For if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you.
Matthew 6:14 (NIV)
Forgiveness Lands on a Person
The attic gets done last because the attic is where the decisions live. She’s been at the house since Thursday, the rooms downstairs are already stacked and labeled, and now she’s up under the roof with a flashlight in her teeth, going through what her mother kept: a box of report cards, a bag of cords for machines that are long gone, the folding chairs from every summer of her childhood, and a shoebox of buttons sorted by color. It’s after eight. She made a rule on the drive down, and the rule is that nothing goes back into a box.
By nine the anger is up there with her, and it has a name on it. Her father died a while back, her mother is in a care home twenty minutes from the house, and most of what’s in the attic is what her mother saved and what her father would never discuss. The letters he didn’t answer are in a rubber band. So is the program from the recital he missed. She’s been throwing away the evidence all evening, telling herself that when the house is empty she’ll be square with him.
Jesus is teaching people how to pray, and the words he gives them ask for rescue from the evil one. If they forgive other people when those people sin against them, their heavenly Father will forgive them too. The forgiving he asks for travels toward the one who did it. For her that’s her father, who had a face and a history and, by now, a grave.
The attic will be empty by Sunday and she’ll have done a real and costly thing, and not one hour of it will have gone near him. Jesus is describing a movement that runs the other direction. It costs her a sentence she has to mean about a man who can’t hear it, and the Father’s forgiveness of her, he says, follows hers. He doesn’t say how long it’s allowed to take. He does say which way it goes.
At the top of the stairs she calls down into the kitchen to ask if anybody wants the last of the coffee. There’s nobody in the kitchen. Then she says her father’s name, the way she said it as a girl when she wanted something, and goes back up.
A Prayer to Remember
Before anything else, Lord, there’s a name we can’t say without going stiff, and you know whose it is for each of us. You’ve forgiven us things we have never told another living soul. Loosen what we’re still gripping, and start with the part where we’re certain we were right. We don’t know how to want this yet, so start the wanting in us.
In Jesus’ name, we pray. Amen.
