On Prayer 7

It followed that, having observed God's generosity, we should pray for his clemency too. For what good will food do us if we are in fact reckoned to him like a bull for the sacrifice? The Lord knew that he alone was without sin. So he teaches us to ask, “Forgive us our debts.” The prayer for pardon is a confession, because one who asks pardon confesses his sin. Thus repentance too is shown to be acceptable to God, because he wills it rather than the death of the sinner. In the Scriptures “debt” is a figure for sin, because it is likewise owed to judgment and exacted by it, and does not escape the justice of the exaction unless the exaction is remitted; as the master remitted the debt to that servant. For this is where the example of the whole parable points. For that the same servant, freed by his master, does not likewise spare his own debtor, and is therefore reported to his master and handed over to the torturer until he pays the last farthing, that is, down to the smallest sin, fits the fact that we too profess to forgive our debtors. And elsewhere too, from this aspect of the prayer, he says, “Forgive, and you will be forgiven.” And when Peter had asked whether a brother should be forgiven seven times, “No,” he said, “seventy times seven”: to reform the law for the better, since in Genesis vengeance was reckoned seven times for Cain but seventy times seven for Lamech.