I once heard Dara O'Briain, an Irish comic, do a few minutes of stand up on the Lord's Prayer. He specifically joked about the word Jesus uses in Matthew 6.12, "trespasses."  Was trespassing a huge problem in Jesus's day?  Were Jesus and the disciples often traipsing across other people's land ticking off local farmers?  Did they not have fences back then?

In some ways I agree with Dara, although for different reasons. For me, this line is one of the most difficult parts of Jesus's prayer by far: "And forgive us our trespasses as we have forgiven those who trespass against us."  The language here may seem uncommon, or overly specific. This has led some modern English language versions of the bible to translate the word Jesus uses here, opheilema more generally as sins. Jesus's language however, is actually quite interesting to reflect upon.  The word opheilema, although traditionally translated as trespasses, also connotes the meaning of a debt or an obligation in a financial or moral sense.  By investigating this word's meaning more broadly we can begin to understand the full implications of Jesus's call to pray forgiveness.  

Social trespassing

Of course, Jesus is not simply condemning trespassing as a specific societal ill, nor is he against economic debt alone in this prayer.  Rather, it seems to me he gives us a profound insight into how relationships work.  In other words, when we talk about our relationship to people we often use language which refers to cost and proximity. For instance, when we encounter a friend unexpectedly we often say we "ran" or "bumped" into them even though we may never have even touched. You can generally tell how close a relationship is by how physically close people get to each other.  Family members often stand close to each other, hold hands, etc.  Business associates less so.  There is a great Seinfeld episode from years ago which centres around a "close talker."  Seinfeld and the gang encounter one of Elaine's boyfriends who gets right up in the faces of those he speaks to.  He is in this sense trespassing upon the personal space of those around him. 

Interestingly, just as relationships measure physical space, they also account for emotional space.  If you are married for instance, you may often notice that your spouse has different times in which they are able to tolerate emotional intimacy.  For instance, for many men and women coming home from work, they are not up for emotionally deep conversation when just getting home. Many couples have buzz or problem conversations that they know will create distance. If someone near you is coming to close emotionally, you may say something to get them to back off.  It often happens without thinking.  You enter a room to see the person you haven't seen all day, but then you end up in an argument about which way the toilet paper rolls and why an empty was left in the dispenser this morning.  Why do we argue about petty things?  Often to negotiate emotional space.

The fact is, we are almost always negotiating emotional and physical space with the people around us.  And we sometimes find ourselves trespassing upon each other's space.  We may get too physically close to soon in a dating relationship. We may cross an invisible emotional boundary when we inadvertently start talking about salaries or a person's weight at a dinner party.  Religion and politics are often emotionally charged hot button issues which can be hard to navigate without a certain emotional proximity. Hence, to translate Jesus's prayer, "Forgive us our trespasses" is in some ways one of the better translations of the Greek opheilema.

Social Accounting

In fact, however, I quite like the way Jesus's word here is often translated as debts. Forgive us our debts as we have forgiven our debtors is how the New Revised Standard Version translates it.  This is in some ways an even more profound translation of what human relationships are about.  Space is simply one matter of social currency.  The fact is there is a whole host of cultural forms of capital which are being negotiated when we relate to those around us. Some recent social theorists like Pierre Bourdieu have developed entire analytical methods of cultural interpretation based on forms of cultural capital. 

Notice how we often schedule time with people these days.  One reason for this is because we feel so strapped for time.  And of course, some people's time is more valuable than others.  You make appointments for a doctor, but you are the only one expected to keep to that appointment's schedule.  Doctors are so important in fact that we allow them a number of waiting rooms.  It's like levels of hell or something.  You start in the large anteroom full of crying kids and hacking cold and flu sufferers.  Then you move into the next waiting room where it's more or less just you alone with elevator music and stock water colors on the walls.  If you're illness is important enough, you are then sent to another waiting room with a signed piece of paper which validates the extraction of an assortment of your bodily fluids for testing. Then, if your fluids give off the right signals, then you will be sent to another waiting ritual for one of the even more important doctors who will then cut you open and fix whatever's wrong with you. Why do we tolerate all this waiting? Because a doctor's time is deemed to be more valuable than everyone else's time, and of course doctors themselves are categorized in terms of importance, general practitioners at the bottom and surgeons or specialized diagnosticians at the top.

So much of relationships come down to a series of accountant procedures whereby you figure whether you are important enough for another person's time.  If you are, then maybe you develop a friendship.  If you're not, then you don't.  Rich people don't just hang out with rich people and poor people don't just hang out with poor people because of their bank balances.  But they do size each other up and make some risk analyses of the value of people's respective value and what the outcome of a relationship is likely to be. Although bank balance tends to play a large factor in relational risk assessment in the US, in Britain, the middle classes (i.e. lower middle, middle middle and upper middle) make all sorts of assessments of the "quality" of the people they encounter and whether they are deemed worthy enough to include others in their social status.  Many assume that such attitudes are limited to the fiction of the Bronte sisters or a Jane Austen novel, but English people continue to categorize each other through their tightly woven curtains according to class. Kate Fox, one of the latest to make a book out of Watching the English, argues that Marks and Spencer, a UK clothing and food retailer is a pretty good class barometer.  Do you shop at Marks and Spencer?  For what?  Their ridiculously marketed and overly priced food? You know, those commercials which try to eroticize a sticky toffee pudding to the point of climax in a thirty second commercial over the holidays?  You do?  Well then, you're upper middle class.  Do you buy clothes there?  Oh well then, you're lower-middle class, and how on earth do you wear such rags?  It seems that the only people who aren't infatuated with this social accounting system in England are the lower and upper classes who, although for different reasons, wouldn't shop there at all. So long as they acquiesce to their place appropriately, then they escape the scrutiny of those in between.

Now let me make this clear,  it makes no difference what culture you find yourself in. Categorizing and classing people is nothing new. Jesus, not unlike The Breakfast Club, all teach us that us that we all bring a series of culturally informed accounting procedures to all our relationships.  In birth, in death and everything in between people always seem to find some criteria to account and categorize others. And so too, Jesus would teach similarly to the The Breakfast Club, that there may be no greater relational tragedy than realizing that you just don't measure up to the standards of others. Whether it's a parent who expected you to become a doctor when all you wanted to be was a nurse, or the neighbor across the hedge (or the pew) who won't speak to you because your style of dress or make and model of car. 

Forgiveness

In some ways the specificity of Jesus's language takes us into a metaphorical world of linguistic interrelationships which are deeply informative for what exactly we must do when we forgive.  For it is forgiveness which is, in the end, the heart of this part of Jesus's prayer.

In a world of relational accounting, Jesus introduces the logic of a gift.  Forgiveness here is the Greek aphiemi which has the connotation of releasing someone from some from a social convention.  To release someone from a moral obligation or from an obligation to remain in your presence. It's something like what we mean when we say "pardon me," when our carts collide at the grocery store, or "excuse me" when we sneeze.  But then, what Jesus means here goes much farther as well.   

No relationship, no matter how compatible the people may be, survives without forgiveness.  It is inevitable that we step on each other's toes at times as we dance through life together.  We keep account of who has wronged us and when and why and it becomes an almost inimitable obsession at times.  Maybe this is why we know that we must forgive our bruised toes and egos. 

When we forgive, a profound sense of the reason why we love the person comes into focus in a way which it could not before we let go.  Said another way, love often brings people together, but grace keeps them together.  But grace cannot come unless we actively forgive.  Grace is simply the static nominalization of what is for all intents and purposes a discipline, an alternative strategy for building relationships with others.  When wronged, we forgive.  We give people our grace, we give them the value they deserve as equals.

What motivates us to forgive?  That is the brilliance of praying as Jesus asks us to pray.  For we ask forgiveness in the present and firstly in order to remind ourselves that we need forgiveness.  The prayer finishes with our forgiveness of others as a past event as if it's already been done.  It's not that our forgiveness preconditions other people's forgiveness or that their forgiveness preconditions ours.  Rather, there is no such thing as true forgiveness that is not pervasively reciprocal.  You cannot ask for forgiveness, really ask for a release from your debts to others, unless you have firstly accounted for and forgiven the debts others owe you.  For what can we gain in forgiveness if we hold debt over others?  It's not just that forgiveness is contagious, it's that it is impossible to live it out consistently if it is not total. 

Valuing Others

In some ways, the use of debts or trespasses goes beyond the way sins is sometimes understood to include any form of social accounting, and any form of social injustice and inequality.

Jesus teaches us to forgive our debts and trespasses, and it seems to me that this use of language this challenges the way we try to attribute value to people based on what they do or look like or whatever behavior we've decided makes some people better than others. In some ways, by referring to debts, Jesus's prayer challenges any form of social separation and injustice which exists between ourselves and other people.  And this should be consistently allowed to inform what we mean when we say we've sinned or someone has sinned against us. Jesus's forgiveness breaks down the attempt to take a person's debts and trespasses against us and brand them as a lesser human being.  In fact, the more we pray this prayer the more it seems to me that it ultimately leads us to give up our classifications altogether.  No one can be valued any higher or lower than anyone else if forgiveness is real in a society.  Whenever we find ourselves classifying people or branding them in terms of the way we feel they have trespassed against us, this prayer confronts us: "Forgive us our debts just as we forgive those who are indebted to us."  In this way, the prayer becomes not just about the fact that people do in fact crash into us at times, trespassing upon us, but that we never allow such things to be attributed to the value of the person.  

Can we really bring ourselves to value and love each other wholeheartedly, intrinsically, emphatically?  Jesus seems to think we can.  Where does he teach us to begin?  "When you pray, pray this way... forgive us our debts as we have forgiven those indebted to us."