Matthew 6:14-18 — Forgiveness & Fasting

LINDA: A bill on the counter with PAID IN FULL stamped across it in red, and a little bottle of olive oil next to the bathroom sink. Those two things have nothing to do with each other. And yet between them sits what might be the sharpest sentence Jesus says in the entire sermon: if you don't forgive, you won't be forgiven.

FRANK: Sharpest is fair, and I'd rather we face it head on than tiptoe around it. The oddest part is that your red stamp and your bottle of oil are both actually in today's text. One is hiding in the Greek, and the other is right there in plain English. By the end, I think the two of them together will explain why that frightening sentence is sitting where it is. Welcome to Dig Deeper, everybody. We're very glad you're here.

LINDA: I'm glad to be sitting across from this particular Bible. We're in Matthew chapter six, verses fourteen through eighteen. It comes right on the heels of the Lord's Prayer: a hard word about forgiveness, and then a word about fasting that seems to come out of nowhere. Frank, would you read it for us?

FRANK: Matthew six, starting at verse fourteen. "For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive yours. When you fast, do not be somber like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces to show men they are fasting. Truly I tell you, they already have their full reward. But when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face, so that your fasting will not be obvious to men, but only to your Father, who is unseen. And your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you."

LINDA: Forgive, or you won't be forgiven. Read cold, that reads to me like a contract. I do my part, God does his, and if I miss a payment the whole arrangement is off. Is Jesus making God's pardon a wage I earn?

FRANK: A wage is exactly how most people hear it, so it's worth slowing down. Start with where this sits. Jesus has just taught the disciples to pray, "forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors." Of all the lines in that prayer, this is the only one he stops and comments on afterward. It's as if he knows this is the petition we'll try to slide past. Now the words themselves. "Trespasses" translates paraptōma, which pictures a false step, a foot that slips sideways off the path. Not a vague bad mood. A specific slip, and one you could name. And "forgive" is aphiēmi, a word that means to release, to let go, to send something away from you. Fishermen use it when they drop their nets. A creditor uses it when he tears up what you owe. So here is the claim of the passage, stated plainly. The person who has been released by God cannot keep another person chained. The two releases belong together... they are one motion, God's mercy moving through you and out the other side.

LINDA: "One motion" is lovely, and I still don't buy it yet. The grammar is a condition. If you forgive, then. If you don't, then not. Call it a motion all you want, but the sentence has an "if" in it, and that sounds like my forgiving comes first and God's comes second.

FRANK: The "if" is real, and I won't pretend it isn't. But Jesus tells a story later in Matthew, in chapter eighteen, that shows you which way the arrow points. A servant owes his king ten thousand talents. That is an absurd figure. A single talent was something like twenty years of a laborer's wages, so this man could not repay the debt in a hundred lifetimes. And the king, "moved with compassion," cancels all of it. Then the servant walks outside, grabs a fellow servant by the throat over a hundred denarii, which is a few months' pay, and says, "Pay me what you owe!" So who forgave first in that story? The king did, before the servant had done a single thing. Theologians distinguish between the ground of forgiveness and the evidence of it. The ground is God's mercy alone. Our forgiving of others is the evidence that the mercy actually reached us. Matthew Henry, writing about what we ask for in this prayer, put it this way: "We beg of God to give it us; not sell it us, nor lend it us, but give it." So when forgiveness is a gift, what does it mean when the gift never shows up in how we treat anybody else?

LINDA: I think it means the gift never got opened. But the parable doesn't end there, Frank. The king takes it back. He hands the man over to the tormentors. That's the part a listener is going to lie awake over: can forgiveness be revoked?

FRANK: The warning is meant to keep you awake, and I don't want to make it tame. But look at what the story exposes. A man who has truly understood that ten thousand talents were wiped away does not choke someone over a hundred denarii. The chokehold shows that he never grasped what had been done for him. First John says that if we confess our sins, God is faithful and righteous to forgive. Our forgiving never earns that pardon. It shows that we've tasted it. Paul says the same thing from the other side in Ephesians four: forgive one another "even as God also in Christ forgave you." The warning in verse fifteen is how God keeps forgiven people from living as if they were never in debt.

LINDA: The forgiveness comes first, and the grudge is the proof I haven't cashed the check. I'll give you most of that. I'm not going to give you the comfortable version, though, because some of the fear in that verse should stay.

FRANK: Some of it should stay. I'd put it this way. The unforgiving heart has quietly taken a seat that isn't its own. Think of Joseph at the end of Genesis, with his brothers at his mercy, the same brothers who had sold him into slavery. They are braced for revenge, and he weeps and says, "Don't be afraid, for am I in the place of God?" That's the question. When I refuse to release someone, I'm sitting in the judge's chair and holding court. And God does not share that chair.

LINDA: You know who owes you. For a lot of people listening, the debt is literally money: the loan to a sibling that is never coming back, the amount you still know to the dollar. The bill sits on the counter, and every time you look at it, you do that math again. You check the account twice as if the number might have changed, and a name comes up with it.

FRANK: The math you do again is the ledger that aphiēmi tears out of the book. Releasing a debt doesn't mean pretending the money wasn't lent, or trusting the person again by Friday... forgiveness and reconciliation are related, but they aren't the same thing, and reconciliation takes two people. What release does mean is that you close the court. You stop reopening the file every time you look at your own finances. You stop collecting interest in resentment. It may still be short in the account. It is no longer owed in your heart.

LINDA: Which forces the next thing. Why on earth does Jesus go from that straight into fasting? The gears grind between them. We're talking about the deepest wound someone has, and then suddenly it's about your face.

FRANK: The gears grind less than they seem to. We've already walked through the pattern of giving, prayer and fasting, so you'll remember that fasting is simply the third of those acts coming back around. Forgiveness is the piece Jesus wedges in between them, and it belongs there because all three happen where no one else can see. Some background helps here. The Law of Moses commanded exactly one fast for the whole nation, on the Day of Atonement, when Israel was told to "afflict your souls." That was the day the high priest went behind the veil with the nation's sin. Everything else grew up around grief and crisis: David fasting while his child was dying, Nineveh fasting in sackcloth. By Jesus' day, the strict fasted twice a week. The Pharisee in Luke says it out loud, "I fast twice a week." Tradition places those fasts on Mondays and Thursdays, which were market days, when the streets were full.

FRANK: Now picture a gaunt, ashen face moving through a crowded market. Jesus calls those people hypokritai. In Greek, that word meant a stage actor, someone speaking from behind a mask to an audience. And there's a small, almost bitter wordplay in his sentence. They "disfigure" their faces, aphanizō, which literally means to make something disappear, so that they may "appear," phainō, to men. They make their faces vanish in order to be seen. Then comes your red stamp, Linda. "They already have their full reward" uses apechō, a word merchants wrote on receipts. Paid in full. Account closed. What do you do with a receipt like that?

LINDA: You file it, because nothing else is coming. The glance from the crowd was the entire payment, and the transaction is over before the fast is even done.

FRANK: Over, and settled, and small. Which is why the second half of the instruction is so surprising. "Anoint your head and wash your face." In that world, oil was not ordinary hygiene. Oil belonged to gladness. A host poured it on an honored guest, and the psalm praises God for "oil to make his face to shine." Someone in mourning went unwashed and left his hair dry, so fasting and anointing sat at opposite ends of the emotional scale. Jesus is saying: while your stomach is empty for God, wear the face of a feast.

LINDA: Isn't that just a different performance, though? Instead of the ash, I paste on a smile. I'm still managing what people see. That sounds like trading one mask for another.

FRANK: It would be, if the smile were aimed at the crowd. It isn't. It's aimed away from them, so that the crowd gets nothing to read. And the gladness is real, which is where the two halves of this passage finally meet. Go back to that one commanded fast in Leviticus. It happened on the day Israel's sin was carried behind the veil and dealt with. Fasting at its root was a response to being cleansed. So what kind of face should a forgiven person wear while fasting? The face of someone whose debt has been paid. There's your bottle of oil sitting next to the red stamp. The hypocrite's stamp says the crowd paid him. The disciple's oil says the Father has already paid everything.

LINDA: And what it costs is being right. The loan stays short, the person never says sorry, I stop mentioning it at dinner, and nobody knows I've done anything at all. No one gives me credit for letting it go.

FRANK: Nobody knows, and that is precisely the point of the passage. The old phrase for this is coram Deo, which means living before the face of God. The grudge and the sad-faced fast turn out to be the same mistake. Each one plays to the wrong audience. The grudge keeps a courtroom open with me on the bench, and the performance keeps a stage lit with a crowd watching. Isaiah fifty-eight has Israel complaining that they fasted and God didn't notice, while they were squeezing their own workers the whole time. Jesus shuts the courtroom and turns off the stage lights, and what's left is a Father who sees. When no one in the room will ever applaud what you just released, who is the one watching?

LINDA: Your Father, it says. I believe that on a good morning. On the morning the statement comes and the balance is thin, "seen" can feel like a pretty small reward.

FRANK: The small feeling is honest, and Jesus doesn't scold it. He just keeps repeating one word: your Father, your heavenly Father, your Father who sees in secret. The king who cancelled ten thousand talents is not a stranger keeping score. He sees the check you won't cash against your brother, and he rewards it.

LINDA: Then let me ask the practical question. Plenty of people listening have never fasted once. Where would someone even begin?

FRANK: Begin small. Skip one meal, and when the hunger comes, let it turn you toward prayer instead of the pantry. If there's someone you're trying to release, that's a good time to pray for them by name. Families can do this together. Parents can explain why, guide the children in a way that fits their age, maybe a snack or a treat for the little ones, and go without right alongside them, so the kids see it lived and not just described. And a word of care: if you have a health condition, are pregnant, or take medication, talk with your doctor first and fast in a way that's safe for you. Then do what Jesus says. Wash your face, keep it quiet, and let your Father be the one who knows. [short pause] I'll read the heart of it once more, slowly.

FRANK: "For if you forgive men their trespasses... your heavenly Father will also forgive you." ... "And your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you."

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