Daily a lesson for May 20, 2014

Today's Daily Lesson is from Matthew chapter 6 verses 14 and 15:

14 For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, 15 but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.

After the dismantling of of Apartheid in South Africa, as the country was seeking its way forward into a unified future, Desmond Tutu used to say, "There is no future without forgiveness."

It is extraordinary to me that Jesus taught that if you wish to find forgiveness you must first give forgiveness.  This is counterintuitive for me.  I am inclined to think that the one who has received forgiveness is the one most able to give it; but apparently it is the other way around.  The one who gives forgiveness is the one who will receive it.

To forgive means literally "to let go of".  I think it is difficult for us to let go of other people's sins because, if we are honest, holding onto those sins gives us a sense of power.  Resentment at having been wronged has a certain pleasure to it.  If we are honest, we have to admit that we enjoy lording it (whatever "it" is) over other people.  In an odd way, we actually come to enjoy the taste of the bitter root.

But God has no taste for bitterness.  His land is the land of milk and of honey, where the bitter herb is left behind.  To continue to feast on the bitterness of resentment is to continue to live as a prisoner to the past.  And Tutu is right; there is no future in it.

I think Jesus told us to forgive in order to be forgiven because He knew that receiving forgiveness is an act of humility; it is an act of powerlessness.  We literally "beg forgiveness"and when we do we admit that God is God and and that we are not.

But you know, I would rather be a begging in God's honey-filled future than lording it over everyone in my bitter past.

Postscript: 
  It also occurs to me that we can't receive the forgiveness we need into our hands so long as you're holding tight-fisted onto the sins of somebody else.