Forgive us our trespasses

Matthew 6

What does this mean?  We pray in this petition that our Father in heaven would not look at our sins, or deny our prayer because of them.  We are neither worthy of the things for which we pray, nor have deserved them, but we ask that He would give them all to us by grace, for we daily sin much and surely deserve nothing but punishment.  So we too will sincerely forgive and gladly do good to those who sin against us.

This petition has to do with our poor, miserable lives a sinner-saints.  It is a prayer grounded in a sober reality.  We are justified and holy in God’s sight as He gazes on us through the crucified and risen Jesus.  We are new creations in Christ Jesus.  Yet the old sinful nature remains.  Though we have God’s Name and His Kingdom, though He exercises His will to save us, though we are fed in this life for the life to come, nevertheless we daily stumble and sin.  The reflexes of our old selves are too strong.  The habits of our heart turned from God are to ingrained.  Thought, word and deed are polluted.  That God doesn’t punish us, or anyone, is His gift of grace in Jesus.  That Jesus Himself teaches us to pray for forgiveness is also God’s gift and grace.

To forgive is to drop dead to sin.  God has dropped dead to your sin in the death of Jesus.  Now you drop dead to those who sin against you.

Like every petition, this one is for our benefit, not God’s.  God forgives even before we ask for forgiveness or even thing of asking for it.  Without our prayer, out of His own goodness and mercy, God has sent His Son to die for all.  “God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself , not counting men’s trespasses against them” (2Cor. 5:19).  He has given us the Gospel and the sacraments, which are nothing but pure forgiveness.  He has given us the church and pastors to speak forgiveness.  All this He does without our asking or invitation.

Just as we pray for daily bread, so we must pray for daily forgiveness.  The Christian life is not, “once forgiven, always forgiven,” or “once saved, always saved,” but continually and daily saved and forgiven by grace through faith for Jesus’ sake.  Were it not for the continual application of the death and resurrection of Christ to our lives, we would be quickly drawn into the muck and mire of our sinfulness, become self-absorbed with our guilt, and drawn away from Christ and the Gospel.  We could find ourselves praying according to the law, flashing our credentials, striking bargains, cutting deals, reminding God of all the good things we have done for Him lately and how obligated He is to help us.  We will begin to pray like the Pharisee who boasted how much better he was than the other men, instead of like the tax collector, who couldn’t even lift his eyes toward heaven.

We pray as fellow sinners for ourselves and our fellow sinners.  Forgive us.  This petition breaks our religious pride.  Anyone who would boast in his or her goodness and look down on the wickedness of others will stumble over this petition.  And anyone who prays this petition cannot look down on another, no matter how great that a sinner that person might be.

Outside the church we can bemoan the breakdown of the family, the loss of morals and family values and the violence of our society without recognizing our own contribution to the breakdown of our families, our own inner immorality which may or may not manifest itself in outward action, and our own anger, prejudice and hatred.

But inside the church, sin must be taken absolutely seriously.  In the church sin is not a social condition, a disease, or the product of the past.  Here you can’t simply complain about sin, vote it out of office, legislate it out of existence, or twelve-step it under control.  Sin must be killed, drowned, nailed to the cross, dealt with to death.  And it has, in the death of Jesus one very good Friday between noon and three.

Forgiveness rains down vertically from God to us, then flows out horizontally int streams from us to our neighbor.  God forgives, and His forgiveness propels the forgiven to forgive.  Our prayer for forgiveness and our forgiving others is offered in one unbroken petition.  Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who trespass against us.

Forgiveness is like the air we breath - inhaled, exhaled.  No holding your breath, at least not for very long, or you will stop breathing altogether.  Forgiveness is intended to flow freely.  Just as it is true that one cannot forgive without first being forgiven, it is also true that those who refuse to forgive others also refuse to be forgiven and so shut off the flow from God.  “If you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father also will forgive you; but if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your father forgive your trespasses.”

Unforgiveness on our part indicates that we do not fully grasp the size of the debt we have been forgiven by God or believe that we are forgiven.  We imagine that we are “pretty good people” compared to those whom we refuse to forgive.   Therefore if we can rise to this level of “goodness” then by golly the other person should also live up to our standard of “Rightness.”  If they don’t then they don’t deserve absolution.

We are not the only people who try to qualify our forgiveness.  Peter attempted to limit the forgiveness to an appropriate size.  He wanted to restrict his forgiveness to a nice neat seven times.  Jesus takes Peter’s puny pardon and multiplies it to a heavenly 70 times 7.  And even this is just a symbolic number to tell Peter and us that forgiveness is not limited. 

Jesus told the story of a king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants.  It turns out that one of his servants owed him millions of dollars.  Out of sheer mercy, the king dropped the debt and forgave the servant.  The servant in turn was owed a few dollars by his fellow servant.  But the forgiven servant had his fellow servant thrown into debtor’s prison until the debt was paid.  When the king heard about this, he immediately summoned the servant he had forgiven and said to him, “You wicked servant!  I forgave you all that debt because you begged me; and you should have had mercy on your fellow servant, as I had mercy on you!”  And the king sent the servant to the jailers until the debt was paid.

How does this story of Jesus’ apply to your forgiving those who have sinned against you.  Too often, we do the same thing.  We minimize our debt to God and Maximize the debt of others to us.  But here Jesus warns, “So also my heavenly Father will do to every one of you, if you don not forgive your brother from your heart.  God had broken the vicious cycle of revenge.  Grudges have no place with the free citizens of His kingdom.  If God had tossed away the tally sheets, why do we insist on hanging on to them?  Unforgiveness diminishes our view and expectation of God’s forgiveness.  It presumes that forgiveness is our work rather than God’s work. 

We must be very careful that we do not pray “Forgive us our debts because we have forgiven our debtors,” but “as we forgive our debtors.  Forgiving others in not a precondition for forgiveness.  Our forgiving others is the expected outcome and fruit of God’s forgiveness, but not the cause.  God takes the initiative.  He makes the first move.  He forgives us, unconditionally with no expectation.  Then, we forgive others unconditionally.

It seems like a tall order, this life of forgiveness.  But remember that Jesus prays this petition to Our Father along with us.  He is the only One who does not have to pray “forgive me my sins.”  He had no sin to forgive.  The sin He bore on the cross and to His death was ours.  His victory over sin and death, he had given to us, delivered in Holy Baptism, in the Holy Absolution, in the Lord’s Supper, in the reconciling Word in all its wonderful ways. We forgive others out of the overflow of Jesus living in us.  It is no longer we who forgive, but Christ living in and through us who forgives our neighbors.

Our forgiveness is a comfort and assurance of God’s forgiveness.  When a husband says to his wife, “I forgive you,” or a wife to her husband, or a parent to a child, or a child to a parent, whenever a Christian forgives another, that is the sound of God’s forgiveness at work, spilling over the boundaries of our lives, having its reconciling way in the lives of the forgiver and the one forgiven.  “I forgive you.”  That’s the sound of God’s grace in Jesus Christ. 

“Forgive us, our Father, as we forgive others!”