Money and forgiving

We have been studying the Sermon on the Mount in the gospel of Matthew for several weeks in our Sunday morning Bible study at church, and that great sermon has a lot to say about both our personal piety and morality, and also about social justice. I have also been reading Timothy Keller's book Generous Justice, in part because of our study of Matthew. In the midst of this, we had our annual missions conference.

As part of the missions conference we had a missionary from Calcutta as guest teacher in our class one Sunday morning and he talked about the ministry there that tries to help young women who have been sold into prostitution. Some of them are sold by their parents when they are around 10 years old. Some get into debt and are without income and try to get some money to get out of debt, but the moneylenders can charge 10% per month (120% per annum) interest. The whole situation is so desperate as to be almost unbelievable, and yet it reminded me that the world they inhabit is not so different from the world Jesus' lived in (and probably closer to mine than I like to think about). These women have no skills, cannot read or write, and have no hope of getting out of debt. Once they are forced into prostitution most never find a way out. Many commit suicide.

As we heard about this we were about to discuss the part of the Lord's prayer that says 'forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors'. Some translations say 'transgressions' instead of 'debts'. It turns out, per F.F. Bruce in The Hard Sayings of Jesus that in Aramaic,  which Jesus normally used in daily life, it is the same word for either 'debts' or 'transgressions'.  But in Matthew 18, F. F. Bruce points out, Jesus also talks about forgiving one who 'sins' against you (Matt 18:21ff) by giving an example about money.
So it struck me that for these poor women in India who are forced into prostitution, what they needed to escape from prostitution in many cases was to have money debts forgiven.  If they heard Jesus talking about 'forgive us our debts', what would they hear?

If  someone was owed money by one of these poor women, and decided that if she could not repay at 120% annual interest then she should  be sold into prostitution,  would the Lord forgive a person like that? Until hearing from that missionary I would not have even  thought about the Lord's prayer that way. I would have automatically assumed that the Lord's prayer was only talking about 'transgressions' or 'sins' of personal moral failure, not about things like forgiving a money debt. But in some cases, like these women, forgiveness of a money debt is vital to moving out of a life of moral sin as well.

So, it struck me that our attitude about money affects not only our giving, but also affects our forgiving. If we will not forgive a money debt to keep someone out of prostitution, will we forgive a moral debt? I doubt it. In any case,  listening to the missionary gave me a new viewpoint on what it means to 'forgive our debts'.