“Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”
You may have sped through those words yesterday in church but they’re worth a little more time this Monday morning. Those words tell us that sins, trespasses, happen in our interactions with one another. In church people are oriented toward God but during the week we face off against each other. In your family, in your work, in your neighborhood, on the Internet or highway… Our work week is filled with personal interactions and some can get intense. Of the Ten Commandments, all but the first are about some aspect of our interactions with one another. So this petition in the Lord’s Prayer identifies where we’ll see sin, less in church where we’re proper and more in daily life where we’re real.
“Forgive us…as we forgive those….” There’s more a group sense than an individual sense to this prayer, the “Our Father” not “My Father.” Of course the individual is part of the whole, but I can pray this prayer for myself only to a point. Forgive me my trespasses but next I take forgiveness into the group, to “those” people “who trespass against us.” Our sins hurt all of us but forgiving love helps all of us. “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). Jesus had forgiveness for others in mind when He was dying. We should when we are living.
By that death and resurrection of Jesus, the Father is the source of forgiveness. “Our Father who art in heaven…forgive us.” As an individual sorry for my sin, I apply the word of forgiveness to myself. In our weekday, group interactions? We speak forgiveness to one another. The clergy doesn’t have a lock on this market! Jesus has given His Church a special authority to forgive the sins of those who are truly sorry and not forgive when someone is impenitent (John 20:23), but this petition shows that all God’s people can speak an authoritative word of forgiveness to one another. “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.”
Who but the Lord could give us so much to think about in one little prayer?
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