Forgive Us Our Debts

I. The forty-ninth summer

The first time he heard the horn, he was sitting on his father's shoulders.

He understood little of it — a long blast taken up from hill to hill, people weeping and laughing all at once — but his father held his ankles and said: remember this. You may hear it one more time.

The law does not name the man; call him Machir, after the verb that would mark his life: to sell.1

The lean year came when he had children of his own. First the land went — his father's field, sold to a neighbor with fuller barns. When that proved not to be enough, he went himself.2 The law forbade his buyer to make him serve as a slave; he was to count as a hired worker, as a sojourner. But on his father's ground there now worked a servant who had once been its heir.

He counted the years as the law counted them: seven weeks of years.3 And in the forty-ninth summer he knew what was coming. On a day in early autumn on which no one worked — the one day of the year on which the whole land fasted and the sanctuary was atoned for — the sound of his childhood came back over the hills.4

The horn said everything there was to say: this year is holy; release in the land, for all its inhabitants; each one returns to his property, each one to his family.5

Machir got up from someone else's field — which with that one blast was his father's field again — and he walked. His children behind him, for that was written too: he, and his children with him.6 Past others who were walking, each in a different direction, the whole land on the move without anyone needing to ask the way. Before evening he stood on ground that knew his name again.

And the year that lay before him, no one would sow. He came home to land that would give of itself for a whole year — a year of living on what is there, as his people had once lived in a wilderness.7

That evening he stood in the yard where as a boy he had sat on shoulders. The father who had held his ankles was long gone; his words had come true. Machir had heard the horn one more time.

II. The land no one can keep

A second sentence Machir had carried with him all those years, received from his father as his father had received it from his:

"The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is Mine; you are strangers and sojourners with Me."8

So the field had never really become the neighbor's. Nor had it ever really been Machir's. In this land everyone lived as a lodger with Someone, and every sale was a sublet with an end date that no one had to negotiate.

And about himself there was something written that his buyer had known from the first working day: "for they are my servants, whom I brought out of the land of Egypt; they shall not be sold as a slave is sold."9 He who had brought him out of the house of slavery had laid down that none of his own would ever go back into it for good. Machir's freedom had been on the calendar all those years — for longer than his service had lasted.

There could have been a shorter way. If a blood relative had come forward, a redeemer with full hands, he could have bought back the field earlier, and the man with it.10 No one came forward. For Machir freedom came not through a relative, but through the calendar of his God — and the calendar proved enough.

In the year of rest he walked his land with his children beside him and showed them the boundaries: as far as the brook, as far as where the field rises against the hill. Whose it really was, he added each time — with his father's sentence, which was now his to pass on.

III. The man who was taken back

No one ever came to take Machir back.

No servant of the neighbor ever stood in his yard after the horn; what had been proclaimed on the Day of Atonement stayed proclaimed. Perhaps he never knew how far from self-evident that was. 600 years later another man walks home in Jerusalem, and his story begins the same way.

He is a Hebrew, slave of one of the great men of the city. Outside the walls lies the army of Babylon; of the fortified cities of Judah, two are still standing.11 In that distress the king makes a covenant with the whole city, in the house that is called by God's name: release is proclaimed — the jubilee word itself — and each one lets his Hebrew slave and slave woman go. They cut a calf in two and walk between the pieces; an oath cannot get any heavier.12 His master lets him go.

And he walks. Free, for the first time in years — free within besieged walls, but free. He never heard Machir's horn; for him it was a covenant made in distress, but the freedom felt no less real.

Then the army withdraws.13 The sky above the city clears, the roads open — and the servants of his old master come to fetch him. There is one verse about it, and it is enough:

"But afterward they turned around, and took back the male and female slaves whom they had set free, and subjected them again as male and female slaves."14

Then God spoke, and what He said was about this man. You had done well, He said — a covenant before my face, in the house that is called by my name. "But you turned around, and you profaned my name."15 Whoever took this man back took back more than a laborer: the Name itself was dragged back inside with him, into servitude.

And the verdict took the jubilee word into its mouth, with the sign reversed: "You have not listened to Me by proclaiming a release, each one for his brother and his neighbor. See, I proclaim a release over you — to the sword, to the pestilence and to the famine."16 It ended as the word said: the army came back, the city fell and burned.17

What became of the man, the book does not tell. What became of his one week of freedom, it does: it became the evidence in a lawsuit about the Name.

Two men walked home. One arrived.

IV. The third man

Centuries later, the Son told of a third man.

He too was set free — not from a field, but from a debt that no human life can work off — remitted in one conversation, out of compassion, with no repayment plan. He walked out of the gate as the freest man in the story. And outside he met someone who owed him something, something small and repayable, and he seized him by the throat.

When the king was told, he called him back, and the debt that had been remitted stood in his name again — the whole debt.18

Three men walked the same road out of the gate. Machir, who was set free and came home. The man of Jerusalem, who was set free and taken back. And the man in the parable, who was set free — and turned out to be a taker-back himself.

For that third place Machir would have needed no parable; the law had already shown it to him. The same chapter that knew his poverty also addressed him as the man with the fuller barns, against the day when the lean years would knock at someone else's door: "when your brother becomes poor and his hand falters with you, you shall hold on to him."19 Hold on to him — not make him serve as a slave.

The boy who had sat on shoulders would become a man to whom others could be in debt; what he was told as a child, he still had to make good as a man.

The fifth petition carries those three lives in its two halves. Forgive us our debts — the petition of one who is still on the way home. As we forgive our debtors — the word of one who does not take back what he has let go.20

On the day of the horn Machir had walked home with his children following behind him. Of that road the law says only: he, and his children with him; what follows here, this book supplies.21

Somewhere in that long afternoon a man stops, lifts up the youngest and sets him on his shoulders. His hands find the ankles of their own accord; that is how he himself was carried.

And he says what his father said, word for word, because in 49 years no better words have come: remember this. You may hear it one more time.