Fourth Request: Forgive as We Are Forgiven

It is a common trope that holidays are a time of strife, as people who bear grudges are brought into contact again. The comedy show Seinfeld had an alternative to Christmas called festivus. The festivus feast began with “the airing of grievances;” this plays off the way family gatherings can be ruined by long-standing conflict.

Such conflicts can be long-lasting because the grievances behind them are never resolved, neither by making amends nor by forgiveness. Over time they become part of the atmosphere. People start assuming that certain people will not “get along,” meaning that their mutual acrimony will dominate whenever they are together.

The word forgive means to “let go.” Jesus tells us to ask God to let go of what we owe as debts to him in the same way we let go of the debts owed to us. Later in the passage he explicates this metaphor by talking about forgiveness of trespasses. He tells us that God will forgive us if we forgive others, while if we do not forgive others he will not forgive us.

It is possible to see this as a kind of works-righteousness. We “obey” God’s injunction to forgive and in so doing earn God’s forgiveness. I do not believe that is the best way of seeing it.

Instead we can see it as God playing the game our way. If we want to keep score, God is (reluctantly) willing to keep score as well. If, instead, we stop keeping score, God will (gladly) do it that way as well. This is in line with the later passage that says,

Judge not, that you be not judged.
For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged,
and with the measure you use it will be measured to you.
– Matthew 7:1-2

This is part of the larger injunction that “whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them…” (Matthew 7:12). Clearly God does not intend for people to use a relationship with him as a smoke-screen to cover their spiteful behavior toward others. Thus in the heart of the model prayer by which Jesus teaches us to pray is the request to forgive as we forgive others.

Of course the reason we are told to ask for forgiveness is that we need it. A beatitude says,

Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy”
– (Matthew 5:7).

We cannot go through life without becoming a debtor, without hurting and harming those we encounter, even if unintentionally. Relationships are just like that, given our fallen state.

The logic of this request is a bit tricky, but it serves the dual purpose of both encouraging self-reflectiveness to see our own need for forgiveness and to see others as having the same need as we have, but seeing it in light of our own need. Because we need forgiveness, and others do too, it makes sense for us to ask to be forgiven and to forgive. This is, again, a game God invites us to play: the forgiveness game. If we play that game, we cannot lose. Besides being forgiven ourselves, forgiveness opens up the possibility of reconciliation. Long standing animosity can be released and, perhaps, relationships that were poisoned can be revived.

This forgiveness, or letting go, is a subspecies of the entire notion of the cross. In numerous places we are told to “take up our cross,” to “die to ourselves,” to “lose our lives in order to find them.” The cross, which in this context means identification with Christ’s death, becomes a kind of spiritual chemotherapy, killing the spiritual cancers that would kill us. Like all cancer, the spiritual cancer is us.

In the same way that chemotherapy kills the patient—that is, the cancer—without killing the patient, the spiritual chemotherapy of the cross kills the spiritual cancer of self that would kill us, and it does so in a way that leads to newness of life with God. Unlike natural death, Christ’s supernatural death is attached to a resurrection, so death is no longer the last word.

Taking the cross seriously connects us with Christ’s supernatural death, and the Spirit “applies” Christ’s death to our lives. This is the analogy of applying the “blood of Christ.” We are “washed in the blood of Christ” and so become clean. This paradox is just another way of saying that our identification with Christ’s death cleanses us and sets us free from the deadness of our old life and attaches us to Christ’s resurrected life. Romans 6:5 says, “For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.”

The result of dying with Christ is a sense of freedom. By letting go of the old deadness, we let go of that which binds us. The festering grudges that chew away at us are not fun. But we cannot let go of them—they are inherent in who we are. And we actually get a perverse pleasure, like picking at a scab, from rehearsing our grudges and proving to ourselves how right we are and how wrong the other person is.

In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, “Is it good, friend?”
“It is bitter—bitter,” he answered;

“But I like it
“Because it is bitter,
“And because it is my heart.”
– Stephen Crane, In The Desert

Letting go of this is to be freed from the “body of death” that Paul speaks of in Romans 7.

Paul also speaks of the duality of the cross:

But far be it from me to boast except in the cross
of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been
crucified to me, and I to the world.
– Galatians 6:14

One can say that the world no longer appears on Paul’s radar, and Paul no longer appears on that of the world. Paul no longer seeks to find his life from the world, and the world no longer sees Paul as having any value or importance.

It is the latter that is often most disconcerting to Christians. Suddenly the world no longer wants us. Like Jesus, we are “despised and rejected.” Just as the fundamental paradox of the cross is life from death, so this associated paradox is freedom coming from rejection. The world that rejects you no longer has standing to make a claim on you.

So it is with every dying associated with the cross. The things that we cling to make a claim on us. Our grudges, obsessions, desires and so on all demand our lives. When we let go of them, they are powerless toward us. They no longer “dominate our destiny.”