The Rev'd David P. Sprunk
Assistant Priest, St. Peter's Anglican Church (FiF)
Jersey Village, Texas
March 21, 2007
Lenten Evensong 4: FORGIVENESS – DIVINE and HUMAN, (The Lord's Prayer – Fifth Petition)
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Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. (Mat.6:12) It has been well pointed out that the position of this petition in the Lord's Prayer is peculiarly appropriate. Forgiving follows immediately on the heels of giving. The previous petition asked God to give us our daily bread. This petition asks him to forgive us our sins. Jesus bade all men to pray the prayer without distinction. He did not say that this is the prayer which sinners ought to pray; he said that this is the prayer that all men ought to pray. Before a man can honestly pray this petition of the Lord's Prayer, he must realize that he needs to pray it. That is to say, before a man can pray this petition, he must have a sense of sin. Sin is not nowadays a popular word. Men and women rather resent being called, or treated as, great sinners. The trouble is that most people have a wrong conception of sin. They would readily agree that the burglar, the drunkard, the murderer, the adulterer, the foul-mouthed person is a sinner. But they are guilty of none of these sins; they live decent, ordinary, respectable lives, and have never even been in danger of appearing in court, or going to prison, or getting some notoriety in the newspapers. They therefore feel that sin has nothing to do with them. The New Testament uses five different Greek words for "sin". The first one means "a missing of the target" – a failure to be what we might have been and could have been. That is precisely the situation in which we are all involved. When we realize that sin means the failure to hit the target, the failure to be all that we might have been and could have been, then it is clear that every one of us is a sinner. The second word for "sin" means "a stepping across" – stepping across the line which is drawn between right and wrong. Do we always stay on the right side of the line which divides honesty and dishonesty? Do we always stay on the right side of the line which divides kindness and courtesy from selfishness and harshness? Is there never an unkind action or discourteous word in our lives? When we think of it in this way, there can be none who can claim always to have remained on the right side of the dividing line. The third word for "sin" means "a slipping across" – the kind of slip which a person might make on a slippery road. Again and again we speak of words slipping out; again and again we are swept away by some impulse or passion, which has momentarily gained control of us, and which has made us lose our self control. The best of us can slip into sin when for the moment we are off our guard. The fourth word for "sin" means "lawlessness" – the sin of one who knows the right, and who yet does the wrong; the sin of a person who knows the law, and who yet breaks the law. The first of all the human instincts is the instinct to do what we like. Even as there are some who can say that they have never broken any of the Ten Commandments, there are none who can say that they never wished to break any of them. The fifth word for "sin", which is the word used in this petition of the Lord's Prayer, means a "trespass" or a "debt" – a failure to pay that which is due, a failure in duty. There can be no one who can ever dare to claim that he has perfectly fulfilled his duty to man and to GOD. Such perfection does not exist among men. So, then, when we come to see what sin really is, we come to see that it is a universal disease in which every man is involved. Outward respectability in the sight of man, and inward sinfulness in the sight of God, may well do hand in hand. This, in fact, is a petition of the Lord's Prayer which every man needs to pray. Dare we pray this petition? Not only does a man need to realize that he needs to pray this petition of the Lord's Prayer; he also needs to realize what he is doing when he prays it. Of all the petitions in the Lord's Prayer, this is the most frightening. "Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." The petition asks God to forgive us as we forgive others. The literal meaning is: "Forgive us our sins in proportion, as we forgive those who have sinned against us." This can only mean that if we are unforgiving, if we pray this when we are in a state of bitterness towards a fellow man, we are deliberately asking God not to forgive us. It is a dreadful thought that a man should ask God not to forgive him, and yet that is precisely what the unforgiving man does when he prays this prayer. If we say, "I will never forgive so-and-so for what he or she has done to me," if we say, "I will never forget what so and so did to me," and then go and take the fifth petition of the Lord's Prayer on our lips, we are quite deliberately asking God not to forgive us. Human forgiveness and divine forgiveness are inextricably intertwined. Our forgiveness of our fellow men and God's forgiveness of us cannot be separated; they are interlinked and interdependent. If we remembered what we are doing when we take this petition on our lips, there would be times when we would not dare to pray it. When Robert Louis Stevenson lived in the South Sea Islands, he used to conduct family worship in the mornings every day for his household. It always concluded with the Lord's Prayer. One morning, in the middle of the Lord's Prayer, he rose from his knees and left the room. His health was always precarious, and his wife followed him, thinking that he was ill. "Is there anything wrong?" she asked. "Only this," said Stevenson, "I am not fit to pray the Lord's Prayer today." No one is fit to pray the Lord's Prayer so long as the unforgiving spirit holds sway within the heart. If a man has not put things right with his fellow-man, he cannot put things right with God. There is no evading the principle laid down in the Lord's Prayer – that we must forgive those who have wronged us, if we want our Heavenly Father to forgive us our sins. In addition to this petition of the Lord's Prayer, our Lord reiterated it on two other occasions. Two days after our Lord's triumphal entry into Jerusalem, on the day we celebrate as Palm Sunday, Jesus taught his disciples: "Whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against any one; so that your Father also who is in heaven may forgive you your trespasses. But if you do not forgive, neither will your Father who is in heaven forgive your trespasses" (Mark 11:25,26). Our Lord also has given us a practical example of the connection between our forgiving those who have wronged us so that we may be forgiven our sins. Jesus told the parable of the servant who was forgiven his debt – and who yet was unforgiving of someone who owed him money (Mat. 18:23-25). A king, in auditing his books, discovered an official who owed him a huge amount – what we would call millions of dollars. The official was hopelessly over his head in the matter of clearing himself with his king. Now this parable could be treated as a theoretical possibility in a rare instance. But I am convinced that Jesus meant it to be understood as the actual standing of every person in the presence of a holy God. As sinners, we are under the judgment of the throne, and there is no way by which we ourselves can satisfy the debt. The official broke out in a cold sweat. He saw his whole world going down. This was finally it. Since he couldn't pay, the king ordered the official's complete assets liquidated and his whole family sold into slavery. At that, the official found his voice. Falling to his knees, he begged, "Lord, have patience with me, and I will pay you everything." The last words were a ridiculous claim, but the king responded to the first words. Just as the official felt that the sky was falling down on him, compassion welled up in the king's heart. "Out of pity for him," the record reads, "the lord of that servant released him and forgave him the debt." What a deliverance! Within an inch of doom, he was saved. At the edge of the precipice, he was pulled back to safety. The sense of relief in his heart was indescribable. It was the greatest experience of his life. Multiply this joy by a million when it comes to experiencing the forgiveness of God. We have wronged Him more than we have wronged all other human beings combined, for the hurt we have caused others was an even deeper hurt for Him. The One we love most, we have hurt worst. After all that He has done for us, we have caused him indescribable pain. But wait! As we lie prostrate in repentance before Him, doom doesn't fall. Sweet pardon descends instead. God has swept our whole mess behind Him. Nothing at all stands against us. There's a rainbow around that throne of judgment. The rainbow of His mercy encircles the throne of His justice. It's like being snatched from before the firing squad at the last moment. The joy and relief we experience have no parallel on earth. But the parable takes a strange turn when the forgiven servant refused to forgive. The forgiven official went out on the street and happened to meet a fellow who owed him a few dollars. Without even being civil, he grabbed him by the throat and growled, "Pay what you owe." What followed looks like an instant replay of what the official himself did before the king. This fellow dropped to his knees and begged, "Have patience with me, and I will pay you." It's hard to believe what happened. The official didn't need the money. His king had written off his whole debt. Besides, the amount of money involved was only a mere fraction of what he had owed the king. The official made one bad mistake. He looked upon the forgiveness he had received from the king as one situation over there. He looked upon the forgiveness another man begged of him as another situation over here – and he didn't make any connection between the two. They were two entirely different worlds – miles apart. But you can't do this. When the angry king got the official back in his presence again, he explained, "I forgave you all that debt because you besought me. Should not you have had mercy on your fellow servant, as I had mercy on you?" The two situations are both part of a single whole. Never let them get separated. Handcuff them together. Each bears a direct relationship with the other. Jesus locked them together for all time when he taught us to pray, "Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us" (Mat. 6:12). Six words in Jesus' parable set the direction for the Christian in every relationship with others. God speaks them: "As I had mercy on you" (Mat. 18:33). Because we have received His mercy, we also are to be merciful. It is a fair question as to whether the official really received the king's forgiveness. He was offered it. The parable says that the king "released him and forgave him the debt" (Mat. 18:27). But the parable also says at the end that the king in anger "delivered him to the jailers, till he should pay all his debt" (Mat. 18:34). Did he still owe it – or didn't he? Was he forgiven – or wasn't he? It appears that he had not really accepted the forgiveness in his heart. It hadn't registered. Otherwise, how could he have treated the way he did the man who owed him a few dollars? Pardon had been offered by the king but not truly received; therefore, the debt still remained. The implication is that those who refuse to forgive another who has wronged them have not really themselves accepted the forgiveness which God has offered them. If we are to have this Christian forgiveness in our lives, three things are necessary:
To be forgiven we must forgive, and that is the condition of forgiveness which only the power of Christ can enable us to fulfill. In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen. |