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

There’s only one part of the Lord’s Prayer that the Lord felt the need to expound upon after he taught his disciples this prayer, and that’s the fifth petition: “And forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” The fact that he drew attention to this one petition and told many parables that expounded upon it even further, that should tell us that we should pay attention to what this petition means.

One quick note, and that’s just in terms of the translation. When you’re around people who are singing Our Father, you often will hear everybody singing it in sync until they get to this part, because some will say, “Forgive us our debts,” and others will say, “Forgive us our trespasses.” In Matthew, it’s without doubt “debts” that is the word that is used, although in Luke, in the parallel account of the Lord’s Prayer, it’s a more general word for sins, so when we talk about debts, we’re using that as a metaphor for sin, but “debt” is a good and proper translation.

The one thing we should consider about this petition is: Whom does it apply to and what does it mean? In the early Church, there was one error that many people held to for a while, which was the idea that after baptism there was no serious sin that could be forgiven. But obviously if the Lord taught us to ask for the forgiveness of our sins, that would mean that our sins can be forgiven.

But on the other hand, you also had some people—and even today, some people are of the opinion that you can attain to a state of perfection to where you wouldn’t be committing any sins, so therefore this would be a part of the Lord’s Prayer that they wouldn’t need to pray. But the idea that anyone would think that I’ve arrived at a point that I don’t need to say the prayer the Lord taught his disciples to say is pretty mind-boggling, and just on the face of it, that ought to tell you that that’s a wrong opinion. It certainly is possible to achieve some level of perfection in this life, but not to the point where you have even gone beyond the point of committing involuntary sins that you would need to ask for God’s forgiveness for.

But a bigger error in our time is just the error of indifference, people not really thinking about what sins they have committed that they might need to repent of. I’ve heard from many priests that over the years have told stories about people who would come to confession that haven’t been to confession for years, but for whatever reason they feel like they need to do it so that maybe they can receive communion, but they’ll go to the priest and they’ll say, “Well, Father, I don’t have anything to confess.” It’s highly unlikely that such a person has lived such a saintly life that they don’t have anything to confess after a year or more of having gone to confession. More likely what it is is that they haven’t thought about the sins they have committed.

On the one hand, we don’t want to have such an introspective view of our sins that we lose sight of God’s mercy and grace and we think that God is just looking for an excuse to send us to hell; but on the other hand, we do need to take seriously the fact that we have sins that we need to repent of. We should be regularly asking God to show us what we need to repent [of], and especially before you go to confession, but really at least at the end of every day if not more frequently, we should be asking ourselves and asking God to show us in what way we failed to do what God has asked us to do.

Obviously, if we do something that God tells us not to do, we know that that’s a sin, but there are also sins of omission. There are many things that we should be doing that we don’t do. Obviously, none of us can say that we’ve done everything that we can possibly could do, so there’s always some way that we failed to do something in the perfect sense. So, for example, there’s lots of poor people around us; very few of us have given so many alms that we can really say that we’ve done everything that we could have done to help the poor. It’s not a sin that we could say, “You violated this law because you did exactly what God told you not to do,” but in this case, you maybe have done what God told you to do, but to what extent did you do it? Was it with a generous heart? Was it something that you did as often you were able to do it?

Often you get to these very fine points of sin. You could spend all your time thinking, “Was that really a sin?” Or you could just say, “Lord, I’m an unworthy servant, and I have not done everything you have asked me to do. I have failed to live up to the ideal,” and acknowledge it as a sin. God will know to what extent it really was a sin, but if you ask for God’s forgiveness, you can trust that he will be merciful, so you don’t need to ever be afraid to confess something as a sin. If you think that it’s a sin, go ahead and confess it.

St. John the Apostle, in his epistles, says, “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.” But then he goes on to say, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” We don’t want to go on the one hand and say that we have no sin, and we don’t have anything that we need to worry about; but we don’t want to be of the opinion that God is grudging in his forgiveness. God is very merciful. But it’s essential to our spiritual lives that we be aware of our sins, but we also have a firm believe in God’s mercy and forgiveness.

One other thing that this petition is telling us is that here, in a small way, we’re being asked to be like God. To be a Christian is to strive to be godly, which means to be God-like, or like God. Obviously we can’t be like God in any ultimate sense—we can’t even come close to that—but in small ways we can imitate God. Particularly when it comes to being merciful to those that have sinned [against] us.

St. Augustine, when he talks about this petition, he basically says: What a deal we have here. You can basically write your own ticket when it comes to forgiveness. All you have to do is forgive people the way that you want to be forgiven. If you just forgive people, then you know that you’ll be forgiven. What an offer! Why would anyone not do that? Well, the thing is, often when it comes to someone who’s really hurt us, people are waiting to feel better about the hurt. That’s not what forgiveness is. Obviously, it would be nice if we could get to the point if we have so forgiven someone that we don’t even remember what they did to us. That would be the ideal that we would want to strive for.

But if someone has deeply hurt you, it’s not likely you’re going to get to this point in this life where you’ve forgotten what they’ve done. It’s also not likely that you’re ever going to feel real good about what they did, and it’s quite possible that you may not want to be around the person who hurt you. It doesn’t mean that you need to be their buddy or that you need to go out of your way and come back and be hurt more by that person. But forgiveness means that you sincerely pray for them, pray that God would save them, that God would enlighten them with the truth. And if you pray that, you’ve forgiven them, and your feelings are an entirely separate question. You may not feel great about that person, but can use the negative thoughts that you may have about somebody as a reminder to pray for them, and if you keep praying for them every time that you have those negative thoughts, then you’ve forgiven them. You can turn a temptation into a blessing, into something that is good.

A few weeks ago, we heard the parable of the unforgiving servant. Just to refresh your memory, this was the servant who had racked up 10,000 talents’ worth of debt. Obviously, this wasn’t a field hand here that we’re talking about; this was someone who was a very high-ranking official for a king. To rack up that kind of debt, he would have had to have been very high-ranking and very irresponsible with all that he had been given. Ten thousand talents in gold would be the equivalent of many hundreds of millions of dollars, if not more than that, in our contemporary time. So if you had such a debt, it would be an impossible debt for you to ever pay. We’re told that the king looked at him and he heard his accounts; he said, “Well, sell everything that he has and let the debt be paid.”

So this man who had been this high official was suddenly looking at losing everything that he’d had and being sold into slavery. He fell down on his knees and he said, “Be patient with me, and I’ll pay you everything!” And there’s no way he possibly could have paid everything, but he asked for the king to be merciful, and the king had pity, and he forgave him the whole debt. That would have been a great, heart-warming story except for the fact that the guy went out and there was some guy who owed him maybe $10,000 in contemporary money. He grabbed him by the throat and he said, “Pay me what you owe!” And the guy appealed to him the same way: “Be patient with me, and I’ll pay you everything.”

But rather than imitating God, which is what he was called to do, this man dragged him off and threw him in prison till he would pay the debt. We’re told that his fellow servants, which the Fathers tell us are the angels, came and told the king what had happened. So they brought him before the king, who said, “O thou wicked servant! I forgave thee all that debt because thou desiredest me. Shouldst thou not have had compassion on thy fellow servant, even as I had pity on thee?” And his lord was wroth and delivered him to the tormentors till he would pay all that was due unto him. Then he ends the parable with these words: “So likewise shall my heavenly Father do also unto you if ye, from your heart, forgive not everyone his brother of their trespasses.”

Right after the Lord’s Prayer, what did Christ say that expounded upon this one point? He said if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive you your trespasses. So every time you pray the Lord’s Prayer, if you refuse to forgive those that have hurt you, you’re calling judgment on yourself, because if you’re refusing to forgive, then what the Lord is telling us is that God is going to [refuse to] forgive you, because even though acquired this hurt from this other person, in comparison with what we have done to God, in comparison to the debt that we owe to God, it’s insignificant debt. And if God has forgiven us, we have to be imitators of him; we have to forgive.

On the other hand, what a joy it is to forgive and to be forgiven! There’s no more joyful service in our liturgical year than Forgiveness Sunday. It’s called Forgiveness Sunday because the gospel reading begins with the Lord’s expounding that very verse that I just read on the Lord’s Prayer. At the end of the forgiveness vespers, we all bow down and we ask each other’s forgiveness, even if we’re not aware of any way that we’ve offended other people. If you participate in that and if you sincerely ask for forgiveness and then impart forgiveness to everyone in the parish, you walk out of that service, even though your legs may be a little bit wobbly after all the prostrations, you walk out of that with a great joy, a great release.

And that doesn’t have to happen only once a year; that can happen every day, if we’ll simply do what the Lord tells us to do and to forgive sincerely from our heart those who have offended us and have the faith that God will forgive us in the same way. As we hear in the psalms at baptism, “Blessed are they whose iniquities are forgiven and whose sins are covered.” Amen.