Matthew 5:12, Ash Wednesday Meditation

Good Shepherd Lutheran Church
State College, PA


A few years ago I was talking to a woman on my case load about her financial situation and she informed me that she owed more than $27,000 in fines. She didn't have a job, and her sole income was from Social Security Disability, which was less than $1,000 per month. During the time I worked with her, she wasn't paying anything toward her fines; all the money she received each month was needed to pay for her housing and food. She told me, more than once, that she knew she'd spend the rest of her life in debt, that there was no possibility of paying off her fines.

The Lord's Prayer assumes that we are always in debt because of our wrongdoing. Although we usually pray "forgive us our trespasses," "forgive us our debts" is the correct translation of this passage. It's OK to pray the prayer as we do, but when we come to this verse in Matthew we need to translate it as "debts." Our sins have put us in a position where we are in debt to God, a debt we can never repay from our own resources. But this prayer also assumes that others are in need or our forgiveness. Pope Benedict, in the first volume of his series Jesus of Nazareth, says that this petition "presupposes a world in which there is trespass" (p. 157), a world in which we commit sins against God and against one another, a world in which debts because of wrongdoing are part of daily life.

A friend of mine who grew up in a very conservative church felt guilty for growing a beard, and periodically, when the guilt became too much for him, he would shave it off. Often we feel guilty for no good reason. But our basic guilt before God is an objective reality whether we feel guilty or not. We have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, and are in need of God's mercy and forgiveness. We stand before God in the position of debtors, people who are guilty of violating His law. And we are also guilty of sins against one another; we need to receive forgiveness from others and others need to receive forgiveness from us. We live in a world "in which there is trespass," against God and against one another.

But this prayer also assumes that God is concerned about our guilt and wants to forgive us. Not only us, He also wants to forgive some of the people we might wish He wouldn't forgive, like those who have betrayed us, or those who have brought suffering into our lives. Or those with whom we disagree politically. Or those who have set themselves up as our enemies in the workplace. No matter how serious and inexcusable our guilt, God's desire is to offer forgiveness and admit us into His kingdom.

And the third, and most distressing, thing this prayer tells us is that God wants us to imitate Him in offering forgiveness to others. Sometimes this is relatively easy, but often forgiving others is a process. If someone has deeply wronged us we probably won't be able to forgive all at once. If we try to offer forgiveness too quickly and lightly, we may end up deceiving ourselves and accepting a counterfeit, something that looks like the real thing but isn't.. The question is how to get from where we are to where we know we should be. And this begins with a recognition of the truth about ourselves. If we're angry and bitter, if we just can't let go of the wrong, we need to begin by admitting this in God's presence. The Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann suggests that making use of the Vengeance Psalms, these Psalms that Christians often struggle with because of their anger and violence, can, surprisingly, be the first step toward learning forgiveness: "The articulation of vengeance leads us to a new awareness about ourselves.… John Calvin describes the Psalms as ‘An Anatomy of all Parts of the Soul.' And so they are. They tell us about us. The Psalms provide space for full linguistic freedom in which nothing is censored or precluded" (Walter Brueggemann, Praying the Psalms, p. 58). He suggests that instead or censoring these Psalms we bring them into God's presence and admit that they reflect the truth about how we feel.

Praying the Psalms, including those psalms where the authors are crying out for vengeance, provides a context for facing the truth about what is in our hearts. As much as we want to be like Jesus in asking forgiveness for those who hate us, we can't get there without acknowledging what we really feel. Eugene Peterson, the author of The Message, says the same thing; praying these difficult Psalms can actually point us in the direction of forgiveness: "For those who are troubled about the psalms of vengeance, there is a way beyond them. But that way is not easy or ‘natural.' It is not the way of careless religious goodwill. It is not the way of moral indifference or flippancy. It is, rather, the way of crucifixion, of accepting the rage and grief and terror of evil in ourselves in order to be liberated for compassion toward others.... My hunch is that there is a way beyond the psalms of vengeance, but it is a way through them and not around them. And that is so because of what in fact goes on with us. Willy nilly, we are vengeful creatures. Thus these harsh psalms must be fully embraced as our own. Our rage and indignation must be fully owned and fully expressed. Then (and only then) can our rage and indignation be yielded to the mercy of God. In taking this route through the Psalms, we take the route God has gone. We are not permitted a cheaper, easier, more ‘enlightened' way" (Answering God: The Psalms as Tools for Prayer, p. 68). We bring our unforgiving thoughts into God's presence and allow Him to heal us, to enable us to forgive as He does.

But we need to ask one more question. When we pray "forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors," does this imply that God only forgives us to the extent that we forgive others? We really don't know fully what is in our hearts. We may think that we've forgiven someone, only to find anger and resentment welling up that we didn't know was there. If we say that we are forgiven only to the extent that we fully and completely forgive others, we're essentially saying that we can't be forgiven; we're setting an impossible standard. In this case, we're not justified by faith through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ; we're forgiven by exercising forgiveness. Our forgiveness of others becomes the primary thing, the condition upon which God forgives us. But really the movement goes in the opposite direction. God forgives us fully and freely, and then we are called to forgive others in the same way. If we refuse to forgive we're showing that we haven't truly understood what it means for God to forgive our sins.

But struggling, and often failing, to forgive those who have wronged us is not the same thing as refusing to forgive. We're called to cultivate forgiveness, to cry out to God for grace to forgive, to take steps in the direction of forgiving from our hearts those who've wronged us; but our forgiveness at its best is an imperfect imitation of the forgiveness that God has granted us. Here's how Paul says it in Colossians: "Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other, just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive" (3:13). The Gospel of Jesus Christ first brings healing to our relationship with God, but then it also begins healing our relationships with one another. And this begins when we show others mercy because God has shown us mercy.

The truth about us, as fallen human beings, is that we are debtors and can never, even if we had all eternity to do it, pay off our debt. Paul says that by nature we have "no hope and [are] without God in the world" (Ephesians 2:12). Our condition, as fallen human beings, is absolutely hopeless; but Paul continues after this with one of his great phrases: "But now…." This was once true of you, but now everything has changed because of God's mercy and grace. "But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ" (Ephesians 2:13). We can pray these words from the Lord's Prayer in confidence because Jesus has paid in full the debt for our sins, a debt that we were incapable of ever paying. The Christian music group, Glad, has a wonderful song about this: "Be ye glad, oh, be ye glad, every debt that you ever had has been paid up in full by the grace of the Lord, be ye glad be ye glad be ye glad." Every debt has been paid up in full by the grace of the Lord. Surely this is a reason for gladness. John Newton, that notorious slave trader who experienced God's mercy, said near the end of his life, "Although my memory's fading, I remember two things very clearly: I am a great sinner and Christ is a great Savior." It would be a good thing, during this Lenten season, to meditate on the price Jesus paid to relieve us of our overwhelming debt; the more aware we are of God's mercy toward us, the better-able we will be to show mercy toward one another.