Lord’s Prayer 3
Forgive us our sins as we forgive others
Which came first, the chicken or the egg? People have been debating that question for years and as far as I know, they have still failed to come up with an answer to it. Fortunately, as we look at the subject of forgiveness today, we are not going to have a similar problem. It is true that the words in the Lord’s Prayer say, “forgive us our sin as we forgive those who sin against us”, but again, as far as I know, nobody has suggested that forgiveness begins with us; the first act of forgiveness must always be God’s.
We love because God first loved us and in the same way, we can forgive because God forgives us. This forgiveness is central to the very character of God, if it was not, we would not be able to have any relationship with Him, and we would not be able to come together into His presence this morning, and we would certainly not have even begun to be able to forgive others.
However, our forgiveness of others and God’s forgiveness of us are linked together very closely. A biography of Lord Longford reads:
“When he was castigated, and often ridiculed by fellow Christians, for bearing the cross of Jesus when he publicly forgave Myra Hyndley, serial killers Peter Sutcliffe, David Neilsen, and any other that had committed horrendous crimes, these sadly misguided critics chose to forget that as a Christian Lord Longford had no alternative but to forgive.
Any Christian that is unable to forgive is not a true disciple of Jesus Christ. A committed follower of Jesus does not have the privilege to pick and choose, he is obliged to seek the good in everybody regardless of the extent of the sin that a person may have committed.”
We heard the same from the lips of Jesus himself in Matthew’s gospel this morning. After Jesus had told his listeners how the unmerciful servant was called back in and “turned over to the jailors to be tortured, until he should pay back all he owed”, he went on to say “This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother from your heart”. Do we really believe these words today? Do we realise that if we are not prepared to forgive others, the slightest thing we do wrong after that will be not be forgiven until we are prepared to do so.
And on this weekend in particular, only a few weeks after the murders of Holly and Jessica, a year on from the murder of thousands in the twin towers, and as politicians around the world talk about killing the leader of a different country because of his sins, it is time we considered how seriously we do take these words.
The problem is that forgiveness is an act that is totally against the human nature. If somebody hurts us, then for the majority of us, our first, and for some, only, reaction is to hurt them back. Sigmund Freud explained this perfectly when he wrote of forgiveness: “One must forgive one’s enemies, but not before they have been hanged.” The Readers Digest had a story some time ago about the riots that followed the trial of Rodney King in the United States; Reginald Denny was dragged from his truck and viciously beaten by a gang. After a painful recovery, he met his attackers, shook hands with them and forgave them for what they did to him. A reporter who witnessed this scene wrote, “It is said that Mr Denny is suffering from brain damage.”
This is how many non-Christians view forgiveness. It is not something that should be done or even thought of. There is something wrong with you if you do not hit back harder at those who hurt you.
Yet as Christians, we are commanded to forgive, and warned that if we do not, then we will not be forgiven. Sadly, it is a command that we are not very willing to obey. I heard about a lady several years ago that had arranged to have lunch with a close friend. She turned up for lunch at the right time and the right place but her friend never showed up even though she waited for almost an hour. When this lady got back home, she phoned her friend and discovered that she had forgotten all about the lunch arrangement and for the next five years they never talked again. This lady left the church she belonged to and moved to a different one because she refused to even sit in the same building with her friend or should I say ex-friend.
Not only that, but every time she arranged to meet someone for coffee after that, she would phone him or her a week before the meeting and say ‘you haven’t forgotten’. Then she would phone them a couple of days before and say the same thing. Then she would phone them on the morning of the day. Then she would phone them just before the time she thought they should be leaving to go to the meeting. It eventually got to the stage where people were reluctant to arrange to meet her because they did not want to be treated like this. I don’t know what happened to this lady. For all I know she could be doing the same thing now, all because she is not willing to obey God’s command to forgive.
Perhaps that is why God has shown that there are other good reasons why we must forgive. One such reason is that if are not willing to forgive someone who has hurt us, the only other alternative we have is to hate them. And if you remember John’s words in his first letter, “Anyone who claims to be in the light but hates his brother is still in the darkness. Whoever loves his brother lives in the light, and there is nothing in him to make him stumble. But whoever hates his brother is in the darkness and walks around in the darkness; he does not know where he is going, because the darkness has blinded him.” I am sure it is no coincidence that John follows those words by writing “I write to you, dear children, because your sins have been forgiven on account of his name.” Love, hate and forgiveness will always be words that are bound together. We cannot love our enemies unless we forgive them, and if we don’t forgive them, we leave ourselves with no choice but to hate them. There are no other options.
Another reason why we should forgive is that it is good for our own physical, mental and spiritual health to do so, even if it is an unnatural act. I read the following story in a sermon given by Rev. Mary Graves: Marietta Jaeger is a Christian woman who learned to forgive the brutal murderer of her own daughter. Her seventeen-year-old daughter was kidnapped and for over a year, she had no idea where she was. Later she learned that she had been assaulted and killed. Yet, Marietta, over time, and with the help of a priest from Yugoslavia who had survived the horrors of WW2, forgave the murderer. She told her pastor “Unforgiveness undoes us. God is the best psychiatrist going. The only way we are ever going to be whole and healthy is when we know how to forgive.”
If we refuse to forgive others, the only person who is hurt by that refusal is ourselves. Take the recent Holly and Jessica murders for example. For their parents, it is likely to be a considerable time before they can forgive whoever committed the act. But for the rest of us, we need to offer that forgiveness now. If we don’t we will be allowing things like anger, hatred, and fear to have a permanent place in our lives. And the only person damaged by this is us. It is going to make absolutely no difference to the person who committed the murders, unless they eventually do come before God and confess and repent of what they have done, but it makes every difference in our own lives.
We must be a people who forgive because we are commanded to, because it is for our own good to do so, and as I said at the start, because we have been forgiven. The importance of this in our own lives cannot be stressed enough. In fact, we see how important it is by the way that Satan continually tries to stop Christians and others forgiving. There have been so many ideas or suggestions put around that try to make the act of forgiveness less than what it is. “I will forgive, but I will never forget”, “I will forgive, but I never want to see them again”. These two are ideas that the world’s beliefs say can be done as we forgive others, and sadly, many Christians go along with this wisdom.
We only need to see how God treats our sins after He has forgiven us to see this: “The LORD is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love. He will not always accuse, nor will he harbour his anger forever; he does not treat us as our sins deserve or repay us according to our iniquities. For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his love for those who fear him; as far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us.”
When we remember that verse, so many of the world’s ideas on forgiveness are obviously wrong. God’s forgiveness does not involve remembering what we have done wrong, and neither should ours. I believe that there is a more insidious wrong teaching about forgiveness being taught currently however. This is that we only need to forgive when the person who has done wrong comes to us to confess and repent of what they have done. As far as I can tell, this teaching is based on passages such as last weeks lectionary lesson where Jesus tells us what to do if a Christian brother or sister sins against us: “If your brother sins against you, go and show him his fault, just between the two of you. If he listens to you, you have won your brother over. But if he will not listen, take one or two others along, so that ’every matter may be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses.’ If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if he refuses to listen even to the church, treat him as you would a pagan or a tax collector.”
Luke uses slightly different words to record this passage: “So watch yourselves. "If your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him. If he sins against you seven times in a day, and seven times comes back to you and says, ’I repent,’ forgive him.” Passages such as these seem to be there to teach us about confession and repentance in a specific situation rather than to be used to tell us how or why we are to forgive. Their purpose is to get us to do everything we can to get our brother or sister to confess and repent their sin and so that they do not loose their place amongst God’s people. For forgiveness though, we are called to forgive others in the same way that God forgives us, and how does He do that? Remember Christ’s cry from the cross just before he died: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”. That cry was given before anybody had repented.
You have probably heard it said that if you were the only person in the world, Christ would still have come to that cross and died for your sins. I would add to that and say that He would have done so even if you refused to repent of your sin. He would have done this because He loves you, and would give you every chance to be with Him.
We need to beware of any teaching that seems to make forgiveness easier, and this teaching does exactly that. It says that we don’t have to forgive until others come to us. In other words, it transfers the responsibility for forgiveness from us onto them. One of the hardest things we have to learn to do in our Christian lives is to forgive others. And it is right that this should be so. Look at what it cost Christ to forgive us, He gave up everything that was His by right, he went through agony to bring that forgiveness to us. It was no easy option for Him, and it should not be for us. We should always suspect anything that seems to make it easier or less costly.
Having said that, there is one big thing we can do to make forgiveness easier, and that is to make sure we do not have to forgive others as much. Think through the times when someone has hurt you in the past. For many of us, it is our pride and own ego that has been hurt and it is this that puts us in the position of having to offer forgiveness. For the lady who got upset when her friend did not arrive for coffee, the main reason she did so was because her ego had been bruised. “How could she forget to meet ME, doesn’t she think I am important?” You see this happening repeatedly in Churches, somebody suggests some sort of change to a meeting and the people involved take it as a personal insult. “Is he or she saying we have been doing things wrong”, and from there things grow until anger and bitterness take over.
If we do not allow our own pride and ego to get hurt like this, we will not need to forgive others as many times.
As Christians, we are commanded to forgive. Jesus told us to pray, “Forgive us our sins as we forgive others.” In today’s reading, we are warned “This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother from your heart.”
We may not be able to do this perfectly at first; it could even take our whole lives to learn how to do so. But we need to begin doing this daily, and it should definitely be something we practice before we leave home to come here on a Sunday. In the Sermon on the Mount, Christ told us “Therefore, if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there in front of the altar. First go and be reconciled to your brother; then come and offer your gift.” If there is anybody that we have not forgiven, we make it extremely difficult for God to bless us when we come into His presence here. As I said, we may not do this perfectly at first, but with God’s help, we will learn.
I want to finish by asking whether there is anybody at all who we need to say ‘I forgive you’ to. It could be a friend, or someone at work. It could be Saddam Hussein or some other world leader. If there is, I would ask that you join me in this prayer:
Father, you are the God who gave His Son to bring forgiveness to us. We ask you to forgive us for the times when we have been unwilling to give even a small amount of that forgiveness to others. Jesus, you have said that we cannot come into a place of worship without giving that forgiveness, and Lord, we want to worship you with all of our hearts. For this reason, if for no other, we release all those who have hurt us in the past. Holy Spirit, we ask that you bring them to that place where they can repent and come to know Christ as their Lord and Saviour. And now, Mighty God, Heavenly Father, as we continue to worship, may you be glorified in our midst.
Amen.
