Loading...Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. We all know this prayer. We say it together every Sunday. Some of you may say it daily. We may use the words debts or sins instead of trespasses but they all mean the same thing. My question today is, Have you really ever thought about what you’re saying when you read that sentence?
Forgive us our sins AS we forgive those who sin against us. Do you notice that it doesn’t say forgive us our sins as we SHOULD forgive those who sinned against us or forgive us our sins as you have told us to forgive others. It says Forgive us our sins AS we forgive those who have sinned against us. In others words we are asking God to “Forgive us in the same way we forgive others” OOPS! Are we asking God to model our behavior. Forgiving others is difficult and I imagine every one of us have someone that we have struggled to forgive or may have simply said “I can never forgive him/ her or them.”
Peter asked Jesus “How many times should I forgive? Now Peter knows what the Rabbis teach. They teach that the offended person should forgive three times. Peter, who, probably is feeling pretty good about him self now that Jesus has named him the rock and the foundation of the church, tries to prove to Jesus that he has been listening. That he has learned. He knows that Jesus expects more of his followers than the Rabbis. So he answers his own question by doubling the amount of the Rabbis and then adding one more for good measure. He says should I forgive seven times?”
It probably surprised Peter when Jesus’ answer was not seven times but seventy seven times. This amount is often translated as seventy times seven times. That’s 490 by the way, (I used to teach math and I love it when I can throw some math into a sermon) Jesus is not asking us to keep a tally of the number of times we forgive a person. He is saying that the number was not important that we shouldn’t even keep track of the number. We are to forgive a person as often as they are in need of being forgiven, no matter how many times it is.
To explain, Jesus tells the Parable of the Unforgiving Servant.
In the story, a servant owes the king ten thousand talents. Now, this is a crazy big number. One source I found explained it this way. A talent was the largest unit of money in New Testament times, equivalent to 6,000 denarii. A denarius was the equivalent of a day’s wages. The Greek language had no words for amounts larger than Ten thousand. When Jesus says “ten thousand talents,” he multiplies ( there’s that math again) the largest unit of money by the largest Greek number, and the result is an unimaginable amount, the equivalent of a working man’s wages for 60 million days or 200,000 years.
I said that was a crazy big number. Of course there is no way a slave can build up that amount of debt much less ever be able to pay it off and being thrown into prison would certainly not help pay it off. But the forgiving King in the parable forgives the debt.
Yet, when that same servant, who has just been forgiven a debt of a bazillion dollars, runs into a someone who owes him a hundred denarii, which is only a few dollars compared to his enormous debt, he does not forgive.
Jesus is telling us that when it comes to forgiveness, we are all like servants, we owe our Lord more than we can imagine. A crazy big amount. It is God who has been sinned against and yet it is God who offers us forgiveness. We will never be able to pay back all that we owe to God. But God forgives us anyway, completely over and over. And since God offers us forgiveness regardless of our offenses, we are expected to do the same. If the servant had been transformed by the grace and mercy of his king, he would have been sympathetic to his fellow servant who owed him money, He would have forgiven as he had been forgiven by the king.
When we think about how much God has forgiven us of our many sins without keeping a record, it should transform us to model God’s behavior and move us to forgive those who have sinned against us. If God continually shows us grace and mercy, shouldn’t we treat others with the same empathy and compassion?
Forgiveness doesn’t mean forgetting or pretending that the sin against us didn’t hurt. We may still get angry when people hurt us. Forgiveness does not mean that people should not be held accountable for criminal actions. Forgiveness does not mean that we should allow people to take advantage of us. Forgiveness does means that we aren’t spending our energy plotting, scheming, and punishing. It means not to let ourselves become spiritually ugly.
Jesus’ point is well made. God has forgiven each of us so much that we should forgive others. Some many claim that there are some people who cannot be forgiven because their actions were too horrific. We have just past the anniversary of 911. We all remember that day as we watched in horror the attacks on our country, killing thousands of people. Mass shootings in our country are tearing families and whole communities apart on a daily bases. Reading about the acts of terror that have taken place around the world, the killing fields in Cambodia, The Nazi death camps, the genocide in Rwanda, leaves us sick to our stomaches.
Are there some people who just can’t be forgiven? This may be hard to hear but I believe that Jesus and the scriptures say no to that question. There is no one that we should not forgive. We don’t forgive their behavior. And it is our responsibility to do all within our power to not let their actions continue or to ever occur again. But we are to forgive the person because even the people who commit those heinous crimes are children of God. It is God’s responsibility to judge God’s children.
Scripture teaches that we are not the judge, judgment is for God alone.
In the reading from Romans today, Paul says, “Why do you pass judgment on your brother or sister? For we will all stand before the judgment seat of God.” It is God’s job to judge not ours. These people that we find it hard to forgive will one day stand before God.
And scripture also says we are to forgive as we have been forgiven.
How do we each react when confronted with someone or a group of people that we find hard to forgive. Will we let our injuries fester into hate. Hate which will eventually harm us more than it harms the one who is hated. Hate that will destroy our joy and our ability to love.” Or will we ask God to help us to forgive.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu is known for his work in opposition to Apartheid and in helping to bring reconciliation to South Africa. He modeled forgiveness. He said “Forgiveness does not mean condoning what has been done. It means taking what happened seriously and not minimizing it; drawing out the sting in the memory that threatens to poison our entire existence. It involves trying to understand the perpetrators and so have empathy, to try to stand in their shoes and appreciate the sort of pressures and influences that might have conditioned them.” He said, “the only way to experience healing and peace is to forgive. Until we can forgive, we remain locked in our pain and locked out of the possibility of experiencing healing and freedom, locked out of the possibility of being at peace.”
Martin Luther King Jr., who being a black man must have modeled forgiveness many times over. He said, “We must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive. He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love. There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies.”
Forgiveness does not mean forgetting, and reconciliation is not always possible. Forgiveness means leaving judgement to God, letting God be the judge of God’s children, and continuing our lives with peace in our hearts. We model God’s behavior, by forgiving as many times as is needed over and over again because that is what God does. We forgive others because God forgives us.
