Tuesday, Week of 1 Lent

“For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father also will forgive you; but if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses” (Matthew 6:14-15).

In today’s reading, Jesus tells his disciples not to “heap up empty phrases” (6:7); God doesn’t hear you because of endless words but, instead, God knows what you need before you even ask him. Because of that, Jesus teaches us to pray using the words to the Lord’s Prayer. He then goes on to emphasize our own responsibility in living the kind of life we’ve asked for – we need to forgive others if we desire God to forgive us.

The Lord’s Prayer begins by hallowing God’s name and establishing a relationship between us: “Our Father who art in heaven” (6:9). The whole prayer flows from that relationship. Since God is our Father, we can ask him to fulfill our needs. And since we hallow God’s name, we have a responsibility to lead lives befitting God’s holiness.

Giving glory to God is about more than just asking him to forgive us. We, too, have a part to play in our relationship with the Father. He asks us for so little, only that we let go of the hatred and anger that burdens us, so that we can accept God’s love and forgiveness instead of having hearts poisoned by an unwillingness to forgive.

Forgiving someone else doesn’t actually do a whole lot for that person: they still have the responsibility to seek out relationship with God, to heal that relationship by asking God to forgive them, to grow in that relationship by asking God for the strength to turn from further wrongdoing. Forgiving someone else does a whole lot more for us than it does for them, because it makes us open to the process of forgiveness. A person who has never forgiven cannot truly accept forgiveness or know its value. It’s like Jesus said: who will be more grateful and full of love for God, the one who has been forgiven of little, or the one forgiven of much? By acknowledging the gift of offering forgiveness, we begin to understand how much more we receive when forgiven by the One with whom our relationship has been most damaged by sin.

At the end of the prayer, Jesus emphasises that, by praying to God and seeking relationship with him, there are things we must do. Our prayer cannot be empty words heaped up before God, or promises of wanting a relationship with Him in which we do nothing. Our prayer must include the way we live, because the things we do are part of our relationship with God and are thus prayers. The simplest way to put this is to say that life itself is the prayer. So we must live giving glory to God, relying on Him, and seeking to draw closer to him by living with love, as He loves us.