Mark 11:25(and 26), CEB - And whenever you stand up to pray, if you have something against anyone, forgive so that your Father in heaven may forgive you your wrongdoings.”
Right away, you will notice that I
did not include v. 26 in today’s reading even though I mention it in the
heading. This is because v.26 is not in
most of the manuscripts from which Mark is translated. The scholarly consensus is that it was added
later by a scribe who thought that it belonged there for some reason that of
which we are not aware. In any case, I
defer in most cases to scholarly consensus, so I have not included v.26. In any
v. 25 is difficult enough.
Reading it a face value, this verse
could be taken to mean that God’s forgiveness of us depends on our first
forgiving others. And making that
assumption also assumes that we somehow have the power to extract God’s forgiveness
through first forgiving others. We do
not. God is always first in forgiveness. If God does not freely choose to forgive us,
we remain unforgiven. So if we can’t
manipulate God’s forgiveness with our own, what does this saying mean?
Though God is first to offer
forgiveness, we’re not really capable of fully understanding or receiving that
forgiveness until we offer it ourselves. To understand forgiveness more fully, we have
to experience both sides of it – the side of the forgiven and the side of the
forgiver. We are more inclined to hold on
to offenses until we realize that letting go of offenses actually frees us even
more than it frees the offender. When we
relinquish the need to retain others sins against us, we become more free to
more fully embrace the reality that our sins have also been relinquished by
God. Just as we learn more about the
fullness of love by loving, we learn more about the fullness of forgiveness by
forgiving. To love is to forgive and to
forgive is to love.
Question: What have
learned about forgiveness by forgiving?
Prayer: God, it feels
counterintuitive to choose forgiveness until we have done it many times. But as we do it, help us experience the
fullness of how in character it is for You to forgive us. Amen.
Prayer Focus: Pray
for God to place on your heart a person that you need to forgive today.
Song: I Forgive You –
Kelly Pickler
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