C 08 - Forgive Us Our Debts

. Forgive Us Our Debts

We are in default in our relations with God; we owe him a debt which we have not paid, and if we are unable to pay we continue to be defaulters; if one fails to meet one’s obligations, one is in default. One may be righteous, but nevertheless one is guilty. The result is that we offend the person in relation to whom we are at fault.

We are debtors to God; we owe him not any special thing, whether it be little or much, but quite simply ourselves, all we are, creatures sustained and nourished by his goodness. We, his children, called by his word to serve and glorify him, brothers of the man Jesus Christ, we fall short of what we owe to God. What we are and what we do bear no relation to what we have been given. We are his children and we are unable to recognize the fact. Calvin writes : ’Whosoever will not confess that we offend God like debtors who do not pay, shuts himself out from Christianity.’ And Luther : ’Before God everyone is forced to lower his plumes.’ Thus Christianity recognizes this state of things, but we are powerless to put it right. Even while, in response to his invitation, we are trying to obey and do what he requires of us, we allow our own ideas, our own leanings, our morality and religion to intrude, and we are continually obliged to recognize afresh that we are not worthy to serve him; and when we look at ourselves we know that we are without hope before him. For even while we are living as Christians we are increasing our debt to him and making our desperate situation worse from day to day. And I think that as one grows older one realizes more and more the hopelessness of our position. Things go from bad to worse. We meet a rebuff at the very beginning of the Lord’s Prayer where we are faced with this question : How have we the effrontery to draw near to God? We are zealous for his cause and straightway lay our own needs before him; who are we to claim to be God’s fellow-workers? and then to say to him Attend to me, to us! Give us! We who have offended against him ! Again everything seems to be called in question.

What does forgive mean? Ideally it means to regard one’s debtor as having done one no wrong, not to impute his fault to him, or hold his guilt against him, though he himself is aware of it and recognizes it. It means to let him start again with a clean sheet, to give him another chance. Forgive us! This petition excludes any sort of claim on our part, it denies us any right, even the slightest, to demand anything whatever from God. Neither man’s fault nor man himself as defaulter can be excused; man is unforgivable. He has no right to claim the remission of his debt. The right to restore the guilty to their place as children of God belongs solely to him whom we have wronged; it is the right of the creditor or the sovereign, of that King to whom we have been disloyal, in whose service we have been, and always are, defaulters; that right can only pertain to the free mercy of God. We ask of God, then, that he will be pleased to use on our behalf that right which lies in his grace. We can trust in him. But unless we renounce completely any right whatever on our part, we shall not know how to pray as is fitting. As we also forgive those who have offended against us. Is this a sort of preliminary condition which we lay down for ourselves in order to obtain forgiveness from God? No, it is rather a necessary criterion by which we may understand God’s forgiveness. For anyone who knows that he is handed over to the mercy of God, that he cannot live without Divine forgiveness, anyone who has lived through such an experience, cannot do otherwise than forgive those who have offended against him (we are all offenders, we are all debtors one to another all the time). And even if the debts of our debtors seem very large, they are always infinitely less than those we owe to God. How can we hope for God’s forgiveness, we whose debts are so great, if we are not willing to do this small thing-forgiving those who have offended against us? Having such a hope for oneself must surely open one’s heart and soften one’s feelings and one’s judgment in regard to others. There is no merit, no moral effort or virtue in being able to forgive. How irritating those people are who, perpetually smiling, pursue you with their forgiveness !

Human forgiveness is a lovely thing and almost a physical necessity. In the light of the Divine forgiveness, when we look on those poor souls who have offended against us, even the worst cases seem not very serious; let us not settle down and take pleasure in the offences which have been committed against us; let us preserve a sense of humour about them, and let us freely make this small gesture of forgiveness towards those others. There is no occasion to regard this as part of the Christian warrior’s moral armour; it is not a helmet or a sword which could endow us with courage and strength, but something which ought to be quite natural. Anyone who does not exercise this small amount of freedom is beyond the reach of Divine forgiveness; it might be said of him that he does not know how to pray and thus can receive nothing. This is no exhortation to go and forgive others, but a plain declaration that the Divine forgiveness received by a man makes him able to forgive. God’s forgiveness operates on the divine plane and cannot be compared with what happens on the human level; nevertheless it is necessary that this small matter of forgiving our debtors should be practised on the human level. How can I hope for something myself if I will not give even this to my neighbour? I cannot escape from the obligation of giving this small fragment I But by this action I shall not make myself worthy to receive God’s forgiveness I shall simply prove the sincerity of my hope and my prayer.

We must clearly understand the nature of God’s forgiveness; it is in no sense an uncertain hope or an ideal to be sought or imagined; it is a fact. Before I ask for it, God has already bestowed forgiveness. He who does not know this, prays to no purpose. Forgiveness is ours already; that is the reality by which we live. Our Father who art in heaven, truly thou hast forgiven our transgressions. Before I say to thee `Forgive me’, thou hast established and proclaimed thy right to pardon, the righteousness of thy mercy, thy right to overlook our faults and not to regard us as offenders. In the person of thy Son, thou, the holy and righteous God, hast changed places with us, perfidious and unrighteous men. Thou hast put thyself in our place so that order may be restored in our favour. Thou hast obeyed and suffered for us, thou hast destroyed our sin and the sins of all mankind. And this thou hast done once for all.

Thou hast annulled those sins which are with us from our birth to our death, and also those which we commit each day, every moment in one way or another; those sins which we know only too well, and others that we are not aware of, but which will be revealed one day when our account is made up. Then we shall see ourselves as thou seest us. Thou hast abolished all these trangressions and hast begotten a new man (a new ’us’ and a new ’me’), without sin, without transgression, a man who is pleasing to thee, righteous in thine eyes, pure and spotless and without reproach. Thou hast begotten this man and hast gathered us round him, round the cross of thy Son, so that we may be witnesses of our own judgment, because we must indeed enter into this judgment and this death which he has suffered in our stead to set us free.

Thou hast given us thy Holy Spirit so that this new man which thou hast created in Jesus Christ may live in us, and thy grace, revealed in him, may become ours. Because thou hast done this great work in thy Son and through thy Holy Spirit, we are not permitted to remain any longer in doubt and uncertainty and anxiety on account of our transgressions; henceforth our sins are thy concern, not ours. Thou dost forbid us to look backward, to feel ourselves crushed and, as it were, chained to our past or to what we are and do today or even tomorrow. The time for fixing our eyes always on our sins instead of on thee is past; thou hast cut us off from the past. In Jesus Christ thou hast made of me a new creature and dolt allow me, and command me, to look forward. Not that we are to make light of what we are and do, or what we have been and have done, nor are we to put our trust in what we shall be or do. On the contrary, we are to be always on our guard, knowing that we are being and shall be judged, but also trusting in thee and in what thou hast done, in the judgment thou hast pronounced and the death thou hast suffered for our sakes. This is something which has been completed. But this action, already completed, has secured for us a future, and we have only to walk on the path which lies open before us. Thy forgiveness has made us free to take that path.

We must, however, thoroughly understand that we cannot in all seriousness speak to God in this way or receive his forgiveness without praying `Forgive us our debts’. Now it is for us to move towards that perfectt future; it is for us to believe and to make effective the new beginning inaugurated by the death of Jesus Christ. May we now live our life as it really is, that is to say, united with his, taking the place that he has given us, the place where we really are, where he suffered and obeyed and lived for us. May we put on that new man begotten by God in Christ; may we cease to live heedlessly, and live henceforth in the reality of what God has done for us; may we not withstand the Holy Spirit when he assures us that we are thy children, not on account of our merits but because of thy free pardon, because thou hast conquered sin the flesh and hast exalted thy poor creatures as high as the heavens. May thy forgiveness sanctify us more and more, in spite of what we have been and still are and will be. We know that we shall be sanctified with the holiness that is thine, and that it will triumph over our wretchedness and all our impurities. Oh may thy forgiveness sanctify us for that day when, at the second coming of thy Son, thou wilt reveal to us for the last time, in the light of thy presence, all our shortcomings, our depravity, our transgressions, and everything we have concealed! But, much more than this, thou wilt reveal thy right to pardon, the righteousness of thy mercy which has prevailed over our wretchedness. Forgive us; grant us today, and through the days to come, which your long-suffering may allow us, to live in the liberty of the pardon thou hast given.

Indeed, we have reason to pray ! And if we consider the forgiveness we are bound to extend to others, how much more keenly shall we feel the need to pray. For if we refuse to make this gesture we are far from having apprehended the Divine forgiveness.

Thus, in this fifth petition, we confess our bankruptcy, and anyone who is unwilling to do so, must give up asking God to forgive him. We must recognize that our own cause is lost, but if we do, it will become victorious for us, for then it rests in the hands of him who has forgiven and still forgives.