forgive us our debts

Forgive Us as We Forgive

Lois Tverberg

by Lois Tverberg

“Forgive us our sins, for we also forgive everyone who sins against us.” Luke 11:4

This petition of the Lord’s Prayer is a challenge to us — to ask for God’s forgiveness in the measure that we have forgiven those who have sinned against us. It is a difficult command from Jesus, but if we obey it, we can know that not only are we right with God, but we are free from the damaging effects of anger and feelings of vengeance toward others.

It is interesting to see the background of Jesus’ words about being forgiven as we forgive others. This command is most likely comes from the rabbinic understanding one of the two great commands – to love your neighbor as yourself.

We, of course understand that we should love others with the same measure that we love ourselves, which is certainly very true! But the rabbis also saw that the Hebrew of that verse can also be read as, “Love your neighbor who is like yourself.” While either interpretation is valid, their emphasis was not on comparing love of ourselves with love for others, but on comparing other people to ourselves, and then loving them because they are like us in our own frailties. The need to be forgiving arises naturally from realizing this fact. Even before Jesus’ time, it was expressed this way:

Forgive your neighbor’s injustice; then, when you pray, your own sins will be forgiven. Should a person nourish anger against another, and expect healing from the Lord? Should a person refuse mercy to a man like himself, yet seek pardon for his own sins? (28:2-4) (Ben Sira, c. 180 B.C.)

When we realize that we are just as guilty of sin as those we are angry with, we see that we shouldn’t bear grudges against them, but to forgive and love them instead. Jesus’ petition about forgiveness could almost have the words of the great commandment in it. We could say, “Please love us even though we are sinners, as we love other sinners like ourselves.”

Forgiving sins is one of the strongest tests of love – it is easy to love someone who has treated us rightly, but to love someone who has hurt us is far more difficult. God must love us greatly if he keeps forgiving our sins against him.

Photo by Felix Koutchinski on Unsplash

Measure for Measure

Lois Tverberg

by Lois Tverberg

So when the Midianite merchants came by, his brothers pulled Joseph up out of the cistern and sold him for twenty shekels of silver to the Ishmaelites, who took him to Egypt. – Genesis 37:28

At the opening of the book of Exodus, we learn that four hundred years after the family of Jacob went down to Egypt to live, they have been enslaved. It is ironic that the brothers never would have moved their families to Egypt if they had not sold their brother Joseph into slavery there. In a strange way, when they sold one member into slavery, they were selling their own family into future slavery. Their fate is linked to their sin, somehow.

bronze scaleThe rabbis pointed out that this pattern of the punishment fitting the crime is a recurring theme throughout the Scriptures. Because Jacob deceived Isaac in his blindness into giving him the birthright, Jacob is fooled into marrying Leah when he is “blind” – when she is brought to him veiled, and in the night he doesn’t see his new wife. Or, because Pharaoh killed the Israelite boys by drowning them in the river, God defeated his army by drowning them too. Haman was hanged on the gallows that he prepared for Mordechai. The rabbis called this pattern “measure for measure” – midah keneged midah.

While this is the pattern for divine justice, God tells the people of Israel that they should use midah keneged midah in a different way. They are to show mercy on the aliens and foreigners, because they were once foreigners too, in the land of Egypt. Instead of remembering their suffering there in order to be cruel or vengeful, they should remember how it felt to be in a strange land and to be oppressed, and to have compassion on others because of it.

Jesus tells us the same thing — that when we remember how much we’ve been forgiven, it should make us desire to forgive others too. He says that with the measure that we use, it will be measured to us as well.

For more details on this concept, see the longer article, “The Logic of Measure for Measure.”

Photocred: Bibleplaces.com

The Coming of the Jubilee

Lois Tverberg

by Lois Tverberg

“A moneylender had two debtors: one owed five hundred denarii, and the other fifty. When they were unable to repay, he graciously forgave them both. So which of them will love him more?” Simon answered and said, “I suppose the one whom he forgave more.”
– Luke 7:41-43

In the parable above that Jesus tells after the sinful woman has anointed his feet, he likens the person who is a sinner to one who is a debtor. He also does this in the parable of the unmerciful servant, who has a debt to the king that he can never repay (Matt 18:23-35).

Jesus frequently uses the image of debt as a way to describe guilt from sin. To us they aren’t parallels because borrowing money or possessions isn’t sinful. But one of the words in Hebrew, hayav, that means “debtor,” also is used to describe a person who is guilty of sin. There is an overlap conceptually, because both require restoration – either of the money borrowed or reparations to the victim of the sin. In the Lord’s prayer, Jesus was most likely using the word hayav when he said “forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors.”

Jesus' Feet WashedIt is interesting to relate this idea to another one that Jesus used in his ministry – the Year of Jubilee. During the Year of Jubilee in Israel, all debts were to be forgiven, and any land that a family had been forced to sell in a time of famine could be reclaimed by them. It is interesting that the prophets and rabbis connected this thought of the year of Jubilee with the coming of the Messiah. In fact, one of Jesus’ first public statements about his ministry was to quote Isaiah 61, which says that he was anointed to proclaim “the year of the Lord’s favor,” meaning, the Jubilee year (Luke 4:19).

Through Jesus’ use of the image of the Jubilee, we can see God’s enormous grace – those who have been forgiven the greatest debt, like the sinful woman in the painting, love the most in return. It is good news to the “poor in spirit,” the humble and contrite of heart who see the need to be forgiven of sin (Isaiah 66:2). Through Jesus’ gift on the cross, those who will become a part of his Kingdom receive a forgiveness of debt far greater than they could pay themselves, and a chance to start over with life anew.

Photo: Ermitage, Sankt Petersburg