Forgive Us Our Debts

Forgive Us Our Debts (March 21, 2004)

[Fourth of five sermons on the Lord's Prayer, Scripture - Luke 15]

Fred Craddock, the New Testament scholar, tells of one Sunday morning he received a call from a rural church in Georgia wanting him to fill in for their minister. And would he mind teaching the Sunday School class. He agreed, then asked what they were studying and was told it was the Prodigal Son. What, he wondered, could he possibly say people hadn’t heard before.

On the way to the church he decided to change the story somewhat. He began the usual way: A young man asked his father for his portion of the inheritance, then left home for a far country where he wasted it in riotous living and ended up feeding the pigs. When he came to himself he decided to go back to his father and repent.

As he drew near to the farmhouse, Dr. Craddock went on, he heard the sound of merrymaking and feasting. He called one of the hired hands and asked him what was going on. “The old man got tired of waiting for you to come back so he is throwing a party for your brother who stayed with him,” he was told. Then, Dr. Craddock said, a woman called out in the back of the Sunday school class: “Hallelujah, that’s the way that story should have been told the first time!”

Indeed, we have grown so used to the story of the Prodigal Son we easily forget how much it went against the grain in Jesus’ day – and still does. It upsets our ideas of fairness and justice. But Jesus risks all those standards to say clearly that forgiveness lies at the heart of God.

Today we come to the fourth in our series on the Lord’s Prayer and the petition: Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.

Martin Luther called the Lord’s Prayer the greatest martyr on earth because it is so abused. Surely, it is abused in this petition. “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors,” people pray, and then go out and hold a grudge, or refuse to extend a hand in reconciliation – even to members of the church, or carry on a long-standing feud.

Jesus said: “For if you forgive others the wrongs they have done, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if you do not forgive others, then the wrongs you have done will not be forgiven by your Father.”

We should note this doesn’t mean we forgive in order to obtain God’s forgiveness. That is not the grace of the gospel. What it does mean is that if we are not of a forgiving spirit ourselves our hearts cannot be open to receive the forgiveness God offers.

Long standing feuds, some going back centuries, mark our world today. There are “Hatfields” and “McCoys” everywhere and they won’t speak to each other except to fight. Many of these feuds are religious, some within Christian groups, and they go on and on and on. There is not a section of the world which does not have this. It was rife in Jesus’ day in the feuds between Jews and Samaritans.

Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet not as a love story, which is the way it is often taught, but as a protest against walls that divide. There are Capulets and Montagues feuding everywhere.

Jesus had a different idea.

Forgiveness was a central word in Jesus’ teachings and in the early church. His practice of pronouncing forgiveness to people angered the Pharisees. Many of his parable were about forgiveness. The most famous is the Prodigal Son. Jesus talked about forgiveness so much that he was asked if there isn’t a limit, perhaps seven times? “Seventy times seven,” he replied.

Another parable was the unmerciful servant, who was forgiven his debt but refused to forgive the much smaller debt of his fellow servant. On the cross Jesus said “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do.” He also pronounced forgiveness to one of the thieves who had admitted he and his friend had been justly condemned.

It has been said that one of the thieves was forgiven so all may have hope, but not both, so that none may presume.

In the early Church the central meaning of the Cross was forgiveness. Somehow Christians knew that in Christ’s atoning death a terrible debt had been paid on their behalf and we were reconciled to God. Ancient crosses which Christians wore bore the Greek words “for the forgiveness of sins”. This was what it meant, not as a protective amulet or a good luck charm.

C. S. Lewis said that everyone thinks forgiveness is a good idea, until they have something really difficult to forgive.

How many people just love to go on through life nursing their grudges. They keep their grudges going the way you might keep a pot slightly simmering on the stove, and they nurse those grudges and pet them and pet them and pet them. This is not the way we were meant to live. God sent his Son to show us this and then to die to reconcile us to God and bring us forgiveness itself.

Because this is at the core of our faith it is always the greatest source of sorrow for ministers when they see folks in their churches unable to forgive, or couples unable to get along because neither has learned how to forgive the other, or people forever saying “I’ll forgive, if the other person does such and such first because that person started it.”

Jesus is saying that God is a lot like the playground teacher who sees a fight between two students. Right away as the teacher arrives the students each accuse the other of starting the fight. The experienced teacher knows that finding out who “started” something on the playground is a losing proposition and is usually irrelevant. The point is stopping it. The highest praise always goes to the first student who reaches out a hand to the other.

It’s not important who started it. It’s important who stops it.

Forgiveness does not mean there should be no justice. It is not saying that it doesn’t matter. Some think God should behave that way, just let bygones be bygones and forgive everything, like a kindly grandfather who at the end of the day thinks the only thing that matters is that everyone have a good time.

But Christian Faith describes God as a Father, not a kindly grandfather, and that means upholding justice as well as mercy. It is for this that Christ died. That he had to die shows the severity of human sin which is the cause of his death, but that he died to free us from the effects of sin shows the mercy of God who sent his Son to die that we might be reconciled to God.

One of the most dramatic displays of forgiveness was by Pope John Paul II when he visited in prison Mehmet Ali Agca, the Turkish man who shot him and publicly forgave him. The Pope did not ask the man to be freed, because that would violate justice, but he did want him to know personally that he forgave him.

Former President Jimmy Carter said that forgiveness was a “basic foundation” of his Christian faith. Carter was preparing to teach a Sunday School class on forgiveness and he began to think of the well known columnist George Will who had sneaked his debate notes to the Reagan camp and how much bitterness this had caused him.

So he went to a bookstore and bought a copy of George Will’s book on baseball, a remaindered copy for which he’d paid a dollar. He read it, liked it, and wrote him a note saying he hoped they would be reconciled. George Will wrote him back a nice humorous note, saying that his only regret was that the former President hadn’t paid full price for the book.

Perhaps you remember the story of a young man named Ben Sharpe who graduated first in his class in the eighth grade at a Christian school in Sacramento, California. He had nothing but A’s in his school record and was chosen to be the school valedictorian. But the day before graduation he was told by the principal he would not be allowed to give the speech. The reason: his hair was too short. The real reason was that his skin was too black. He was one of only a handful of African American students. Then Ben was told he was actually barred from his graduation.

The parents pleaded with school officials to relent, but they would not. At the graduation they didn’t even call his name at the graduation. This was a very conservative school and the dress code prohibited shaved heads, and that was very popular then. Much later, after it was too late, the pastor of the church which ran the school admitted that perhaps Ben’s punishment was a little harsh.

But his mother showed she understood the Christian faith even better. She admitted she felt betrayed, but she wasn’t bitter. “Not to forgive them would be inviting a cancer inside of me that I just refuse to allow to grow,” she said, “So I know I need to move on.”

Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.