Forgive Us Our Debts

And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. MATTHEW 6:12

When Augustine came, in the Enchiridion, to the article of the Creed that follows the holy church, he paused over the order of the words. After the church comes the forgiveness of sins, and he did not think the order was an accident. “For it is by this that the Church on earth stands,” he writes. The church is not a society of people who have stopped needing mercy. It is the company of the forgiven, who go on being forgiven, and who can only live together because they do. The church at Hippo was not held up by the holiness of its members. It was held up by pardon.

Not free from sin

Augustine begins with baptism, in which, he taught, all guilt is washed away. But he will not let anyone think that the need for forgiveness ends at the font. The rest of our life, he says, gives constant occasion for the forgiveness of sins, however far we advance in righteousness.

He draws a careful line here. “For although every crime is a sin, every sin is not a crime.” A believer’s life may, by grace, be kept free of the gross offences that scandalise the church and cut a man off from the body of Christ. It will not be kept free of sin. The word spoken in irritation, the duty left undone, the daily coldness of love — these stay with us to the end.

If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. 1 JOHN 1:8

There is a realism here that is a mercy to anxious consciences. Expect to need forgiveness every day, Augustine says in effect, and come for it every day.

The daily prayer

The place where he comes for it is the Lord’s Prayer. The daily prayer of the believer, he says, takes away the small sins of daily life. Forgive us our debts is a petition no Christian outgrows; there is, he remarks drily, no want of debts to be forgiven.

But the petition has a condition, and Augustine presses it hard. We ask to be forgiven as we forgive. He calls forgiveness a kind of almsgiving — “to forgive a man who asks for pardon, is really to give alms” — and then he goes further. Of all the alms we can give, none is greater than to forgive from the heart a sin that has been committed against us. To love the one who wishes us ill, and do him good when we can, is the mark of the mature children of God.

But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you. MATTHEW 5:44

He knows that few reach that height. The least the petition asks, he says, is that when someone who has wronged us begs our pardon, we forgive him from the heart. But he will not soften the Lord’s own warning, which follows the prayer in Matthew’s Gospel.

For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you: but if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses. MATTHEW 6:14–15

“The man whom the thunder of this warning does not awaken is not asleep, but dead,” Augustine writes; and then, with the hope that never quite leaves him, he adds that the voice is so powerful it can awaken even the dead.

Sins we grow used to

One of the most searching passages in the Enchiridion concerns sins that come to seem small. Some sins, however great, look trivial simply because we are used to them. They are no longer hidden; they are boasted of. He tells how, expounding Galatians some years before, he had been driven to cry out: “Woe to the sins of men! for it is only when we are not accustomed to them that we shrink from them.”

Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness. ISAIAH 5:20

Every age has its accustomed sins, and Augustine admits that in his own day some were practised so openly that the church dared not discipline even its clergy for them. The first step towards being forgiven is to see that there is something to forgive. A conscience dulled by custom has to be woken before it can be washed.

Mercy that makes us repent

Where does such a waking come from? Not from ourselves, Augustine says. Even repentance needs grace. Shame holds us back from humbling ourselves, because the good opinion of others gives us more pleasure than righteousness does; and so the mercy of God is needed not only when a man repents, but to bring him to repentance at all. His proof is Peter in the high priest’s courtyard.

And the Lord turned, and looked upon Peter. And Peter remembered the word of the Lord, how he had said unto him, Before the cock crow, thou shalt deny me thrice. And Peter went out, and wept bitterly. LUKE 22:61–62

Peter did not turn first. The Lord turned, and looked. Every true repentance begins with that look. And because it begins with God, no one who truly repents need ever despair. However great the sin, Augustine says, the mercy of God is never to be despaired of by those who truly repent; and in weighing repentance we should look less at the length of time than at the depth of sorrow, for a broken and contrite heart God does not despise.

The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise. PSALM 51:17

The one sin that cannot be forgiven, on his reading, is the refusal of forgiveness itself: to despise God’s mercy, not believing that sins are forgiven, and to persist in that hardness to the last day of one’s life. The unpardonable sin is not a slip that a tender conscience falls into unawares. It is a settled no to pardon.

Where to read with care

Protestant readers will find some things here to question. Augustine speaks of alms as making satisfaction for sins, of times of penance fixed by the church, and of sins being forgiven only within the church. The Reformers, reading Scripture, insisted that the one satisfaction for sin is Christ’s own sacrifice, and that works of mercy are the fruit of forgiveness, never its price. Augustine himself, it should be said, was fierce against anyone who thought alms could buy leave to go on sinning; the life must be changed, he says, and God has given no man licence to sin. What no reader should miss is the heart of it: the church lives by pardon, pardon is daily, and those who receive it must give it.

And be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you. EPHESIANS 4:32

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Pray the Lord’s Prayer slowly each day this week, and at the words forgive us our debts, name before God the sins of that day.

2. Is there someone who has asked your pardon and not truly received it? Forgive them from the heart, and tell them so.

3. Name one sin that has come to seem small to you because you, or those around you, are used to it. Ask God to let you see it as He does.

4. If you have despaired of being forgiven, read Luke 22:54–62 and notice who turned first.

5. Examine whether you have treated any good work — giving, serving, praying — as a payment for sin. Thank God that Christ has paid, and give freely.

A PRAYER

Father, I come to You as one who needs forgiving every day, and I thank You that there is forgiveness with You.

Forgive me my debts, the ones I see and the ones I have grown used to, and give me a heart that forgives as freely as I am forgiven.

When I will not turn, turn and look on me, as You looked on Peter, and lead me to repent.

Keep Your church standing on Your pardon, not on our goodness, for the sake of Jesus Christ, who has paid what we could never pay. Amen.