Matthew 6:14-18 — Forgiveness & Fasting

FRANK: A man skips a meal and rubs oil in his hair so nobody can tell he's hungry. That's one instruction Jesus gives here. The other is heavier. Forgive the person who wronged you, or your Father won't forgive you.

LINDA: Those two do not belong in the same paragraph. One's about, what, grooming during a fast. The other is my eternal standing hanging on whether I let go of a grudge. That's a strange pair to bolt together.

FRANK: It is a strange pair, and yet Jesus fastens them tight, right here in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount. Welcome in, everyone. Matthew chapter six, verses fourteen through eighteen today, and we're going to sit in that gap you just named, because the gap is exactly where the point is hiding.

LINDA: Alright, I'm curious. Read it for us.

FRANK: "For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you don't forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses. Moreover when you fast, don't be like the hypocrites, with sad faces. For they disfigure their faces that they may be seen by men to be fasting. Most certainly I tell you, they have received their reward. But you, when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face, so that you are not seen by men to be fasting, but by your Father who is in secret; and your Father, who sees in secret, will reward you."

LINDA: Verse fifteen is the one I can't walk past. "Neither will your Father forgive your trespasses." That's a threat. That's God saying, hold a grudge and I'll hold one against you. And I thought the whole gospel was that his forgiveness of me doesn't run on my performance.

FRANK: You're right to flinch, and you're right about the gospel. So let's hold both. This isn't Jesus turning pardon into a wage you clock in for. Watch what he actually says. He puts our forgiving and God's forgiving in the same knot, and then over in Matthew eighteen he pulls that knot into a story, so we can see what he means by it. A servant owes his king ten thousand talents. That's not a big loan, Linda, that's a number chosen to be absurd. You could work a hundred lifetimes and not touch it. And the king, moved with compassion, just... cancels it. Wipes it clean. Then that same forgiven man walks out the door, finds a fellow servant who owes him a hundred denarii, a few months' wages, and grabs him by the throat. Pay me what you owe. And the king hears about it and hands him over to the jailers. Jesus ends it with a line pointed straight back at our verse. "So my heavenly Father will also do to you, if you don't each forgive your brother from your hearts." What do you see in that servant after he's been forgiven?

LINDA: His fists are still closed. He isn't losing his forgiveness—he's proving he never really took it in. Do you see what that means?

FRANK: The man clutching at pennies while a fortune has just been erased over his head is a walking contradiction. He obviously never grasped the mountain of grace he was standing under, or those fists would open. He describes an unforgiving person who won't be forgiven—not as a transaction that failed, but as a heart that the grace never actually reached. The church has long put it plainly. Where you genuinely cannot forgive, that's evidence the gospel hasn't landed in you yet. Where you can, that's the gospel flowing through you. But what about the person who's tried, Linda? What about someone wounded so deeply they can't seem to get there?

LINDA: From a comfortable chair it sounds very tidy, but somebody hurt me badly. They never said sorry. And my willingness to let that go is supposed to be the thermometer for whether I'm even saved. That feels like a lot of weight to put on my worst wound.

FRANK: It's not weight I'm putting on it. It's weight Jesus puts on it, and I can't soften it into nothing. But hear where he's actually standing when he says it. He says it as the one who is about to absorb the ten thousand talents himself. This isn't a rule he cooked up to make your life harder. It's the shape of his own heart, and it runs the whole length of Scripture. The covering God stitched for Adam and Eve, the blood on the doorposts, every animal on the temple altar, all of it pointing to a Friday when the Son of God looks at the men driving the nails and says, "Father, forgive them." Every sin anyone ever commits is ultimately against him. He is the most sinned-against being in the universe, and he forgives anyway. So when he asks you to release your grudge, he's not asking you to do something he wouldn't. He's asking you to do something he has already done at infinite cost.

LINDA: The rescued drowning man, right. He's been pulled into the boat and now he's refusing to throw the rope back to the next person in the water.

FRANK: A man pulled out. And Paul says the same thing without the parable, in Ephesians, when he tells us to forgive one another "even as God also in Christ forgave you." Notice the ground he stands it on. Not, forgive them because they deserve it. Forgive them because of what was already done for you.

LINDA: I have a specific person I'm thinking of while you're saying this. And honestly the way it's gone is not a screaming match. It's just... quiet. I stopped texting back. I let it die. And I've told myself that's fine, we just drifted.

FRANK: Cold silence is a verdict, Linda. You've just described it perfectly, and it's the sneakiest form of the thing, because it never looks like unforgiveness. You haven't plotted revenge, you haven't yelled. You've simply gone cool and appointed yourself the judge who decides this person isn't worth the effort of repair. And Joseph, of all people, is the answer to that in Genesis. His brothers sold him into slavery. Now their father's dead, their lives are in his hand, they're bracing for him to finally get even. And he weeps and says, "Don't be afraid. Am I in the place of God?" There's the hinge. He refuses to sit in the seat of Judge, because that seat is taken.

LINDA: The drifting apart, the going cool—I'm quietly climbing into a chair that isn't mine.

FRANK: You've climbed into God's chair, and it's a chair Joseph got out of while he still had every earthly right to sit in it. What does getting out actually look like in a normal morning?

LINDA: I don't feel forgiving. I feel the old flinch when their name comes up.

FRANK: Then start with the flinch and don't wait for the feeling. Forgiveness begins as a decision, not a temperature. Tonight, before you sleep, name that person to God and tell him you're releasing the debt. Out loud. And then tomorrow, one ordinary text. Nothing dramatic, no demand that they apologize first, no score you're settling in the wording. Just something warm that treats them like someone you still want in your life. You move first. That's the cost. It costs your pride, because moving first feels like losing. But you're not scraping goodwill out of an empty tank. The Spirit of Christ is in you, and he already crossed an infinite distance toward you while you were still cold to him. That reach is the strength in your hand.

LINDA: Alright. That's the forgiveness half. Now the fasting half, which still feels like it landed here from a different sermon. Why is the sad face such a big deal to him?

FRANK: Because you have to know what a fast was to a first-century Jew to feel the sting. The Law commanded exactly one fast for the whole nation. One. The Day of Atonement, "you shall afflict your souls," the day the high priest carried the nation's sin behind the veil. Beyond that single day, fasting grew up around grief and crisis. Mourning, repentance, desperation. David wouldn't eat while his child was dying. Nineveh fasted in sackcloth when they feared judgment. It was a private turning of the heart toward God in sorrow. But by Jesus' day the strict Pharisee fasted twice a week, Mondays and Thursdays. And here's the detail that makes it click. Those were the market days. The busiest days, when the towns filled up with people. What happened when a drawn, ashen, unwashed face showed up on a Monday street?

LINDA: A costume, deliberately seen by the largest possible crowd. His disfigured face wasn't accidental—it was timed for the audience.

FRANK: A costume timed for foot traffic. And that's why Jesus' fix is startling. He doesn't say, fast quietly. He says, "anoint your head and wash your face." And a modern reader glides right over that, but to that crowd it was almost a shock. Oil in the hair, a washed face, those were the marks of a feast. Oil belonged to gladness. When you honored a guest you poured oil on his head. The psalm thanks God for "oil to make his face to shine." A man in grief left himself unwashed and disheveled on purpose. Jesus is telling the faster to put on the face of a man celebrating. What does he want you to do?

LINDA: Wear the look of a feast while your stomach is empty for God. That's almost the opposite of what I'd expect. I'd expect, be humble, be low-key about it.

FRANK: Hidden hunger. Hidden gladness. Both together make the fast impossible to perform, because the one signal a watcher could read, the misery, you've covered it under the face of joy. Now no one on the street can guess what's passing between you and your Father. The hunger is real, the gladness is real, and both together are an offering that only one set of eyes can see. Which is the same phrase he used four verses earlier about prayer. Shut the door. "Your Father who sees in secret." He's building this on that one thread. The Father who sees in secret is the Father who rewards in secret. That's the reward. Not the glance from the crowd. Him. Do you see what ties both halves together?

LINDA: The audience. Forgiveness and fasting are in the same paragraph because both are done for one set of eyes, and the grudge and the sad face are both really about wanting a different audience.

FRANK: You've put your finger on the seam of it. The unforgiving man wants the satisfaction of being publicly the wronged party. The sad-faced faster wants the credit of being publicly holy. Both have traded the audience of One for the crowd. And Isaiah nailed the fasting version of this centuries earlier. Israel fasted and then complained that God didn't notice, and God says, your fast serves yourselves while you're stepping on your workers and ignoring the hungry at your door. The performance and the empty heart, same hypocrisy Jesus names here. Both commands drive to the same place. Live your real life, the forgiving and the going without, in front of the Father who actually sees it, and let his seeing be enough. But is that reward smaller than the applause?

LINDA: Bigger. The reward is a bigger thing. It's being seen by the only one whose seeing matters.

FRANK: A far bigger thing, and a free one. Matthew Henry said it about forgiveness in a line I've never gotten past. "We beg of God to give it us; not sell it us, nor lend it us, but give it." That's the water running through it. Your forgiveness was given, not sold and not loaned. And a heart that truly drank that down cannot keep its fists closed against a brother. So the grudge you're holding, and the quiet you've let settle over a friendship, that isn't neutral, and it isn't safe. It's a fork in the road, and the Spirit who first reached for you is the strength to move first. What does that look like tomorrow?

LINDA: There's a name, and I know what tonight looks like now. Name them to God. Release it. Send the ordinary text in the morning before I talk myself out of it.

FRANK: Do that today. Don't wait for the feeling to arrive, because it may come after the obedience, not before it. And here's your fork in the road, straight from Jesus, not from us. "If you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you." Christ reached for you while you were still cold toward him. Now let grace go first through you. Send the message.

LINDA: This one's part of the Dig Deeper app, so if you're new here, search Dig Deeper in your app store and come sit with us again.