Conditioned forgiveness

“… Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And do not bring us to the time of trial, but rescue us from the evil one. For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.” (Matthew 6:12-15) 

God only forgives us if we forgive others
The Our Father is more than just a simple prayer. It is the most concise or the all-encompassing summary of Jesus’ message; it contains everything that we need to put into practice to have life and to have it abundantly. In Matthew’s version of the Lord’s Prayer, forgiveness is not only part of the body of the prayer but it also merited an added comment from Jesus as a “Post Scriptum”.

Of all the themes enumerated in this prayer, as if it were a list, Jesus commented on only one – forgiveness -- to make it clear, leaving no room for doubts or false interpretations, everything he has to say on this subject. This appendix addendum was presented in verses 14 and 15 which came, as we have said earlier, outside the body of the prayer.

In order to make people think, very often in my homilies I ask the congregation whether God loves us unconditionally, to which all unanimously answer ‘yes’; then I follow with the question of whether or not God also forgives us unconditionally, and without much thought they also all answer ‘yes’ because they think it is logical that this should be the case.

When I contradict this collective agreement that God forgives unconditionally by saying that unlike God’s love for us, his forgiveness is not unconditional, but rather that “some conditions do apply”, that it comes with some requirements. All are taken aback by that and many, again without much thought, are too quick to say that my doctrine is false.

Many Christians pray the Our Father prayer probably more than once a day yet are not fully aware of what they are saying and what the prayer demands of them. From the added comment that Jesus himself made, we can only conclude that despite loving us unconditionally, God does not forgive us unconditionally. Therefore we better satisfy His conditions first before asking for His forgiveness. In order for us to be forgiven for having offended God, it is “conditio sine qua non” that we should first forgive others who have offended us.

In fact, in the prayer that Jesus taught us, when we say, forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us, we are telling God that as we have already forgiven others, that is, we have already done our part, that He should now also do His part and forgive us in turn. We place the forgiveness that we should grant others as a pre-condition to the forgiveness that we ask from God; in other words, we ourselves see that forgiving others is the condition to receive God’s forgiveness for ourselves. What allows us morally to ask God for forgiveness is the fact that we have already forgiven from the heart those who have hurt us.

“…the measure you give will be the measure you get.” (Matthew 7:2). Just as the love we have for ourselves ought to be the same measure of love that we should have for our neighbours, we cannot wish to have God for ourselves and the devil for others. We cannot hope for God’s forgiveness if we do not truly and fully forgive those who have offended us.  This truth may be as hard to accept as was Jesus’ discourse on the Eucharist in the Gospel of John which caused many followers to desert the Lord.

And forgive us our trespasses in a greater way than we forgive others – As a matter of fact, the hardness of this language on forgiveness provoked similar dissent as that over the Eucharist; in recent time, the Brazilian charismatic priest Marcelo Rossi, giving deaf ears to the words of Jesus in verse 12 because of its hardness, replaced them with his own, as cited above.

Revoked pardon
Word of a king cannot be withdrawn – Let us recall the promise that King Herod made to the daughter of Herodias, and let us also recall the words of Pilate with respect to the words he wrote on the sign placed at the top of the Lord’s cross. A king does not go back on his word, on what he has said and promised. Much less God, the King of the Universe, would take back His word.

However, the parable of the Unforgiving Servant described in the Gospel of Matthew (18:23-35) suggests that on the subject of forgiveness, God can even go back on His word. The parable recounts the story of a slave who owed an exorbitant sum of money to his Lord who, having compassion on his slave, forgave him his debts. However, as this servant did not forgive someone who owed him a much smaller sum of money, the Lord took back his word and revoked the pardon that He had previously granted.

When God goes to the extent of taking back something that He has already given, something that a sensate person would never do, this shows how adamant God is about that single condition to obtain His forgiveness, that is, we must be ready to forgive those who need our forgiveness as much as we need God’s.

Allowances
“Then Peter came and said to him, ‘Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?’ Jesus said to him, ‘Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.” (Matthew 18:21-22)

Always hitting on the same key, these are the verses prior to the parable that we quoted above where God withdrew the pardon He had previously given. God does not give us respite. We are to forgive and forgive not just once or twice but always, unceasingly and without getting tired just as God does with us. We can never say ‘enough is enough’ and we can never give up on someone because God never gives up on us.

Not taking anything away from the difficulty of forgiving someone who has hurt us, the following points can be of help:

1. Take into account the person’s upbringing: the traumas suffered during infancy, the bad parents, the bad teachers. A perfect upbringing and education do not exist; since Freud, no one argues the effects that the first years of life have on the rest of our lives. To overcome these deterrents is not easy and many never succeed. In view of this, to what extent is a person responsible for what he does? If the courts of justice take into account these determinants then why don’t we also when we are called to forgive?


2. Forgive them, Lord, for they know not what they do. This was the reason the Lord gave to forgive those who killed him. When we do evil things, most of the times we act under the influence of a powerful emotion; strong emotions fog up the mind the same way excessive alcohol does, and the person ends up not knowing what he says nor what he does. The prodigal son was out of his mind when he decided to abandon his family, as it was well told in the Gospel, and as the parable says, when he came to his senses he returned to his family.
   
   
3. The sin is one thing, and the sinner is another. The person who commits a wrongdoing also does many good things but often we do not see the good, only the bad. Furthermore, it also happens that when a person who has always done right by us does one single bad thing against us, we end up condemning him forever for it. We report to the four winds the evil that someone has done, the good that this same person does not even in private do we acknowledge it; we criticize his wrongdoings and envy his goodness. Like God, we need to make the distinction between the sinner and the sin, so as not to “throw away the baby with the bathwater”.


4. We are often hypocrites, criticizing others for the same wrongdoings that we ourselves do, or may one day come to do if given the same circumstances. If we can honestly conclude that we would do the same then to forgive is to put into practice the precept of the Lord that tells us, do to others whatever you would like others to do to you.


5. But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.  Matthew 5:44 – I would say that more than an exhortation or an advice, Jesus is giving us the technique that miraculously works. None of us like to pray for those who hate us, and yet, if we make the choice to do just that and commit ourselves to do what is right, going against our instincts, we will find that after some time the feeling of hatred starts to weaken and eventually disappears altogether. Give it a try and you will see for yourself. The Gospel cannot be wrong.

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC

Forgive and Forget

An ex-prisoner of a Nazi concentration camp was visiting a friend with whom he had shared this painful past experience. “Have you forgiven the Nazis for all they did to us?” he asked his friend. “Yes, I have,” his friend answered. “Well I haven’t and I never will, I still hate them to the depth of my soul.” Upon hearing this, his friend told him pleasantly, “If this is how it is, then you are still their prisoner.”

Like a computer with a large operating memory and without a hard disk to store the data, God forgives and forgets. For Him who lives in the eternal present, the past has no value. Along the path of life, both good and evil contributed to what we are today -- good works that shaped our good characters and bad choices that we made which dealt us invaluable life lessons because oftentimes we learn more from what we did wrong than what we did right. God is not interested in the particulars, however, but only in what we turned out to be today at this present moment.

“Up stream mills are not turned by passed waters”
Not to forgive is to choose to remain in a cell of bitterness, serving the sentence for the crime of another person. Mahatma Gandhi

God forgives, forgets, and turns the page. Just like the water that always flows freely and does not adhere to anything, so is God who does not hold any grudges. “Up stream mills are not turned by passed waters” says a proverb, but unfortunately, unlike God, the human mind defies this natural law. Many disturbances of the past keep turning inside of our hearts and minds in the present. Like an old scratched vinyl disc, the past is replayed over and over again in our head and is manifested in our behaviour.

A traumatic past is continuously and obsessively projected into the present, thus forcing the people in our present relations to play the roles of the monsters who have hurt us in the past, and making us react in the very same way we did then.

It is only by forgiving the people who have hurt us in the past that we are freed from the prison of resentment and other harmful emotions that are running loose inside of us -- and because we are not even aware of them, they control us instead of us controlling them. It is only when we truly forgive that we are completely set free from our past and all that went wrong with it. Furthermore, it is only by forgiving that the grip which otherwise they have on us is released.

It has been told that in Heaven Cain used to avoid the company of Abel until one day the latter not understanding the reason for his brother’s behaviour decided to confront him. “Hear me out, why are you running away from me? After all, aren’t we brothers?” Downcast and ashamed, Cain uneasily asked his brother, “Don’t you remember what happened down below on earth between you and me?” “I have a vague idea,” said Abel. “Was it you who killed me or was it I who killed you?”

For as long as the remorse lasts, the guilt also lasts. Cain had not yet forgiven himself… If God forgives and forgets, and turns the page, then for our own good and mental well-being we are called to do the same, forgive others as well as forgive ourselves.

It is true that the facts are not entirely forgotten from the cognitive point of view because God has endowed us with memory, but if we really succeed in forgiving then the hurtful facts are recalled in a different way, without emotion. They no longer cause us stress or anxiety, nor hate or resentment because they truly remain in the past and in some cases are even forgotten cognitively like Abel showed in the story.

Sin is a debt owed
…erasing the record that stood against us with its legal demands. He set this aside, nailing it to the cross. (Colossians 2:14)

“Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors”, this verse comes from the Gospel of Matthew’s version of the Our Father. In the commonly recited form of this prayer, the word ‘trespass’ which replaces ‘debt’ does not confer the real biblical meaning of what is a sin or an offense.When we sin, we incur a debt against the one we have sinned; our relation with this person, that is, the order, the equilibrium and the harmony of this relationship are not restored until this debt is paid. This idea to satisfy, compensate or reward the one we have injured arises from the fact that we feel indebted to that person.

We need to regard sin as a debt owed in order to truly understand what St. Paul was telling the Christians in Colossus. He spoke to them in fact of an extensive invoice listing in great detail both the sins of mankind and their own sins. This bill which he described is a document of our debts, which by itself speaks against us because it reports all the evil that we have done.

In Christ, however, God the Father eliminated or cancelled this debt; in the original Greek text St. Paul does not use the term chiastrein which means to cancel by placing an X over the entire body of the invoice. He does not use this term because even after we cancel a bill, we can still read it again and afterwards maybe regret having forgiven the debt. Rather, the term that St. Paul uses is exalaifein, which means to delete.

In those days there were no papers, instead, they used and reused papyri and animal skins again and again. For this reason, they wrote with an ink that was easily erasable like we did until recently with chalk and blackboard. Once deleted, the bill can no longer be re-read. But so that there is not a single trace of such a bill left, God crucified it,that is, destroyed it completely as if it had been incinerated. It can no longer be re-read not only because it was deleted, but also because it simply no longer exists.

He himself bore our sins in his body on the cross, so that, free from sins,we might live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed.(1 Peter 2:24)

In taking on our sins, Jesus somehow embodied, that is, turned himself into the old Bill that contained all the sins or debts that mankind owed to God; by dying on the cross, he destroyed this bill forever. If in Jesus God forgives and forgets our sins,then we are also called to forgive and forget the sins of others as well as forgive ourselves for all the evil that we have brought onto ourselves.

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC