Reflections on a Difficult Gospel Passage: Forgive Us Our Debts
By: Saundra L. Washington
Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. Matthew 6:12.
The petition of our Lord’s Prayer at first glance seem to intimate that the pardoning of our sins is predicated on our pardoning those who have sinned against us. Yet, we have the uneasy feeling that this certainly cannot be so. It is inconceivable that God would have a need to bargain with us.
Rather, it is less problematic if we understood this passage to mean that our forgiveness is a necessary condition of our ability to receive God’s forgiveness. If we allow egotism to envelop our hearts and minds with prideful thoughts that focus on the sins of others (which is most often the case), we thereby render ourselves incapable of recognizing our own sins and hence, completely block the forgiving mercy of God. Jesus directs our attention first to our own sins. This order is significant. After all, the faults we see in others are also in us in one form or another. The main point is, if we are willing and able to pardon our offenders, then we will also be able to receive God’s pardon.
Robert Stein concurs that the “as” in the petition should not be misconstrued to mean that God forgives us to the same degree that we forgive others. He points out that no believer praying this prayer is sinned against by others as greatly as he sins against God. Certainly this is true, but Barclay advocates a more liberal view.
According to William Barclay, this petition to mean that our sins are forgiven in proportion as we forgive those who have sinned against us. He maintains that if we pray this prayer with an unsettled quarrel in our lives, we are virtually asking God to not forgive us. “To be forgiven,” Barclay claims, “We must forgive and that is a condition for forgiveness which only the power of Christ can enable us to fulfill.”
Karl Barth, on the other hand, is disposed to reject Barclay’s idea that human forgiveness is a condition of God’s forgiveness. He treats this petition as a criterion necessary for our comprehending God’s forgiveness. Insisting that God’s pardon has already been granted even before we ask, Barth points out that the “hope one entertains for oneself necessarily opens the hart, the feeling, and the judgment, in respect to others.
It seems that Barth’s interpretation is, in fact, the reverse of mine. Whereas I maintain that the believer must be free of the spirit of un-forgiveness in order to be open to receive God’s pardon, Barth contends that when the pardon of God is received by the believer, it enables us to forgive. I think Barth makes a good point too when he indicates that the “pardon of God is something that occurs at the divine level and a comparison cannot be drawn with what happens on the human level.”
I would be egregiously remiss if I failed to include Stein’s raising the question of which comes first: believers forgiving others and as a result, God forgives them; or God forgives believers and as a result, believers forgive others; or is our forgiving contemporaneous with God’s forgiveness? These are relevant and crucial questions that must be given careful contemplation and examination.
Though all of our (and others) interpretations differ at several points, we seem to generally agree that forgiveness and forgiving are intrinsically connected. Pardon is inevitably linked both to God and to one’s fellow sinner.
Rev. Saundra L. Washington, D.D., is an ordained clergywoman, veteran social worker, and Founder of AMEN Ministries. She is also the author of two coffee table books: Room Beneath the Snow: Poems that Preach and Negative Disturbances: Homilies that Teach which can be reviewed on her site. Her new book, Out of Deep Waters: My Grief Management Workbook, though delayed in publication, is expected to be available early 2006.
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