Forgive

We are all about grace, we Christians. I mean, we love it. "You got to be good to get to heaven!" Nope. We have grace. "You have to live right!" Nope! We have grace. "What must I do to be saved?" Believe and receive God's grace. It's glorious. We are not saved by works; we are saved by grace. And we love it. So when we get to this little passage, we have a problem.

For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses. (Matt 6:14-15)

That little "for" at the beginning is aimed at the previous part of the Lord's Prayer where Jesus prayed, "Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors" (Matt 6:12). "Let me explain," Jesus says. "If you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses." That really trips us up. Some argue it is "stunting your growth" if you don't forgive, but that's not what Jesus said, is it? What did He say? Is He contradicting the rest of Scripture?

The word there for "forgive" is ἀφίημι -- aphiēmi. We translate it as "forgive," but it is literally an intensified form of "to send." It speaks, then, of letting go, sending away, giving up, abandoning something. As is the case with so much "Christianese," we understand "forgive" to mean "absolved of sin" when it isn't always so. In "Christianese" "saved" always means "saved from sin" even though it doesn't and "justified" always means "made right with God" even though it doesn't and so on. Forgiveness is one of those terms. Forgiveness can and often does mean the ultimate "removal of sin," but it can also mean to set something aside. In this case, Jesus spoke of setting aside sins. If we don't set aside the sins of others, God is not going to be able to just move on with our sins; He's going to have to deal with us about them. Jesus bore our final payment, but Scripture says that the Father chastises those He loves (Heb 12:6), so this would be the sort of context of this text. We don't face damnation; we do face discipline ... even chastisement -- a temporal response from God for a temporal problem at hand ... the failure to forgive.

So how do we do that? I know a woman who lost much family in the Nazi concentration camps. "I will never forgive them," she told me. I don't understand that to be a sure indication that she isn't saved. I do believe that the best she can expect is ongoing discipline from God. Because he (or she) who is forgiven little loves little (Luke 7:47), and none of us are forgiven little. So how would she forgive? I mean, we're talking about Hitlerian kind of evil.

I see it this way. I am commanded to "love your neighbor as yourself" (Matt 22:39). Jesus concludes from that they we must "Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you" (Matt 5:43). There is a correlation between loving my neighbor and forgiving my neighbor, including my enemy neighbor. And the lesson is in the "as yourself." You see, I routinely see myself as my own worst enemy. I often don't like myself very much. I am very much aware that I can be evil. And you know what? I still love myself. We all do (Eph 5:29). So what do I do? I correct myself and I discipline myself and I repent and turn (repeatedly) because I love myself. I seek my very best ... which, in the case of sin, is correction and salvation.

In the same way, we can forgive others. We can seek their very best without approving of the evil they've done or even ignoring it. It doesn't take a super genius to realize that ignoring evil is not good for people. We just set aside the personal malice, the desire for vengeance, the "self" that is, in all these cases, the obstacle to forgiveness and seek their best. We show them the same love we have for ourselves. Because in our case to fail to forgive is a failure to love and to fail to love is something that God will have to keep bringing to our attention -- or not "send away" as it were.