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14 For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; 15 but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses. (Matthew 6:14-15 NRSV)
Dear Friend, as we pray today, please pray this request shared by a dear friend and former DS in another conference: "Prayers for Bruce, a dear friend, a believer, a Vietnam vet, in Methodist Hospital in DesMoines for Cancer treatments. Peace, Dave." May our voices ring in heaven asking that Bruce receive healing and new strength! Prayers also for this old man as I will preach at Pilgrim Presbyterian Church on April 12th. May the Lord give me a word!
My favorite movie of all time, until it changed, was Monty Python's Search for The Holy Grail. It came out when I was in seminary in Denver,Colorado. I guess being far from home, single, lonely, and eager to entertain myself, I went to see the movie and loved it, and returned a totatl of sixteen times. Money well spent says I! There is a scene in the movie where the seekers (looking for the Holy Grail) are stopped by an old knight known as The Black Knight, who simply says, "None shall pass." *link below to see that scene. And this verse is saying the same thing!
There are passages in Scripture that comfort. There are passages that instruct. And then there are passages that simply stop you where you are and refuse to let you pass until you have dealt honestly with what they are saying.
Matthew 6:14–15 is the third kind.
Jesus has just finished teaching His disciples to pray — the prayer we call the Lord's Prayer, the one that has been on the lips of the church in every generation since. And embedded in that prayer, almost in passing, is a petition that most of us recite without fully absorbing its weight: forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. It is a remarkable line — the only petition in the prayer that comes with a built-in condition. We are asking God to treat us the way we treat others.
And then Jesus steps outside the prayer and underlines it. Twice. Once positively, once negatively. As if He knows — because He does know — that this is precisely the place where His followers will be most tempted to make an exception, to find a footnote, to quietly decide that this particular teaching does not apply in their particular case.
There is no footnote. There is no exception. There are just these two verses, standing like a door that must be walked through. This comes, believe it or not, at the heart of Jesus' famous Sermon on the Mount and the seriousness of the Lord's words is what we shall study; for Jesus was speaking not only to the gathered crowds, but to the !2 especially. "For if you forgive others their trespasses..."
The word translated trespasses is paraptōmata — literally, a falling beside the path, a deviation, a stumbling. It is a word that captures the way human beings wrong one another — not always with calculated malice, but with the ordinary failures of selfishness, carelessness, blindness, and broken promises that accumulate in any relationship over time.
People will wrong you. Some will do so casually, without realizing the damage they leave behind. Some will do so deliberately, with full knowledge of what they are taking from you. Some will betray your trust in ways that alter the course of your life. Some will wound you in the very places where you are most exposed — precisely because they were close enough to know where those places are.
Jesus does not minimize any of this. He does not say the trespasses are small, or that they don't matter, or that you should simply pretend they didn't happen. He acknowledges that there is something real to forgive — a genuine wrong that has been committed, a genuine debt that is owed. Forgiveness is not the denial of injury. It is the decision about what to do with an injury that is real.
The condition Jesus sets — if you forgive — is a present, active, ongoing posture. Not a single dramatic moment of release, after which forgiveness is permanently achieved, but a continued orientation of the will toward the one who has wronged you. Forgiveness, in this sense, is less a feeling and more a decision renewed as often as the wound resurfaces.
"...your heavenly Father will also forgive you..."
The promise here is as clear as anything Jesus says. Forgiveness extended to others is met by forgiveness from God. The one who releases others from what they owe finds themselves released from what they owe. Grace given flows into grace received.
The heavenly Father's forgiveness, in other words, is not simply the reward for our forgiving others. It is the source from which our forgiveness of others must flow. We forgive because we have been forgiven. We release because we have been released. The grace we extend is always a secondary grace — a passing on of what we ourselves have first received.
"But if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses." And here is where the passage refuses every comfortable shortcut.
This is among the most unsparing things Jesus says in the Gospels, and the church has wrestled with its implications in every generation. Is Jesus saying that our forgiveness of others earns God's forgiveness of us — that it is a precondition we must satisfy before divine mercy is available? The more faithful reading understands the connection differently. An unforgiving heart is not a heart that has genuinely encountered the grace of God. It is a heart that is still operating by the logic of debt and merit — still keeping accounts, still insisting on what is owed, still measuring relationships by the ledger. And a heart still operating by that logic has not yet fully received, or has not yet fully internalized, what forgiveness from God actually means.
The refusal to forgive is not merely a moral failure. It is a spiritual one. It reveals a heart that has not yet stood honestly before its own need and received, with open hands, the mercy that was offered.
Forgiveness is not the same as reconciliation. Reconciliation requires two parties — the one who forgives and the one who receives that forgiveness with genuine repentance. Forgiveness can be granted even when the other person is absent, unrepentant, or no longer living. You can release someone from your inner ledger without having a restored relationship with them. Sometimes, especially in cases of abuse or betrayal, restored relationship is neither possible nor safe — and Jesus is not commanding it here.
Forgiveness is not the erasure of memory. The wound does not have to disappear for forgiveness to be real. Grief and forgiveness are not opposites — you can mourn what was lost while simultaneously choosing not to hold the person who caused the loss in a posture of resentment.
Forgiveness is not the pronouncement that what happened was acceptable. It does not declare the trespass to be no trespass. It does not minimize the harm or excuse the failure. It says, rather: this was real, it cost me something, and I am choosing not to let it define the posture of my heart toward this person going forward. That is a profoundly costly choice — and Jesus never pretends it is otherwise.
Forgiveness is not a feeling that arrives after sufficient emotional processing. It is a decision of the will, made often in the absence of any feeling that supports it, and then renewed as the feeling of injury reasserts itself — which it will, sometimes for years. The willingness to keep forgiving, to refuse to let resentment rebuild what grace has torn down, is the ongoing work of a lifetime.
Lent is precisely suited to this passage because Lent is, at its core, a season of honest self-examination in the light of the cross.
The cross is the place where God's forgiveness of us is most fully displayed. Jesus, in the moment of His execution, prays for His killers: Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing. He practices what He preaches, at infinite cost. And the entire movement of Holy Week — from Palm Sunday through Good Friday to Easter — is the story of how far God was willing to go to forgive us. While we were still sinners. While we were, in the deepest sense, the ones who put Him there.
To sit with Matthew 6:14–15 during Lent is to hold it up against that reality and ask: in light of what has been forgiven me — the full weight of it, the cost of it, the grace of it — is there anyone I am still refusing to forgive?
You do not have to pretend the wound is not there. You do not have to manufacture a feeling you do not have. You simply have to be willing to begin — to bring the unforgiveness before the God who has forgiven you everything, and to ask Him to do in you what you cannot do in yourself.
PRAYER: Father, You have forgiven me more than I can fully reckon with. Soften whatever in me is still clenched around an old wound, and give me the grace to release it — not because it didn't matter, but because Your mercy toward me is greater than any debt owed to me. In Jesus' strong name I pray, Amen.
Have a great and blessed day in the Lord! OUR CALL TO ACTION: Bring one name before God — the person it costs you something to forgive — and simply say: I am willing to be made willing. Let that be the first step.
I love you and I thank God for you! You matter to God and you matter to me! Lead the way with love!
Pastor Eradio Valverde, Jr.
