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Matthew 6:12; 18:10-35; Romans 13:8
I’m going to step out on a limb this morning and address one of the most vexing and crucial questions of the Christian faith: is it “debts ” and “debtors” or “trespasses” and “those who trespass against us” or, more of recent, “sins” and “those who have sinned against us”. I was once told that a previous minister in the church I served down in Caledon, ON, Claude Presbyterian Church, had a good explanation. He was Rev. Mills from back in the ‘50’s. It was July and there was a couple visiting from the nearby Inglewood United Church as they closed for that month while their minister was on vacation. When it came time to say the Lord’s Prayer, of course the Presbyterians at Claude said “debts” and “debtors” while the couple from the United Church loudly voiced “trespasses” and “those who trespass against us”. It was noticeable that the United Church couple suddenly felt self-conscious. So, after the service Rev. Mills decided to set them at ease and went to them and said, “We’re Presbyterians and we’re mostly Scots. We say ‘debts’ and ‘debtors’ because, frankly, it’s harder for a Scot to forgive a debt than to forgive a trespass.” Though it makes sense, that is not the reason.
So, briefly, the answer to that question begins with noting that the prayer appears twice in the gospels and the Greek word that gets translated as “trespass” appears in neither. Matthew says, “forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.” and Luke says, “forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone who is indebted to us.” There’s an easy reason for the difference between “debts” and “sins”. Jesus spoke a dialect of Hebrew known as Aramaic and in Aramaic the same word means both “a sin” or “a debt”. So, to translate what Jesus said from Aramaic into Greek, Matthew went with “debts” and Luke chose “sins” to mean a moral fault against God or another person, or even better, the failure to do that which is good for God and for others when you should have and therefore, you are left owing both an apology and restitution for having either failed to do that good or for having done something offensive.
So, what Jesus most likely meant in this part of the Lord’s Prayer was, “Forgive us for not doing the good that we should have done for which we are now owing apology and restitution as we ourselves have forgiven the apology and restitution that others owe us for not doing good to us when they should have.” To Jesus this verse of the Lord’s Prayer is deeply rooted in the Jewish concept that God created us to do good to and for one another; yet, for some reason, which we call sin, we both fail to do that good and rather instead of the good, we do selfishly motivated harm to each other and are, thus, left owing the good that we should have done as well as apology and restitution.
Okay, still awake? Let’s ponder how trespasses got in there? Well, we owe that to a theologian/pastor of the church from the early 3rd Century, a man named Origen. He appears to have been the first to have written the Lord’s Prayer in such a way as to be used in the context of public worship. He simply decided to use the Greek word we translate as trespasses where Matthew used “debts” and Luke used “sins”. Only Origen knows for sure why he did this. I would speculate that as Origen was well versed in Paul and Paul used the word for trespasses more frequently than anybody else in the New Testament when talking about sin. To trespass or a trespass is a wrongful incursion upon the person, property, or rights of another. Or, with respect to God, it is to try to claim and do for yourself what is God’s domain to claim and do – playing God.
Interestingly, this Greek word for trespass also means to stumble into the wrong – getting tripped up by a temptation or by something you didn’t see coming to the extent of falling away into a rejection of God and God’s will. Life goes that way at times - “I was looking at that beautiful woman, tripped on a stone and over the cliff I went only to land at her place and what happened after that I figured was God’s will.” Paul also used “trespass” in passages considered to be most crucial for his explanation of how we have been forgiven and justified by means of Jesus’ faithful life, death, and resurrection according to God’s grace.
So…therefore…Origen was probably just trying to create a prayer for congregational worship based on the prayer Jesus gave his disciples and being well versed in Paul, he used Paul’s language. It also helps Origen’s case that Jesus himself used the word for trespasses in his little ditty that immediately follows the Lord’s Prayer. Jesus said, “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.” The whole discussion here can be simplified into saying that the actual act of forgiving is more important than the words we use to describe what we are to forgive.
So, the “debts” wording is more correct biblically, but tradition has passed on to us a prayer for use in worship that is based on Scripture and the full meaning of sin and forgiveness. So, we ask, “Which should we pray?” Well, the World Council of Churches in the late 60’s decided to help us out and created a new version, the Ecumenical Lord’s Prayer, which says, “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.” That prayer is really all we need for worship’s sake provided that we have been taught and understand what is meant by sin. In the first place, sin is our estrangement from God that becomes visible in our lives particularly through selfish self-beneficent behavior. Sin is when we don’t do the good for God and for others that God requires of us as God is the one who has given us life, life which God himself said was very good when he created it and thus having not done it we are left owing.
Personally, I’m Presbyterian. I choose to go with debts and debtors when I pray this prayer which I try to discipline myself to pray whenever my mind is idle, or worrying, or self-attacking, or unhelpfully monologuing. I choose the debt imagery because we are debtors who owe a debt of gratitude towards God for our creation and our salvation in Jesus and his continual working in our lives to make us to be more and more in the image of Christ Jesus as individuals and more and more in the image of God’s Triune self as the body of believers. Moreover, because of that debt to God, we owe each other a debt of love, which is a debt that is always outstanding.
Paul says as much there at Romans 13:8 (ESV), “Owe no one anything, except to love each other, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.” Or as the NIV says it, “Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for he who loves his fellowman has fulfilled the law.” Paul is quite clear that we have an outstanding debt of love owed to God, each other, and all peoples that we must be about paying. Even when we have been wronged against. This isn’t something that we can be choosy about. We cannot decide to love one and hate another. We owe all people a debt of love. To withhold that love is Sin. To act upon another in a way that is not love is to trespass against them. In this sin-sick world, love seems wasteful, to love is a good way to get hurt. Quite frankly, to love is to bear the cross and so is what it is to forgive. Amen.
