The most frightening text in the Bible is in the Lord’s Prayer – “Forgive us as we forgive those who sin against us.”
When we pray it, we ask for forgiveness to be measured, we determine how much we receive, and we ask for exactly the same amount that we give to anyone else.
Biblical forgiveness means to let go, yield up, or to remit the sin. In other words, to clear the slate, and it was spelt out in the first book of the Bible.
Joseph’s brothers, the sons of Israel, had lied to their father years before, and tricked him. They told him their brother, Joseph, was dead.
In reality they had sold Joseph into slavery. Joseph was bought as a slave into Pharaoh’s house and became Prime Minister. But his brothers did not recognise him when they came to buy grain years later during the famous seven-year drought.
Joseph played every card in the pack to convict his brothers of their secret guilt, hoping they would confess their sin to their father and ask his forgiveness.
They knew what Joseph was about because they said on one occasion, ‘No doubt we are being punished because of our brother. We saw his distress when he pleaded with us and we refused to listen to him.’
All their ethics and morality in returning to Joseph what was rightly his when Joseph’s goods were put into their grain sacks, could not plaster over the gaping wound of their sin.
Joseph knew that it was only as the father forgave his brothers that the family could be reconciled and made whole as it used to be.
By the same token, it is only as God forgives us that we can be reconciled with each other and made whole as we were intended to be. Read about it in Genesis, chapter 42 through 45, it is a gripping story.
The brothers would not budge to ask forgiveness and finally, if they were to be reconciled at all, Joseph resolved he must forgive even though neither he, nor his father, received any sort of apology.
He had to step into the breach and reconcile them with himself first and then with their father, just as Christ reconciles us with each other and then with our Father.
Only through the grace of Joseph could the brothers be brought to repent of their sin and ask their father, Israel, to forgive them.
Only through our Brother’s grace can we see our own guilt and seek our Father’s forgiveness.
It is recorded that Joseph’s resolve caused him firstly to weep in private, but at the moment of reconciliation he gave a cry of anguish that sent his servants running in fear of what was wrong.
For Joseph, it was agony. He was forgiving the unforgivable, they didn’t even know they had hurt this man and they had brought all the gifts their father, Israel, had provided them with for Joseph. But the gifts were as nothing unless Joseph’s forgiveness could awaken in them a sense of their own sin.
They were blind and stubborn in their own guilt so it all depended on Joseph’s grace, not on their contrition. Only when Joseph forgave could there be reconciliation and only then, were the brothers able to say ‘sorry’ to their father and ask him to forgive them.
Ah, it is here that we see Jesus, our brother, in tears privately in the garden; then on the cross, the cry of anguish and his forgiveness to awaken in us the sense of sin so that we can go to our Father.
Jesus puts all our offerings and gifts back in our sacks and says ‘be reconciled with your brother first’ and it is a double header. Jesus is our brother as much as our mother’s son is our brother and we have sinned against him, we have sold him out repeatedly, so our reconciliation begins with him.
He forgives in order that we are made able to forgive. Only then, dare we pray to our Father, ‘forgive us as we forgive those who sin against us.’
But what sort of story would it have been if Joseph had demanded an apology, then said, ‘it’s all OK now, but pay up or else’? Could they have paid enough for all his years of heartbreak and deprivation, could they restore ‘the years the locust had eaten’?
To demand reparation would turn forgiveness into a loathsome debt. How good would our reconciliation with God be if Christ forgave us, was resurrected, and then said, ‘Now you can start paying’?
Who of us could afford the burden of a milli0n dollars a day or a million prayers a week on our knees, and what sort of reconciliation is cheque-book reconciliation? It would become a hateful, ignominious burden.
Never pray the Lord’s Prayer on the cheap or on the never-never. It is the hardest prayer in the world to pray. We must fear to pray it unless we let Christ in first, he is the first essential and his forgiveness is free – but the costliest thing in the universe.
It cost him everything and it costs us everything.
If you have not wept in private and cried aloud as Joseph cried, you have never forgiven – just try it and you will see.
Elizabeth Price
(To access the entire “Reflections on Joseph” mini-series, please click here.)