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.
And we need to add the underlining to this phrase with the verse that follows:
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.
‘Forgive me, Lord’. Who has not prayed that, and sometimes when we really should not have done so! But what about – do it just as I do it others? That is a bit challenging, and might explain why God is somewhat distant at times.
Debts, used in the prayer, and trespasses used in the underlining. A debt is what I owe; a trespass is crossing a line (I did a post recently on boundaries). What a great way to understand ‘sin’. I owe… I owe it to treat people as if they are part of humanity created in the image of God. It pushes me back to what I understand to be a central plank in Paul’s ethics – how we see no-one through old categorising criteria. And if I do not treat people in that way I am trespassing, I am stepping outside of my boundaries and resisting them living to the edge of their boundary.
Forgiveness – release the ship to her destiny. The problem of sin is that it imprisons us. So it seems if we are to fly and touchour destiny we need to release others, not demanding that they put right what they ‘owe’ us, not fighting them over where they have trespassed on to our territory.
Maybe so much of the prayer hangs on this part. After all it is the only part in Matthew that Jesus picks up and repeats.
Imagine not a world of perfection, but a world of release. Maybe this is why creation was never created perfect, maybe this is why the ‘bad’ tree was the one that would enable us to know what is perfect and what is not. Maybe the tree of life will help us simply live releasing, untying, saying to the ships we see ‘Untied, go sail’. I don’t think I can contribute much to perfecting the world, but maybe I have a contribution to liberating those I see within this imperfect, this ‘sinning’ world. A liberated world.