgiveness. Carrying a grudge and resentful bitterness is a heavy burden. Better we should lay those at the foot of the cross together with our own sins. That is the fullest experience of forgiveness.