In his sermon “Blessed Are the Merciful” [www.preachingtoday.com], Rev. John Koessler told a story about a mother who came to Napoleon on behalf of her son who was about to be executed. The mother asked the ruler to issue a pardon. But Napoleon pointed out it was her son’s second offence and justice demanded death.
“I don't ask for justice,” the woman replied. “I plead for mercy.”“Blessed are those who show mercy to others, God will show mercy to them.” This is Jesus’ fifth Beatitude that theologian Dale Bruner calls one of the three help Beatitudes [Matthew A Commentary Volume 1: The Christbook. Revised and Expanded Edition, p.155. Wm B. Eerdmans Publishing, Grand Rapids, Mich.]. It is called a help Beatitude because it focuses on service and love to others and requires an intentional action on the part of those who show mercy. The disciples and others who climbed the side of the mountain to spend time with Jesus would have needed to hear more than one brief statement from Jesus about mercy -- or about any of the other nine blessings for that matter. That’s one reason Matthew structured Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount the way he did. He knew Jesus’ listeners would need to hear how Jesus’ stories in the rest of the Sermon unpacked the meanings underlying the Beatitudes. They would have much to ponder and to do.
The emperor objected, “But your son doesn't deserve mercy.”
“Sir,” the mother replied, “it would not be mercy if he deserved it, and mercy is all I ask.”
Her son was granted the pardon.
At first glance, the people listening to Jesus would understand that those who were merciful to others had some feeling of sadness and compassion for a person’s bad situation – maybe even of his or her own making -- and were trying to do something about it. Those who were merciful were being kind or forgiving or generous to such a person in serious need. Unless they were strict Pharisees, that is. In Jesus’ day, traditional pharisaic theology would have affirmed another kind of beatitude: “Happy are those who are righteous – who have cleaned up their act, who are good and have it all together -- then God will be merciful to them.” They would have had a difficult time with Jesus’ attitude and teachings that conflicted with theirs.
Mercy is mercy because it does not figure out what a person might deserve. The Oxford Canadian Dictionary says mercy is “compassion or forbearance shown to a powerless person … with no claim to kindness.” Mercy would not be mercy if it acted on what a person deserved. On the contrary, mercy allows people to make a fresh start and often involves forgiveness and the release from their indebtedness to others – perhaps even to the one showing mercy. So being merciful as Jesus teaches can be personally costly.
Let me put it this way: Mercy is good if I am the one receiving mercy! However, if I am the one required to show mercy, then there is considerably more to struggle over. That’s because, in this context, the only kind of person to whom I can show mercy is someone who clearly does not deserve it. In fact, the person may never be able to pay me back for whatever I do to show mercy. That’s why I asked John to read Jesus’ story about forgiveness and the servant who would not forgive in Matthew 18. The story is about a king whose servant owed him an impossibly large sum of money – millions or billions or even zillions of dollars, as one commentator suggested. When the king called in the debt, the servant begged for patience. He asked the king to give him a chance to pay it all back. This desperate request was as impossible as the debt itself because it would have taken several lifetimes to repay the amount he owed! Of course, the king knew the servant's situation was hopeless. So what did the king do? Instead of giving the servant more time to repay or making him pay for the debt with his life – which he could have done with all justice -- the king showed great mercy and cancelled the entire debt.
But that’s not the end of the story. We wish it were. No sooner did the servant leave the king he found a fellow servant who owed him a relatively small debt compared to what he had owed the king. The servant grabbed him by the throat. “Pay up! Now!” he demanded.
His poor fellow servant fell to his knees and begged him, “Give me a chance and I’ll pay it all back.” Did you notice these were the very words the first servant had used with the king when he pleaded for more time to pay back his impossibly large debt? But the irony was lost on him. So he had his colleague thrown into jail.
Jesus then said: “When the other servants saw this going on, they were outraged and brought a detailed report to the king. The king summoned the man and said, ‘You evil servant! I forgave your entire debt when you begged me for mercy. Shouldn’t you be compelled to be merciful to your fellow servant who asked for mercy?’”
You would think so, wouldn’t you? But you and I also know differently, don’t we? Acting with mercy toward someone who has slighted or offended us is not easy, is it? Forgiving someone who has hurt us or said something behind our backs is not easy, is it? Being generous toward someone who has taken advantage of us or been mean to us in some way is not easy, is it? But when we listen to Jesus, we are faced with the fact of acting intentionally with mercy toward such people. Otherwise, we are in difficulty with God. James, the half-brother of Jesus, told us clearly in James 2:12, 13 [GNT]: “Speak and act as people who will be judged by the law [of mercy] that sets us free.” (We are to love our neighbour as ourselves -- even the undeserving neighbour.) “For God will not show mercy when he judges the person who has not been merciful; but mercy triumphs over judgement.”
What would persuade us to be merciful – to act with mercy to someone who does not deserve mercy? Is not what persuades us found in our inner being, in our hearts, because we have responded to God’s remarkable grace and costly forgiveness of us -- we who are entirely undeserving of God’s love of us? William Shakespeare had a well-developed sense of biblical themes and their application to our lives. Showing mercy was one of them. You might recall the familiar quotation from The Merchant of Venice when Portia asked Shylock to show mercy.
He said,What compels us to show mercy – to act intentionally with kindness, compassion, forgiveness and generosity -- toward someone who deserves to be dealt with differently? It is, first of all, having a heart out of which mercy flows. Twice in Matthew’s Gospel [9:13, 12:17], Jesus quoted from Hosea 6:6 where God said, “I want mercy and not sacrifice.” Religious sacrifices and rituals can be done casually, by habit, with little thought or meaning or personal consequences in our behaviour. But mercy calls for our intentional compassionate identification with others. My theologian friend Dale Bruner observes that God’s call for mercy in Hosea is the Old Testament equivalent of the New Testament’s golden rule: “Do for others what you want them to do for you: this is the meaning of the Law of Moses and of the teachings of the prophets.” And it was Jesus who said these words in Matthew 7:12. So for Jesus, a fundamental priority in Be-Attitude Living is showing mercy graciously to those who do not deserve mercy [Matthew A Commentary Volume 1: The Christbook. Revised and Expanded Edition, p. 421. Wm B. Eerdmans Publishing, Grand Rapids, Mich.].
“On what compulsion, must I?”
She responded:
“The quality of mercy is not strained.
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.
Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown.
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings.
But mercy is above this sceptred sway;
It is enthroned in the hearts of kings;
It is an attribute of God himself;
And earthly power doth then show like God's
When mercy seasons justice.”
Saint Augustine, who is accepted by most scholars as the most important figure in the ancient Western Church, said that those who act with mercy are also those who “come to the aid of the needy.” Ambrose, another theologian and church leader in the fourth century wrote: “There is your brother, naked and crying! And you stand confused over the choice of an attractive floor covering.” (As true in the fourth century as in the 21st century!)
In his book The Best Kept Secret of Christian Mission [Zondervan, 2010, pp. 97-98], author John Dickson writes about Tim Winton, Australia's most celebrated novelist and also well-known for his Christian faith. Winton was interviewed on a television show and asked about the time a stranger visited his family. That visit profoundly affected young Tim as well as the rest of his family. Dickson sums up Winton's response:
Tim Winton [told] how his father, a policeman, had been in a terrible accident in the mid-1960s, knocked off his motorcycle by a drunk driver. After weeks in a coma, he was allowed home. [Winton said], “[My father] was like an earlier version of my father, a sort of augmented version of my father. He was sort of recognizable, but not totally my dad.… Everything was busted up and they put him in the chair.… I was terrified.”
Winton's father was a big man and Mrs. Winton had a great deal [of trouble] bathing him each day. There was nothing that Tim, five-years-old at the time, could do to help. News of the family's situation got out into the local community and shortly afterward, Winton recalls, there was a knock at the door. “Oh, g'day. My name's Len,” said the stranger to Mrs. Winton. … “I heard your hubby's [not well]. Anything I can do?” Len Thomas was from the local church, Winton explained. This man had heard about the family's difficulties and wanted to help.
”He just showed up,” [Winton said], “and he used to carry my dad from the bed and put him in the bath and he used to bathe him -- which in the 1960s, in Perth, in the suburbs, was not the sort of thing you saw every day.”
According to Winton, this simple act of kindness from a single Christian had a powerful effect. “It really touched me in that, regardless of theology or anything else, watching a grown man bother, for nothing, to show up and wash a sick man -- you know, it really affected me.”Jesus says those who show mercy to others will be blessed by God. So we rightly ask the question: When will God show mercy? There are at least three answers we can give because of what we know from the Scripture. First, God has already shown his mercy to the world in Jesus’ death on the cross for the forgiveness of our sins. We hear this often, I know. But underlying the seventy times seven forgiveness theme that Jesus prefaced his story about the king and the unforgiving servant with is the costly and generous and amazing mercy of God in Jesus. And Jesus did that for all humanity.
Second, those who act with mercy toward others will themselves be treated with mercy in the future on God’s final Day of Judgment. Mercy and forgiveness are not meant to be withheld but to be passed on to others. So God promises he will be merciful and forgiving to those who intentionally act with mercy to others who do not deserve mercy -- any more than we do. But where forgiveness and mercy and kindness are not passed on to others, there is judgment.
There is also a third sense of when God shows mercy. It is included in today’s Call to Worship. God said to our spiritual ancestor, Moses: “I am God, the God of mercy and grace, endlessly patient with so much love and forgiveness for you.” And as the Words of Assurance of God’s Forgiving Love reminded us this morning, adapted from Psalm 103: “God is sheer mercy and grace and not easily angered. God is rich in astonishing love. God doesn’t treat us as our sins deserve. As far as sunrise is from sunset, God has separated us from our sins.” I like the way Canon Michael Green expressed when God shows his mercy to us in his commentary on Matthew’s Gospel [Green, M. (2000). The Message of Matthew: The Kingdom of Heaven (90). Leicester, England; Downers Grove, Ill., U.S.A., Inter-Varsity Press]:
“[Those who are merciful to others] have tasted the sheer mercy of God who received them into the kingdom. They have come to share that quality of divine love. And they will be shown mercy throughout their lives and at the Day of Judgment.”
May this be so for you and for me.
Rev. Chris Miller
October 31, 2010
OYM Oriole-York Mills United Church, Toronto
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