As I said last night in Ash Wednesday worship, Lent traditionally focuses on the three great spiritual disciplines Jesus talks about at the beginning of Matthew 6: prayer, fasting, and alms giving. But I am proposing this Lent to consider another spiritual discipline which may be the most difficult of them all: forgiveness. Forgiveness is a practice at the heart of what it means to be a Christian.
Learning to forgive is not just an optional part of Christian life and devotion. It is incumbent upon us as the only proper response to receiving forgiveness for our own sins.
As the text I’ve chosen for this Sunday’s sermon, Exodus 34:1-9, makes clear, forgiveness is part of the nature of God. As He identifies Himself to Moses and the people of Israel by the divine name, mercy and forgiveness top the list of the ways God describes Himself and what He does. Which is fortunate for the Israelites at that moment, since God and Moses are right then engaged in repairing the consequences of their sin while Moses was on the mountaintop the first time.
As we walk through Lent this year, trying to understand forgiveness and grow in our ability to practice it, this is the place to start, with God’s own merciful and forgiving nature. We are empowered to forgive by the primary fact of being forgiven by the grace of God in Christ Jesus. So forgiveness always begins with God.