Mid-Lent 3
Fourth
and Fifth Petitions
3/15/23
What would
you think if you gave gifts to a person on his birthday and at Christmas
every year, and he never expressed any kind of thanks? When present as the gift
was given, he never said, “Thank you.” When absent, he never sent any kind of
thank you message. Year after year this
pattern continued. Gifts were given, but there was never any response of
thanks.
I dare say
that we would all be quite put off. After all, being that ungrateful is just
plain rude. We might put up with the
pattern of behavior for quite some time. But eventually, we would probably
decide that enough is enough. We would make the decision to stop giving gifts
to that individual altogether.
Remarkably,
that is not how God works. Jesus
said about our heavenly Father, “For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on
the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.” God gives the
blessings of his creation to all people. He gives it to those who believe in him. He gives it to those who don’t believe in the
true God. He even gives it those who say
that he doesn’t exist!
In the
Fourth Petition of the Lord’s Prayer we say, “Give us this day our daily
bread.” Now as we will see, daily bread
means everything that has to do with the support and needs of the body. The issue here is not whether God is going to
give these things. As Luther says in the
Small Catechism, “God certainly gives daily bread to everyone without
our prayers, even to all evil people.”
God graciously gives what is needed to
support life. He gives more than just
what is needed to live – he also gives what we need to live well. He does it for those who believe in him, and
those who do not. But as the Small Catechism
goes on to say, “we pray in this
petition that God would lead us to realize this and receive our daily bread
with thanksgiving.”
God is the One who gives us all that we
need to live. The Psalmist wrote, “The eyes of all look to you, and you give them their
food in due season. You open your hand; you satisfy the desire of
every living thing.” When we speak of
daily bread we mean everything that has to do with the supports and needs of
the body.
Those needs are
broader than we might think. Of course
it includes food, clothing, and shelter.
But in the lengthy explanation Luther reminds us that it includes the
social dimension of human existence.
This means first of all those members of our family - a devout husband
or wife, and devout children. It also includes
good friends and faithful neighbors. We were not created to live in isolation
from other people, and friends and neighbors are a great blessing that make for
a good life – a life that is about more than just existence.
Luther also includes
devout and faithful rulers and good government in that list, and emphasizes
their importance in the Large Catechism. He points out that “Although we
have received from God all good things in abundance, we cannot retain any of
them or enjoy them in security and happiness were he not to give us a stable, peaceful government.” God uses the government as the means by which
he restrains evil, and provides the peaceful setting in which we can enjoy the
many blessings of daily bread.
Our Lord Jesus
teaches to pray “Give us this day our daily bread” so that we recognize God as
the giver of these things. And then when
we recognize this, faith responds with thanksgiving. We have this petition of the Lord’s Prayer to
remind us to respond daily in thanksgiving for the daily bread God gives.
We need this reminder. We also daily need the Fifth Petition where
Jesus teaches us to pray, “And forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those
who trespass against us.” I would
contend that this petition should strike us as both Law and Gospel.
It is law because we
are confessing our sins. And note that
we are not confessing specific sins. Instead, we are confessing the many sins
in our lives. As the Small Catechism
says, ”for we daily sin much and surely deserve nothing but punishment.” In fact, we sin so much and in so many ways
that we don’t even know all of our sins.
That’s how sinful we are.
Yet this petition is
Gospel because our Lord is the one teaching us to ask for forgiveness because
that’s what God wants to do. He
is the gracious God who forgives. As the
Psalmist wrote, “I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did
not cover my iniquity; I said, ‘I will confess my transgressions to the
LORD,’ and you forgave the iniquity of my sin.” Luther says in the Large
Catechism: “Thus this petition really means that God does not wish to
regard our sins and punish us as we deserve but to deal graciously with us, to
forgive as he has promised, and thus to grant us a joyful and cheerful
conscience so that we may stand before him in prayer.”
We know this is true because of the season
of Lent that we are observing. This is a
time when we prepare to remember the passion of our Lord. The Son of God entered into our world. In the
incarnation he became man, without ceasing to be God. He did this so that he could be numbered with
the transgressors – so that he could be numbered with us who sin daily in ways
we don’t even recognize.
Yet Jesus was also the One who had no
sin. Like the Old Testament sacrificial
animals that had to be without blemish, he was the perfect Lamb of God who came
to take away the sins of the world. The writer to the Hebrews tells us, “But as it is, he has appeared once for
all at the end of the ages to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself. And
just as it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes
judgment, so Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins
of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin but to
save those who are eagerly waiting for him.”
He will appear a
second time on the Last Day because Christ did not remain buried in the
tomb. We prepare for Holy Week. But Holy Week leads to the first day of a new
week. It leads to Easter. God raised Jesus from the dead, and because
he did, death has been defeated.
Christ
won forgiveness for us through his death and resurrection. He teaches us to pray for forgiveness. Yet as
Luther notes, “Not that he does not forgive sins even apart from and before our
praying; for before we prayed for it or even thought about it, he gave us the
gospel, in which there is nothing but forgiveness. But the point here is for us
to recognize and accept this forgiveness.”
In the Fifth Petition Jesus teaches us to recognize and accept the forgiveness that he won by his death and resurrection. Yet he teaches us somethings else as well when he adds, “as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Our Lord teaches us that if we are to hold on to Gods’ forgiveness, we must also share it with others. Immediately after giving the Lord’s Prayers Jesus adds, “For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.” Forgiveness is not an “option” in the Chrisian life. Just as God in Christ has forgiven us, so also we forgive one another.
We receive a reminder
of this every Sunday during the Service of the Sacrament. We go to the Sacrament to receive Jesus’ true
body and blood for the forgiveness of sins.
But the apostle teaches us that the Sacrament is the sacrament of
unity. In the Sacrament of the Altar we
are joined together as the body of Christ, and so there is no place for
divisions. To go and receive forgiveness,
we must also forgive those who commune with us.
After the
consecration, the pastor holds up the body and blood of the Lord, and in the
Pax Domini chants, “The peace of the Lord be with you always.” This is first a declaration of the peace to
be received in the body and blood of Christ. But it is also a reminder that we
must be at peace with one another – we must forgive one another – if we are to
receive the Sacrament worthily.
God gave his Son into
death on the cross to forgive our sins.
In the Fifth Petition he shows that he wants to forgive as he invites us
to ask forgiveness for even the sins of which we are not aware. But the One who forgives then sends us forth
to forgive others. As St Paul put it,
“Be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving each other, just as God in
Christ also has forgiven you.”
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