We forgive you too!

[AI translation] This is perhaps the most difficult phrase of the Lord's prayer that I have just read as a basic prayer: to forgive those who sin against us. It is not just a pious speech, it is not an expression of human religious experience or experience, it is not just about trying to forgive those who sin against us. No. Jesus says it this way: "As we also forgive". (Mt 6,12b) And how absolute forgiveness Jesus means, how weighty a part of the whole prayer, is shown by the fact that Jesus even returns to it specifically, and binds it to the souls of his disciples: "For if you forgive men their trespasses, your Father in heaven will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father in heaven forgive your trespasses."Now let each one think of those who have ever sinned against him. To sin against someone is a terrible thing. Let's put it this way: to sin against one another. Because I sin against others as much as others sin against me. We just don't keep track of our own sins. We don't remember it. We don't even notice it. Only what others sin against us. How much this or that person has sinned against me. How they hurt me, how they hurt me. We all have them, maybe more than one.
What terrible things happen between one person and another. How horribly people can sin against each other. How we can spoil, make bitter, ruin each other's lives, how we can turn God's beautiful world into hell! How we can wound each other's souls! How painfully we can stamp on each other's corns, even each other's hearts! How roughly we can trample on the happiness of each other's lives! And alas, when it is too late, when parents die or a spouse, child, brother or sister is lost: then we really feel what we have done to our father, to our child. But many people would scrape someone out of the grave with their ten fingernails, just to make up for what they have done! But it is too late. What we sin against each other is terrible.
It is so natural to be angry with the one who has sinned against you, to think of him with hatred, to scold him, to blame him where you can, or at best to draw conclusions from him and keep away from him. And so unnatural is what Jesus says, that man forgives the one who sins against him. He forgives without the person having made reparation for his sin. Without healing what was broken in me. Without giving back what he stole from me, and even without confessing his sin and asking for forgiveness. Yes, without any reparation, he forgives the one who sins against him. Because that's what forgiveness means. It means that even if the wound he has inflicted is still bleeding, even if the pain he has caused is not yet gone, you will wipe out his account, you will erase his sin from your soul, from your attitude, from your look, from your thoughts. You take it out of yourself, throw it away, throw it out, so that its memory no longer remains in you! And you never make him feel that he or she has ever sinned against you. As if nothing ever happened. Yes, that's what it means to forgive. To forgive those who sin against us.
But is that how you forgive? Does it exist? Well, it's very good to have this thought, because indeed, in order to forgive the offender in this way, something miraculous must first happen in him, in the offended person. Forgiveness is always a miracle. A miracle that only God can perform. And if a man can truly forgive the wrongdoer, it is never in the deepest sense of the word in his own power. We can forgive only when the natural impulses that lie dormant within us, waiting to be avenged, have been overcome by someone within us: by God. For forgiveness means finally breaking down the thick, hard Jericho walls behind which we have barricaded ourselves against the other, and behind which the cannons of our thoughts, words and actions are always ready to fire, aimed at the other who has sinned against us. And behind which our own lives slowly become entangled, lonely, oppressed. These walls are coming down. The fall of the walls of Jericho was a miracle. This is also a miracle. Indeed, it is not the result of our own efforts. You yourself, no matter how humane you are, are incapable of forgiveness. On our own, we are only capable of making the certain walls that separate us from the other thicker and thicker and building them higher and higher. These walls can only be broken down by God. Only God can blow the covers of our anger and hatred in such a way that they truly become nothing.
Remember how Stephen the Martyr begged for the angry people who stoned him to death? "Lord, do not impute this sin to them". But immediately before these words we read: "Falling on your knees..." (cf. Acts 7,60) And here is the secret of forgiveness. To be able to forgive the one who has sinned against me, I must first fall on my knees, I must first be a very humble, broken man, begging God's forgiveness for my own sins. For in the forgiveness we ask and receive from God is the secret of our forgiveness of others. The grateful joy of being forgiven by God - and truly by sheer grace, without any merit on my part, in view of Jesus' death alone - is the soil from which the fruit of forgiveness we bear springs. The acceptance and experience of personal forgiveness from God encourages, prompts and enables our hearts to forgive those who have sinned against Him, however much they may have done so. If a person has truly received God's forgiveness, he must also forgive himself for any sins committed against him. He must, he cannot help it! Whether he wants to or not, he must. Anyone whose heart has been touched by the forgiving love of Jesus, who has stood under the cross and has benefited from the immeasurable mercy and grace that has been poured out on him, who has received this mercy, will himself pour out forgiveness everywhere.
This also shows that the one cannot exist without the other. He who begs from the heart, Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner, cannot but forgive him who sins against him. "And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." (Mt 6,12) Thus says Jesus. With this prayer, Jesus brings all those who sin against us into our prayer closet. Whoever they are and whatever they have done against us. So that when you pray, you can't distance yourself from them, you can't say wait now, sinners against me, because I'm praying now, and then when I've said amen, I'll bring you out again, and then I'll be angry with you again. No such thing!
The people you scowl at, you think of with anger, the people you despise, the people you hate, they all come to you in your prayer room. At the invitation of Jesus himself! And when you fall down before God in your prayer room and beg Him, Lord, forgive me, Jesus will silently bring to you those who have sinned against you, the unpleasant one who has caused you so much trouble, the one who has gossiped about you, the one who has deceived you, the one who has got you into trouble. Imagine it like this. And then what do you do? Do you ever reach out to God with one hand and say, "Lord, forgive me," and with the other you grab one of the offenders by the throat and threaten to make him pay, you wretch? Is it possible to pray and to be angry with someone? Is there such a thing as saying to God: Lord, and the other person says: you wretch? No. There is no such thing. Jesus says that our relationship with God and our relationship with our neighbour must be in harmony. "Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." (Mt 6,12) Our willingness to forgive is not a condition for hearing prayer, but a condition for being able to pray at all. Without a willingness to forgive, without reconciliation with people, without reconciliation, without reconciliation, it is simply not possible to pray. If you do not cast out of your heart, and even out of your memory, that certain feeling of anger, of hurt, you cannot pray. It is impossible.
Can you even imagine God reaching out to you if you are reluctant to reach out to the one who has sinned against you? Do you want to sing a psalm in church, give something in the cup for God's cause, take communion? Wilt thou? Do not do so if there is someone with whom you have not yet been reconciled. If I could see into your heart, I would not give communion to one who has not yet settled some offence, real or imagined, in a spirit of full reconciliation with the one who has sinned against him. I cannot see into your hearts, but God can. And he says, 'Therefore, if you take your gift to the altar, and there remember that your brother has some grievance against you: Leave your gift there before the altar, and go, first be reconciled to your brother, and then come and take up your gift." (Mt 5:23-24) Until then, God does not need your praise, your offering, your worship. Until then, it is all an abomination to God. Do you want to come to Calvary and share in the grace of Jesus' forgiving and cleansing blood? Well, God will send you back. Everyone who does not forgive another in his heart excludes himself from God's forgiving grace. He who does not forgive another man will not receive forgiveness from God. Jesus literally says: "But if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father in heaven forgive your trespasses" (Mt 6,15).
Let us not delay in forgiving. We all still have someone we know somewhere whom we have not yet been able to forgive from the heart. Let us do it today, now. Write that letter today. Be a good will to your enemy soon," says Jesus. Would that God would so bless this word now that it would untie every spiritual knot in all our souls towards one another. For everyone. For such an untied spiritual knot prevents the whole church from worshipping, from growing spiritually, from the Spirit of God from flowing.
God sacrificed His only begotten Son to forgive. We only have to sacrifice our pride, our so-called "right", our "rightness" - our self for Him to forgive. Go away and make peace with your brother first! With the one who has sinned against you, against your wife, or against your church, or against anyone, or at least you think he has sinned. Be reconciled to him, and then, but only afterwards, say, 'And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us'. For then it is possible, then it is lawful, to pray in this way.
Amen
Date: 30 August 1964.