In English, “give us today . . .” might have suggested “and forgive us …”, just as the French “donne” might have suggested “et pardonne”; but in Aramaic the words are quite different from each other. Nevertheless, the need for the daily gift of simple food seems to have suggested to Yeshua another need, perhaps an even greater one. Forgiveness is a human subject so huge that many books have been written about it, yet on our simple daily level it is raw and basic.
Let’s look first at its place in the prayer, and how the daily bread may have suggested it. The prayer for bread may have been suggested by the daily blessing of bread at every Jewish table; and the daily prayer later called the Amidah, most elements of which date from the Pharisaic and Sadducaic time, contains the Selichah, a prayer for the forgiveness of sins. What is perhaps original in Yeshua’s version is the order on the one hand, and the linking of God’s forgiveness with our own on the other: both were standard elements in Jewish spiritual life, but the link here is striking.
What this encourages us to look at is a) what does it mean to be forgiven? And b) what does it mean to forgive? Everyone who has ever felt genuine guilt – and children feel that a lot –knows the real torture it brings. You have donesomething (which includes having saidsomething, for interpersonally words are actions) which has clearly and strongly hurt someone in some way. You see the other person’s pain, and you piercingly want time to roll back to before you did it. But it doesn’t. Oh God,whydid I do/say that? How could I have been so stupid, insensitive, wicked? I wish I could undo it/unsay it. But Time is pitiless, and leaves us pilloried. The person I hurt would be totally justified in retaliating. And in a way, I almost wish (s)he would. Then balance would be restored, and life could go on. If the person we have hurt has real power, we may even feel rather nervous or frightened.
And then – perhaps not right away, perhaps the next day, or the next week, the next time we meet -- the person I have genuinely and wickedly hurt comes up and puts an arm around my shoulders and says, softly, “It’s OK, I know you didn’t mean it.” And changes the subject. How do we feel? Well, thoroughly discombobulated, for a start. That was the last thing we expected.
And then, a huge wave of pure relief flows through us, and we may start to cry. Genuine, unexpected and overwhelming magnanimity teaches us what being forgiven feels like.
When we ask God for this, what are we asking Him to forgive? The probable Aramaic word was hóba, which can mean both ‘sin’ and ‘debt’. So it has been variously translated as ‘sin’, ‘debt’ and ‘trespass’. One might perhaps translate it ‘Forgive us what we owe You’, because we owe Him infinitely more than we might ever hope to repay. In fact, we owe Him everything – all we are and have is a gift. So to ask Him to forgive us that life-including debt is to ask Him to accept us WAF – ‘with all faults” – just as we are, and to restore us to our proper relation to him, that of loving and grateful children to a loving and provident Father. As part of that, we are also asking Him to forgive our sin(s), obviously: the times we screw up that relation in one of the many well-known ways.
Now comes the interesting part. Because unlike most known Jewish prayers like the Amidah, this prayer adds to the penitent request for forgiveness the rider “as we forgive (or: have forgiven) those who owe us”.An instant challenge.Have we forgiven? Whom? What this does is remind us how absolutely crucial forgiveness is between humans. I know two families, formerly good friends, who have not spoken to each other for six years because of what one family-s five-year-old said to the other family’s four-year-old. The opposite of forgiveness is rancour, and the result of rancour is humiliation and resentment.
We have seen what being forgiven means and feels like. What about forgiving? The saying goes ‘forgive and forget’. Depending on what has been done to us, forgiving may be easy or very hard indeed. If a drunken oaf driving a defective car ran down and killed one of my daughters or grandchildren, I do not know if, or how, I should be able to forgive him, and I know I should never forget. The answer, if there is one, is perhaps that forgiving is possible only with, and in, prayer. We are not a forgiving race. But uniting ourselves to the God whose very nature is love and who has forgiven the human race more than we can begin to image – that may enable us to share in some of that mighty love. If we can imagine what we, as humans, regularly do to God; if we can imagine all that we ask, and hope, for Him to forgive; then perhaps we can be enabled by that imagination and the resulting prayer of humility to share in the outpouring of His grace.
Eventually, then, this double-sided petition, as Yeshua imagined it and set it in His prayer, is one for restoration. For restoration of us humans in our relation to one another, and for restoration of our relation to our infinitely loving Father – a restoration which we can’t accomplish but which He can, and will.
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