Lenten Reflection on Bitterness - Matthew 6:9-16

Let us pray:

Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.  Your kingdom come.  Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.  Give us this day our daily bread.  And 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.

To be honest with you, forgiveness was not something that I spent a lot of time thinking about or even being concerned about prior to entering the ministry.  I grew up in the church, and of course I knew that we needed Jesus to have our sins forgiven, but that was about it.  Maybe I just wasn’t listening in church, or maybe it wasn’t there, but I don’t remember—I just don’t recall any thought or discussion about the importance in our faith journey of forgiving others.

It wasn’t until I had to take a hard look at the Lord’s Prayer in a devotional reading that it really hit me how central forgiveness is to our faith.  We pray “forgive us our debts/trespasses/sins (depending on your translation or preference), as we forgive our debtors/those who trespass/sin against us.”  I had prayed it for years without thinking too much about it, but this devotional really challenged me to think about it—though I can’t remember exactly the direction of the devotion.  I just remember that it pointed out to me the strong implication of what exactly I was praying, to understand what exactly I was saying and asking of God.

How many of us have ever stopped to really consider what we are praying in that prayer rather than simply repeating the words from memory?  The issue of forgiveness is so central to this prayer that Jesus even takes time after teaching the prayer to emphasize only the aspect of the prayer concerning forgiving others: “For if you forgive others…your heavenly Father will also forgive you,” and here is the part that stopped me cold with the reality of what I was praying, “but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.”  We are asking God to treat us, consider us, look upon us in the same way we look upon those who have wronged us.  If I do not forgive others, I am asking God to not forgive me.  If I treat others with resentment, I am asking God to resent me.  If I am bitter toward those who have wronged me, I am asking God to treat me with bitterness.  If I am hateful toward those who have hurt me, I am asking God to be hateful toward me.  To make matters worse, Jesus doesn’t offer any kind of stipulation that if it is just a minor thing like accidently hitting the bumper of our car in the parking lot we are to forgive but if they kill our spouse or child, we can hold on to that bitterness to the end.  No, he simply says forgive and be forgiven, don’t forgive, don’t expect forgiveness. 

Such hard words to hear, but they are the words, the teachings of Jesus.  If we call Him “Lord,” then they are words we have to hear and heed.

What does it mean to forgive?

It does not mean that we are immediately reconciled to the person who has wronged us—it does not mean that an abused wife goes right back in the house and continue living with the unrepentant man that hurt her (that’s reconciliation and that is something completely different than forgiveness).

It does not mean that we forget what has happened to us—God gave us a memory to keep us from falling into the same traps over and over again.

It does not mean that we wait for the person to say “I’m sorry”—we follow Christ who said from the cross, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,” and we remember the words of Paul, “But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.”

So what is forgiveness?