Forgive Us Our Debts As We Also Have Forgiven Our Debtors

Here is my message from Sunday. The text was Colossians 3:12-17  and Matthew 6:5-15:

The Lord’s Prayer, which we have been looking at for the past four weeks, consists of a series of petitions. The first of those petitions are really about God, although about things we might be doing, like hallowing God’s name, which means making it holy, and then it turns to personal petitions, things we are asking God to do for us. And as a reminder that is the plural us, not the individual us. And so last week we began with the first of those personal petitions asking God to give us, and everyone, this day our daily bread. This image is from a freeze from the Roman Senate House which was originally constructed by Julius Caesar in 44 BCE. It was updated over time, and this carving represents the emperor Trajan who ruled from 98 to 117 CE. We actually know some really interesting things about the early Christian church because of a series correspondence that Trajan has with Pliny, who was the imperial governor of what is now modern day turkey. Although it’s hard to see now due to age and destruction, Trajan is sitting on his throne, with some of his advisors behind him, and standing in front of him is a woman who was originally holding a child, although the child has been broken off, and Trajan is extending out his hand and giving the woman and her child bread. This is to show his magnificence as through his generosity, and through the generosity of the kingdom of Rome, Trajan is making sure that this family does not starve to death.

When we talked about the petition that God’s Kingdom will come and God’s will will be done on earth as it is in heaven that that was a political statement. That in praying that petition that we are contrasting the kingdoms of this world, and for Jesus that was the kingdom of Rome, which is how they referred to themselves, against the Kingdom, or the reign of God. And we are called to see and understand how far short the kingdoms of this world fall in comparison to how God desires the world to be. And so here we are seeing then a direct correlation. We pray to God, give us this day our daily bread, as part of God’s kingdom, and the Romans are portraying the emperor doing exactly the same thing

And so what Trajan is saying is that people should be looking to Rome in their time of need, and throwing themselves at the feet of the emperor for assistance, including for daily sustenance. Trust us, they are saying, you don’t need to go looking elsewhere and you certainly should not be pledging your allegiance elsewhere, for the kingdom of Rome is all you need. And to ask for assistance elsewhere, to be looking for the coming of another kingdom could be dangerous. And so praying something as simple as give us this day our daily bread is a direct tie to what comes before it of seeking God’s Kingdom to come, and is both a petition for assistance, but also a political and an economic statement about authority and power and whose kingdom will reign. Asking for bread is about a lot more complex than simply asking for bread. As I said last week, it is to place ourselves under God in humility and recognizing our utter dependence upon God for something as simple as our daily sustenance.

This becomes even more pronounced and evident when we move onto today’s petition which comes  directly out of the request for bread, because it because with the word and. Give us this day our daily bread AND forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors.  And so directly on the other side of the room from Trajan giving this woman and her child, or a child, bread, saving them from starvation, there is another image dealing with debt. Although this freeze is probably not located in its original position in the senate house, it pictures a number of people coming forward with a series of tablets and placing them on a platform, called the rostrum, which is to represent the emperor, just as he is elevated in the other carving. The tablets that the people are carrying are records of their debts, and there are placing them on the rostrum to be burned or destroyed. The emperor is eliminating their debts. And to make this even clearer, and more important for people, on the far left you can see a headless figure, that statue represents freedom from debt slavery.

Trajan is freeing people not only from their debts, but he is also freeing anyone who has been sold into slavery, or sold themselves into slavery in order to pay off debts. And so, again, Trajan is showing his magnificence in not just feeding people, giving them bread, but that he can also free them from debt slavery and even debt itself.  You go to the kingdom of Rome to do these things, as they are the ones with the power to do these things. And indeed it was not uncommon for kings in the ancient near east to occasionally eliminate people’s debt. We have records from Egypt of Ptolemy and Cleopatra, who was part of the Ptolemaic dynasty forgiving debts. Often this was often done in order to stimulate the economy, because what the governments understood is that if you want greater economic activity it’s better to put extra money in the pockets of the poor because they will spend it rather than into the hands of the rich, because they keep it. And if people’s debts were too great then the entire economy, the entire society suffered, and so out of their benevolence they would occasionally help by forgiving people’s debts. But this is something that only the emperor could do for everyone. Only the emperor had the power and the authority to forgive everyone their debts. And so I hope your beginning to see that these petitions are not just any petitions. Jesus didn’t just come up with these because they sounded good. These petitions are here not just because of their need and desire for good things, but because they are directly connected to seeking God’s reign in this world, not Rome’s reign.

And so although we now pray forgive us our trespasses, the original Greek, as we heard this morning in the passage, actually says forgive us our debts as we have also forgiven our debtors. There is a direct economic reality that is being conveyed in this prayer about literal economic debts. And Jesus is saying, don’t go to the political rulers of this world for bread or for economic release, debt release, go to God for these things and give these things to others. And so you may wonder why, if it says debts, we then pray trespasses. And some may remember last week that I said we don’t actually know what the Greek word is that is translated as daily in the petition for daily bread actually means, although we can make some guesses, but that we get daily from William Tyndale’s English translation of the Bible in 1526. He also translated trespasses, which then got added into the Book of Common Prayer for the Church of England in 1549, which is why many, but not all, Protestant churches use that phraseology.

And so while we have certainly understood this petition as being about trespasses or sin, let’s deal just for a moment with the economic side of this. And, again, we can see that its literal economics, and not just metaphorical debt as sin, although there is a transition to that, because of other events and also from scripture. After the Jewish revolt in the year 60, after the revolutionaries took control of the Temple in Jerusalem, one of the first things they did was to destroy all the records, all the clay tablets like in that freeze, of the debts that people owed to the Temple. They were freeing themselves of that debt, which could lead to slavery. A few weeks ago we heard the passage from Isaiah in which he says the Spirit of the Lord is upon him because he has been anointed to preach good news. And to whom is that proclamation being made? To the poor. And at the end of that immediate proclamation it says he is proclaiming the year of the Lord’s favor, which Jesus also quotes, which is the year of jubilee. And what happens in the year of jubilee? All slaves, debt slaves and others, are set free, all debts are forgiven, which is supposed to have happened every seven years as well, and everyone is returned back to their own land, which often had to be sold off in order to pay off debt. It stopped the cycle of generational poverty, and stopped the pattern of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. It was the reign of God, the will of God, writ large. And all of this was also a part of what it means to practice Sabbath. And so forgiveness of debt, economic debts, has to be understood as a part of this prayer.

But what are the economic debts that we owe to God that we are asking God to forgive, to wipe off of our credit sheet? While I could say a lot more, for the simplicity of time, we are supposed to believe that everything belongs to God, that we are mere stewards of the resources with which God has entrusted to us. Scripture says a lot about that, and Jesus tells us that we are to render unto God the things that are God’s. But how much do we really do that? How much do we withhold from God? Are we truly as generous with God and with others as we are supposed to be? I’ll just leave that question hanging out there.

But before we get too uncomfortable, there is also the sense of being more than just economic forgiveness. In Luke, his version starts out with sin and then moves to debt, saying “Forgive us our sins, as we forgive everyone indebted to us.” That’s sort of the opposite of what Matthew does of moving from debt to general forgiveness and then to sin. And so while Matthew has an economic message in the prayer, it’s also clear that forgiveness is also much broader than that since what comes immediately after the end of the prayer in Matthew is that teaching that we must forgive others in order to be forgiven by God. And so the question then becomes is forgiveness then sort of a quid pro quo, if we do this then God does that? Or, more directly, is our forgiveness tied to forgiving so that God is dependent upon us? Dependent upon our actions? And the answer is a wishy-washy yes and no. God’s forgiveness is definitely not dependent upon us and God’s forgiveness is definitely dependent upon us, and here is what I mean by that.

The first is that Matthew uses a verb tense that we simply don’t have in English, but putting it in the past tense works, and so it says “forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven…” We are not saying we will give forgiveness only if God gives it to us first. The request is in the past tense, we are asking for forgiveness because we have already been giving forgiveness. God forgives because we are forgiving. And why are we forgiving? Because that’s what we have been commanded to do. It sort of starts with Jesus telling us to treat others as we want to be treated, which means, as we are asking, if we want to be forgiven, if we want to be treated with forgiveness, then we have to forgive. Our as James says, if we want to be judged with mercy by God then we have to give and judge others with mercy. And so our forgiveness comes naturally out of our discipleship, it comes out of the fact that we have already received forgiveness from God through Christ. And so if we are not practice forgiveness then we are not living as heirs of the kingdom. We are not seeking to do God’s will on earth as it is in heaven. Or as we hear in the first letter of John, after being told that God not only acts in love, but that God is love itself, John then says “We love because he first loved us. Those who say, ‘I love God’, and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen.” (1 John 4:19-20) We love because God first loved us, and if we cannot or do not love, then that means we have not truly accepted God’s love in the first place. And so it is with forgiveness. If we do not practice forgiveness, if we do not live in forgiveness, then it means that we have not fully accepted God’s forgiveness, which, as NT Wright notes, is to deny the very basis of our existence as Christians.

But let’s not pretend that forgiveness is easy, because it’s not. In fact, wanting to seek retribution is ingrained into us through the evolutionary process. And yet, forgiveness is also ingrained into us through the evolutionary process because we have to be able to forgive, both the small things and the big things, to live in community. In fact, acts of forgiveness, conciliation and reconciliation have been found in every animal species in which it has been studied, and the one that didn’t, as some of you might guess, is the house cat. And today we’re not going to talk about ways to forgive, as we’ll do a worship series on forgiveness sometime in the next year, but I want to give two different definitions of forgiveness. The first, is a simpler one, and says that “forgiveness is the act of setting someone free from an obligation to you that is a result of a wrong done against you.”  But then I proposed a second definition that is a little more expansive, and comes from philosopher Joanna North, who said “When unjustly hurt by another, we forgive when we overcome the resentment toward the offender, not by denying our right to the resentment, but instead by trying to offer the wrongdoer compassion, benevolence and love.” 

After the shooting at Mother Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston in 2015 by a white nationalist, at the arraignment of the shooter, the daughter of one of the victims, said to him “You took something precious from me. I will never talk to my mother ever again. I will never be able to hold her again. But I forgive you.” And I’m willing to bet that she learned that forgiveness at the knee of her mother. Another teenage child of a victim told the BBC “We already forgive him for what he’s done, and there’s nothing but love from our side of the family. Love is stronger than hate.” And that’s what forgiveness is about, it’s about love. And on this day in which celebrate the love of mothers, birth mothers and spiritual mothers, those who teach us how to forgive, those who teach us how to love, not through their words, but by their actions, it seems appropriate to name that forgiveness and love. Because let’s be honest, it’s hard to be a parent, you have to be able to forgive or you couldn’t make it through, and mothers, perhaps do that better than anyone else. And let’s also say that being able to forgive someone who committed a terrible act of violence and hate against someone you love, doesn’t just happen. That only takes place because they had been living in love and forgiveness every day of their lives before that event took place.

We love because God first loved us, and Jesus says that we are to love the lord our God with all that we are and to love our neighbor as ourselves. That’s what we talked about of how we are to hallow God’s name, and so the Lord’s Prayer then takes that a step forward and says that we forgive because God has first forgiven us, and we ask for God’s forgiveness because we have already been forgiving others because that is who we are called to be. and we are called to pray for that forgiveness every single day just as we are to give that forgiveness every single day, and that forgiveness is economic, and its political and its physical and its spiritual and it connects us and binds us with God and with each other in an ever entangling web of forgiveness. Because we are called to clothe ourselves in love and compassion, in kindness and humility, in meekness and patience, and when we do that then forgiveness becomes a part of who we are and how we live, our forgiveness flows from God to others so that we will indeed come to be known as disciples of Christ because of the love, because of the forgiveness, that we show to the world. I pray that it will be so my brothers and sisters. Amen.