Fr Matthew Reese

“And in praying do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do; for they think that they will be heard for their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him. Pray then like this: ‘Our Father…’”
—Matthew 6:7-9

Dear Friends in Christ,

For those of you following along in the Daily Office lessons, you will be pleased to see that today’s passage from Matthew’s Gospel is the Lord’s Prayer. This prayer, taught to us by Jesus himself, is the very foundation of the Christian faith and life. It is the prayer that animates and undergirds all our other prayer. There are virtually no liturgical services where it does not form a part. It is the prayer that so many of us return to again and again in moments of fear, or anxiety, or anger, or relief.

What I would like to focus on today, however, is the theme of forgiveness that pervades this prayer. Reading it in the Revised Standard Version, where we ask God to “forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors,” gives us a particularly interesting angle. Here, we are not only asking for forgiveness from our trespasses or sins, but from that which we owe. At the same time, we are to extend forgiveness to our own debtors. 

This should call to mind the tradition of the Jubilee Year, an occasion which, in the Book of Leviticus, occurs every fiftieth year. In Jubilee years, the whole community is exhorted to forgiveness—not just spiritual, but practical. In ancient Israel it was a time of the manumission of slaves, of the cancellation of debt, of the laying down of arms. 

Our Roman Catholic brethren just completed a “Jubilee Year of Hope” which ran from Christmas Eve in 2024 to the Feast of the Epiphany (January 6th) this year. Many of our own dioceses in this country have also embarked on similar commemorations. In my own Diocese of Maryland, pilgrimages have been undertaken to help the Church and the faithful reckon with our own shared history, in a diocese whose wealth was built up, and whose land was tilled, by the enslaved. 

In the West—though not only in the West—the scars of the Church’s past are still worn on the tribal nations, where children were taken from their families into the often-dire regimes of boarding schools.

There is much for us to seek forgiveness for, and this is not easy work. But the starting point, the constant refrain, the shared ground, is prayer. And not just any prayer, but this one, as Our Saviour Christ has taught us.

Yours in Christ,

—Fr Matthew