When I was growing up, my brother loved playing the game Monopoly. He often asked the rest of our family to play with him–a request that was usually met with groans. “Do you know how long a game of Monopoly takes?” one of us would ask. The answer was hours, sometimes even days. Eventually, we would break down to his constant requests, and we would play Monopoly. He was a ruthless player. If someone got up to use the restroom, he might fudge the roll of the dice so that he could move his game piece to the spot he wanted to land on. He would strike hard bargains with people if they landed on one of his properties but couldn’t afford to pay the rent. He was a bit of a Monopoly shark, if such a thing exists.

Whenever we played Monopoly as a family, I always hoped I could get a “Get out of Jail Free” card, not because I wanted to use it to get out of jail, but because I knew that card would be worth a lot of money down the road. If someone was broke, went to jail, and didn’t succeed at rolling doubles to get out of jail, I could convince them to give me any property I wanted in exchange for my “Get out of Jail Free” card.

That card gave me power in the game, the ability to leverage other people’s desperate situations to get what I wanted. It offered them “forgiveness,” but it was for my benefit more than it was for theirs. It was a pardon with strings attached.

Today we’re talking about this line of the Lord’s Prayer: “Forgive us our debts, and we forgive our debtors.” This line, probably more than any other in the prayer, is a source of debate and wondering. At funeral services, when this prayer is prayed, I always feel a hint of anxiety as we get closer to this line in the prayer. Am I supposed to say “debts,” or “trespasses?” In the previous congregation where Jeff and I served, people were accustomed to praying, “forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.” So, which is it? Debts, trespasses, sins, or something else? Which version is right? And, what does it mean to forgive others as we have been forgiven? Does that mean we aren’t forgiven by God if we don’t forgive others? 

To help us as we dig into this challenging line of the Lord’s Prayer, we have two Scriptures to guide us: Jeremiah 31 – a passage of hope about the day when God’s law will be written on our hearts, and Matthew 18 – a parable about a man who was hopelessly indebted to the king. The prophet Jeremiah gives us a glimpse of what it looks like to be changed by the radical grace and love of God, and the parable from Matthew helps us think about how forgiveness works in practice.

Forgive us our debts, trespasses, sins, wrongs. So, which is it? The short answer is that it depends on which of the Gospels you are reading. Matthew uses the word for debts, whereas Luke uses both the word for sins and the word for debts. The longer answer is somewhat more complicated. 

According to an article called “Poverty in the first-century Galilee” 9 out of every 10 people “lived close to the subsistence level or below it. There was no middle class. The state did not show much concern for the poor.” Because of this extreme poverty and no governmental help for those who were destitute, indebtedness was extremely common. Author and theologian N.T. Wright says this about the situation: “The problem of debt was very serious in Jesus’ time. When the revolutionaries took over the Temple at the start of the Jewish war against the Romans, thirty years after Jesus’ day, the first thing they did was to burn the records of debts.” Imagine being buried in debt, and being taught to pray to God, “Forgive us our debts.” That freedom from the physical burden of unpayable debt would be like Pastor Adam Hamilton’s sermon illustration of walking around with a backpack filled with rocks on his back and then finally being able to set it down. Relief. Instant relief.

In Adam Hamilton’s book on the Lord’s Prayer, he says that when someone got so far into debt they could never repay it, they might be given some grace for a little while. It would be rare and overwhelmingly generous for the creditor to forgive it permanently. More likely, one of two things would happen to you: you would either become a slave until you worked the debt off, or you would go to debtor’s prison. In the debtor’s prison, you would have to rely on someone else to pay the debt for you. This person would be called a redeemer, and by paying off your debt, they would buy your redemption from debtor’s prison. 

This culture around indebtedness was the backdrop to the parable Jesus told about the servant who was buried in debt. In this story, the servant owes 10,000 talents of debt to the king. This is more than what someone would earn after 15 years worth of work. I investigated how much money this would be equivalent to today, and found figures anywhere between 1.5 million dollars and 7 million dollars. Whatever the actual number might be, what’s important to the story was that it was an impossible debt. No matter what this servant did, he would never be able to pay it back. When the king comes looking to be paid back, the servant understandably is desperate. He can’t pay it back, so he will either be forced to work it off for the rest of his life, or he will be sent to debtor’s prison.

Eric Barreto, professor of New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary, wrote this about the servant’s situation: “Knowing his whole life was about to be crushed, the debtor begs for more time, more patience but receives something unexpected instead: a wholesale remission of his debts. “ Can you imagine the joy and relief?

How might you feel if the king took your note of impossible indebtedness and ran it through the paper shredder? I think I would be inclined to go pay it forward in some way. Or, maybe I’d want to go out to that special occasion restaurant to celebrate. Instead, this newly forgiven servant comes across a servant who owes him money – only a day’s wage as compared to the fifteen years’ wages he’s just been forgiven. The man who owes him a little bit of money pleads for mercy, but our main character instead has the guy thrown into debtors’ prison. All of the other servants see this, and they are infuriated. How could someone who was forgiven so much be so petty? They go and tell the king what has happened, and the king is infuriated too. Can you blame him?

But, as I’ve reflected on this parable, I realized I was being too hard on this forgiven servant and too easy on myself. I wondered if the servant was relieved to be forgiven so that he could keep on living the squandering life where he racked up such an impossible indebtedness in the first place. Maybe he didn’t really taste the reality of forgiveness, and saw it merely as that “Get out of Jail Free” card he could lord over others when they were in dire straits. He didn’t really experience true freedom; he thought he’d gotten away with what he’d done in the first place. See the difference? And when I think about it this way, I realize the many times I’ve been inclined to view forgiveness of my sins in the same way.

When we pray, “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors” we are asking God to give us forgiveness that transforms us. We are asking to be changed from people who are just trying to get away with as much as we can, into people who have experienced true redemption and are eager to give that same grace to others. N.T. Wright says it this way: “It is our birthright, as the followers of Jesus, to breathe in true divine forgiveness day by day, as the cool, clear air which our spiritual lungs need instead of the grimy, germ-laden air that is pumped at us from all sides. And once we start inhaling God’s fresh air, there is a good chance we will start to breathe it out, too. As we learn what it is like to be forgiven, we begin to discover that it is possible, and indeed joyful, to forgive others.”

This is why we pray, “Forgive us our debts.” So, why do other denominations use the word “trespasses?” There are two main reasons for this: 1) When we pray “forgive us our debts” we are asking for forgiveness of our indebtedness to God, which is our sins. In this way, “debts” is a metaphor for our trespasses, or our sins. 2) In the Gospel of Luke, this line of the Lord’s prayer reads, “And forgive us our sins/trespasses, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.” Neither way of praying the prayer is wrong. The word “debts” is the most accurate translation of the prayer in Matthew, but “trespasses” has a solid theological understanding behind it, too.

In Jeremiah 31, the prophet talks about a day when God’s law won’t just be something people tell us to follow, it will be something that lives within us. He writes, “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.”

The day is coming when this line of the prayer will just be who we are: “forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” We will know in full the profound, transformational forgiveness of God, and we will breathe out that same grace, mercy, and forgiveness on others. But for now, we continue praying it together week after week, and day by day, because we need God to remind us we have been set free. We need to ask and receive, again and again, so that our hearts will be transformed. We ask God to forgive us, not so that we can lord it over others, but so that we can be people of mercy as well. 

May God open us up to experience the profound joy of being set free. And may we be people who delight in setting others free with the love of God in Jesus Christ. Amen.