Midweek Musing- June 25, 2025

Matthew 6:12 - Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.

The Fourth Musing in a Series on the Lord’s Prayer

If you’ve been following along, you might have noticed a shift beginning with last week’s reflection on ‘Give us this day our daily bread.’

The first portion of the Lord’s Prayer draws us upward towards heaven and out towards God’s promised day. We have considered God’s name, God’s kingdom, and God’s will.

But in this part of the prayer, we are brought into the present time and place and the very real needs for life in the here and now.

It began with physical and spiritual bread for each day. And now it moves to forgiveness for our wrongs.

Daily bread, both physical and spiritual, reminds us of our vulnerability and our limits and yes, even our mortality. But forgiveness speaks to something even more difficult and painful: our brokenness and our heartbreak.

Now I am going to go ahead and point out the bright pink elephant in the center of the room we would rather ignore. This petition is the most difficult part of the entire prayer.

Not because the words are hard to say… most of us try to say them as fast as we can and move on. But they are hard because actually living them is an exceedingly difficult daily struggle.

So, depending on your tradition, you might say:

“Forgive us our trespasses” (as in many Catholic and Anglican traditions),

“Forgive us our sins” is in many of the contemporary worship liturgies. (You can even find it as an option in PCUSA Book of Common Worship),

Or, as the original Greek and the Reformed tradition render it:

“Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.”

The actual Greek word used here that we translate is ὀφειλήματα (opheilēmata), which literally means “things owed.” This word comes from the Greek verb opheilō, meaning to owe, to be obligated, to be indebted.

So yes—Jesus really is talking about debts. 

While there are all kinds of debts or things we may owe and all would be applicable in this prayer it is most likely those who originally heard this prayer thought about financial debts.

You see in first-century Palestine, debt wasn’t theoretical.

It wasn’t just a metaphor for sin.

It was a harsh economic reality for most people; especially the majority of folks Jesus ministered to.

Crushing debt and exploitative systems kept the poor in poverty and the rich growing even wealthier and becoming even more powerful.

Recall that many of Jesus’ listeners would have been laborers, tenant farmers, or peasants who owed money, grain, or land to landowners and tax collectors—often with no real way out.

The system in which they lived was a system very similar to share cropping that dominated the American south during the era of Jim Crow.

To speak of debts and forgiveness in Jesus’s world or during the age of share cropping or even in today’s economic system that continues to create even larger gaps between “haves and have nots” was according to our way of thinking radical and new.

And yet it really wasn’t. Recall that the Torah called for what was known as a Jubilee Year.

What is Jubilee?

The Jubilee Year (Yovel in Hebrew), described in Leviticus 25, is one of the Torah’s most radical expressions of justice, mercy, and restoration—an economic, social, spiritual, and political vision of freedom.

It is one of the most profound expressions of God’s desire for equality, restoration, and freedom among God's people.

Jubilee was part of the sabbath tradition. It was to occur every 50th year, following the seven-year Sabbath cycle (Shemitah). It was to be proclaimed with the sounding of a ram’s horn on the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur).

The Key Components of the Jubilee Year included that all land was returned to its original family owners. If someone had sold their land, that sale was effectively a lease, and in the 50th year, the land reverted back to the original clan.

This protected families from generational poverty and prevented the permanent accumulation of land and power by elites.

It emphasized the belief that God is the true owner of the land, and the Israelites are stewards. Jubilee restored folks’ freedom and dignity by ensuring that no family could be trapped in perpetual indebtedness.

It seems economic resets were part of God's vision for fairness, where the rich would not endlessly benefit from the misfortune of others. And it seems God intentionally discouraged people from creating systems that exploited and divided people into classes.

Sadly, people of faith and religious institutions have often been silent in the face of such oppressive systems. Indeed, the pharisees and religious leaders in Jesus’s time were actively involved in promoting such systems.

Of course, other religious institutions across the centuries have been complicit as well.

As we continue looking at this petition it is also important to notice how Jesus frames the prayer:

“Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.”

The word “as” (Greek: ὡς – hōs) is what makes this line so demanding.

It’s a little word, but it links the two halves inseparably.

In other words, Jesus isn’t teaching us to pray:

“Forgive me, and I’ll try to forgive others.”

He’s inviting us to pray:

“God, deal with me the same way I deal with others.”

Or more pointedly:

“God, forgive me to the degree that I forgive those who’ve wronged me.”

That's bold. Even dangerous. But it’s also liberating.

Because when we say those words with sincerity, we’re renouncing the right to hold grudges. We're recognizing that forgiveness is the very air of the Kingdom, something we must both breathe in and breathe out.

And doing so with genuineness typically provides more relief for our soul than the one who wronged us. As Anne Lamott puts it: “Not forgiving is like drinking rat poison and then waiting for the rat to die.”

Forgiveness doesn’t deny the pain. It doesn’t erase the wound. But it does keep the wound from becoming infected. It keeps our hearts from hardening.

I believe it is also important to note a bit of grammar here. These words are the plural forms, and friends, I think this matters:

“Forgive us our debts...as we forgive our debtors.”

This is not just about me and my personal guilt or my private struggle to forgive others.

This is a prayer for the community. It is for the entirety of the church. The whole human family.

It reminds us: We all stand in need of grace. And we are all called to extend it to all others.

But just as we need bread daily, we also need to cultivate forgiveness every day.

Forgiveness isn’t a one-time act, just like prayer, or worship, or acts of kindness—it’s a daily spiritual practice. It’s choosing again and again to let go of the anger and bitterness and hurt and heartbreak in order to release the debt. It is a daily and sometimes even hourly choice to refuse to let someone else’s wrongdoing towards you define your life.

And often we need God’s help with this—because sometimes, the hurt is too deep or the wound too fresh for us to do it alone.

I think it is important to realize this line in the prayer was not just some sweet platitude for Jesus.

Why do I think this?

Because our Lord doesn't let this idea go.

If we keep reading just a few verses after the prayer, Jesus adds this postscript: “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.”

This isn’t meant to scare us into obedience, it’s a spiritual principle. If we want to receive grace, we must live in grace. If we hoard resentment, we’ll find it harder and harder to access the mercy we so deeply need.

When I was a child at Nazareth Presbyterian Church in Moore, SC, we had this chalkboard in my Sunday school classroom. If you’re under thirty-five, chalkboards were what classrooms used before whiteboards—or the smartboards we have today.

One of my teachers once wrote the word “SIN” on it in huge letters, and then, with a wet rag, wipe it away until the board was clean again.

As a kid, I thought, “That’s what forgiveness is.”

At Presbyterian College I was given another example of forgiveness that I think works better. Forgiveness is like having a scar. The pain may fade, but the story stays.

And that’s okay.

Forgiveness doesn’t mean forgetting—it means choosing not to repay the hurt.

It means choosing love over revenge. Mercy instead of pride. Grace over retribution.

And it means admitting when we fail at those things and earnestly trying again even though we may fail over and over.

Siblings in Christ this line in the Lord’s Prayer is not for the faint of heart.

But it is for the hurting, the humble, and the hopeful.

It’s for anyone longing to live lighter, freer, and more like Jesus.

So may we dare to pray it— With trembling lips and open hearts.

And then may we with God’s help seek to live it in our lives.

In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Alleluia. Amen.