Forgiveness

Reading these passages

Two different Greek words sit behind the single English word forgive on this page, and they are not doing the same work. Matthew and Luke use aphiemi — to send away, to release, to let go. It is the ordinary word for cancelling a debt or dismissing a crowd, with no religious colouring of its own. Paul, writing to the Ephesians and the Colossians, uses charizomai, built on charis, grace: to give freely, to hand something over as a gift.

The distinction is worth holding onto, because the two words answer different objections. Release speaks to the person who cannot put a wrong down. Gift speaks to the person who believes the wrong must first be paid for by someone. Scripture uses both and does not choose between them.

The debt language

The Lord's Prayer asks for forgiveness in commercial terms: And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. The noun is opheilema — what is owed. It is not a poetic reach for a metaphor; it is the standard word a first-century creditor would have used about money.

Two verses later Matthew changes the picture. Where verse 12 said debts, verse 14 says trespasses, translating paraptoma, a false step or a slip. The same passage describes the same problem twice: as something owed, and as something stumbled into. Neither image is the official one.

The debt language does most of the theological work here, and it sets a limit on what forgiveness can be made to mean. A cancelled debt is not a debt that was never incurred, and it is not a debt that turned out on inspection to be smaller than it looked. The sum stands. What changes is that the claim on it is dropped. Nothing in the word suggests the loss was imaginary or that the person releasing it has stopped counting the cost — only that they have stopped pursuing it.

The hardest verse

Matthew states the promise and then, in the next breath, states its reverse: 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.

There is no exception clause and no softening, and Christians have read that second sentence in at least three ways for a very long time.

Some read it as diagnostic. On this reading the verse describes a condition rather than imposing one: a person who will not forgive shows, by that refusal, that they have not grasped what was forgiven them. The parable that follows in Matthew 18, where a servant released from an unpayable debt seizes a colleague over a trivial one, is usually read as support.

Others read it as a straightforward condition. This reading has the longer history — it is how much of the patristic and medieval tradition took the petition, and the diagnostic reading above is largely a later development. The sentence says what it says, and the discomfort it produces is the point of it.

A third reading distinguishes standing from fellowship — an unforgiving believer has not lost their salvation but has interrupted their relationship with God, in the way any unconfessed sin does.

These are not compatible, and this page is not going to settle a question the church has left open for two thousand years. What is worth noticing is that the verse is severe under every one of them. No reading available makes it comfortable, and the readings that try tend to be the ones that quietly stop quoting verse 15.

One detail that is easy to lose: this sits inside the Lord's Prayer, which is written in the plural throughout. Us and our. Whatever the verse is doing, it is not addressed to an individual working out their private standing alone.

Seventy times seven

Peter arrives with a question that sounds generous: Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? till seven times? Rabbinic guidance of the period suggested three. Peter has more than doubled it before asking, which is usually how a person asks a question they expect to be praised for.

The answer: I say not unto thee, Until seven times: but, Until seventy times seven.

The Greek here is genuinely ambiguous. Hebdomekontakis hepta can be read as seventy-seven or as seventy times seven, and modern translations divide on it; the King James takes the second. For once the ambiguity does not matter much, because both numbers are past the point where anyone could keep a tally, and being unable to keep the tally is the answer Peter was given.

The phrase has a history, though, and that is the part worth knowing. It appears once before in scripture, in the mouth of Lamech, five generations from Cain: If Cain shall be avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy and sevenfold. Lamech is boasting. He has killed a man for wounding him and is announcing an escalation — the earliest recorded statement of disproportionate revenge. In the Greek Old Testament the number reads with the same construction Jesus uses.

Whether Peter heard the echo is not recoverable. But the formula for unlimited vengeance is turned, without comment, into the formula for unlimited pardon.

A third verb

Luke reports the same teaching with a different word again. Where Matthew has aphiemi, Luke 6:37 uses apolyo — to set free, to discharge, to send away. It is the verb for releasing a prisoner and the verb used when a marriage is dissolved. Of the three words on this page it is the most physical: something that was held is no longer being held.

The verse arrives at the end of a short sequence, and the sequence escalates: Judge not, and ye shall not be judged: condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned: forgive, and ye shall be forgiven.

Judging is an opinion. Condemning is a verdict. Forgiving is neither — it is an act, and it is the only one of the three stated as something to do rather than something to stop doing. The first two can be obeyed by remaining silent. The third cannot.

Paul puts the horizontal side in the language of a contest: Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good. The verb is nikao, to conquer — the root behind the name Nicholas and behind Nike. The framing is unusual and worth taking seriously. Paul does not say that returning evil for evil is wrong, though he thinks it is. He says it is losing. The person who answers in kind has been beaten by the thing they were fighting.

And Ephesians supplies the ground for all of it, in the gift word rather than the release word: forgiving one another, even as God for Christ's sake hath forgiven you. The King James renders a Greek phrase that is simply in Christ; the sense is not that God was persuaded by Christ but that the forgiveness happens within him.

Faithful and just

1 John describes God's side of the transaction with a word pairing most readers slide past: If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

Faithful and merciful is what the sentence seems to want. The word is dikaios — just, righteous, the courtroom term. The claim is not that God is lenient with a confessed sin but that failing to forgive one would be an injustice. Whatever weight a reader puts on that, it is not an appeal to God's good nature. It is an appeal to his consistency.

The verse also uses two verbs where one would do: forgive, and cleanse. Release and wash. The claim is dropped and the residue is dealt with, and the sentence treats those as separate operations — which anyone who has been forgiven something and still felt it will recognise.

The Psalms put the same thing geographically: As far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our transgressions from us.

The choice of axis repays attention. Travel north far enough and you reach the pole, after which every step is southward; the two directions meet, and the distance between them is finite. East and west never meet. Whichever way you go you are still going that way. Of the two pairs of directions available, the psalm picks the one with no meeting point.

Which is the note Colossians ends on, and the reason none of this reads as advice: even as Christ forgave you, so also do ye. The instruction is not that forgiveness is healthy, or that resentment is corrosive, or that letting go will help. It is a comparison, and the comparison is the entire argument.