We say it so often in the Lord’s Prayer and it’s so central to our Christian faith that we may sometimes not appreciate how strange an idea it is that our own forgiveness by God for our faults and failures should be dependent on our forgiving others who may have hurt or failed us.
Superficially and in a childlike scheme of morality it’s not strange at all; “Do as you would be done by”; treating others as you wish to be treated yourself necessarily entails us forgiving others if we expect them to forgive us. That may seem perfectly logical, and so it is on basic human level. It’s as natural as the reaction of the other servants in the parable; the servant whose huge debt has been written off behaves outrageously in human terms. Christianity, however, makes much deeper claims and consequently deeper demands when it’s forgiveness by God that is in issue.
The Gospel tells us that we have only to acknowledge our sin for God in his mercy to forgive it. It is enough genuinely to want forgiveness and trust in God’s power to grant it, for it to be given and for us to find salvation. The activity of Grace is beyond fairness and conventional morality; there is no question of payment or desert.
This is not, of course, to say that grace is always easily obtained; we can only be forgiven if we genuinely believe we have done wrong and the corollary any such genuine belief must always be remorse and guilt over the past and an earnest intention to do better in future. We are so used to avoiding blame and excusing our conduct that facing up to our own condition is difficult and painful; think how often we should say sorry to someone we have hurt and yet how difficult it is to do so and really mean it.
It may be hard but it’s not impossible and when we have said sorry to God, He will require nothing more to forgive us. But in that case it’s strange that we pray that we may be forgiven as we forgive those who have hurt us. That “as” means “if” and it sounds like conditional forgiveness, not Grace.
It is only a paradox, I suggest, because we are misunderstanding the nature of Christian forgiveness.
Like the fellow servants in the parable we feel outraged when someone to whom mercy has been shown, conspicuously fails to be merciful to others. This is in part, as I suggested earlier, because an innate logic is offended, but also I think because we have difficulty in thinking of sin in other than transactional terms. In the parable which is obviously talking about sin, Jesus uses the metaphor of debt, a legal obligation which wouldn’t necessarily be a moral obligation. Until the 15th Century in this country when we said the Lord’s Prayer- in Latin, of course,- we would have asked to have our debts remitted as we remitted those owed to us. Replacing debt with Trespass at the Reformation retains the legal feel; a trespass is an infringement of another’s rights, usually property rights. Like debt, it’s a concept that overlaps with sin, but falls far short of meaning the same. Sin is an offence against divine law which is by definition not based on human contracts or rights established to regulate society.
The reason for this difficulty in talking about sin may lie in the Old Testament books of the Law; many of the regulations contained in the Law are about preventing disputes getting out of hand; “An eye for an eye”, for example sounds harsh, but is a great deal better than taking life for a blinding (which might have been accidental) “Vengeance is mine, says the Lord”- that is we should leave retribution to God, not take it ourselves.
More importantly, however, the Old Testament writers developed a concept of the perfect society, located in the Promised Land, based on a harmony between God’s will and human behaviour. It is this “At Oneness” or atonement that should be at the heart of forgiveness. If sin is the opposition to God’s will, forgiveness is the restoration of that harmony. This is surely the point of the touching final scenes of Joseph’s life, at the end of Genesis.
Jesus’ teaching and more, his life, death and resurrection add another dimension to atonement; Jesus shows us that we are not only at one with God but that full atonement implies that we have the potential take on some, however few and small, of the attributes of God; like God we can forgive others and we will only fulfil our divine potential, if indeed we do become like God in forgiving others who sin against us. In this way it is perfectly logical to see forgiving others as a necessity if we are to achieve forgiveness, and even partial atonement and human fulfilment.
All this may seem rather remote and theoretical, but I think it has practical and urgent implications for us. We are a society obsessed with retribution, or to put it more bluntly, vengeance. Calling for ever harsher penalties and longer sentences appeals to our lowest natures and will sell newspapers and may win elections. We have one of the highest prison populations, but we are far from being the least criminal society; it is obvious, that British prison is the opposite of rehabilitation and that harsher sentences do not deter.
Nor I believe do they satisfy the thirst for revenge, because that is an unquenchable thirst that leads only to further suffering. It is not easy to tell a victim of a crime that forgiveness is the only way of achieving peace and healing. Telling the mother of a murdered baby that atonement is the way forward is not likely to succeed, but pandering to desire for vengeance, as in requiring criminals to attend their sentencing will not help. Piling hurt on hurt will never heal wounds. As Christians we can, however, try to resist the trend to encourage the desire for retribution. It will not make us popular, but living and spreading the Gospel never did. Amen.