The Place of Mercy
Blessed are the merciful, says Jesus, for they will receive mercy.
By which he means the happy are… the tender-hearted, compassionate, kind… who, being inwardly affected with the infirmities… and miseries of their fellow-creatures… with tender sympathy endeavour, as they have ability, to relieve them; and who… labour also to do spiritual good; to enlighten the darkness of people’s minds, heal the disorders of their souls, and reclaim them from vice and misery…; always manifesting a readiness to forgive the faults of others, as they themselves need and expect forgiveness from God. That’s how the great Methodist commentator, Joseph Benson, described the merciful.
Mercy ignores what people deserve (in terms of just deserts) and gives them what they don’t – in the form of acceptance, kindness, material support and love.
One thing bothers me though. In the sentence immediately preceding Jesus advocates for dikaiosune – for justice - At least part of which means each receiving their due. Things are dikaiosune when everyone gets what’s coming to them - both in a positive sense: respect, care, protection by the law, but also retributively, justice for our wrongs, punishment for crimes and sins.
Strange then that Jesus immediately advocates the opposite idea - That the kind of life we should practice, what’s practiced in his Kingdom, consists in granting the undeserving blessings and goods they don’t deserve. Seek justice, but act mercifully. Which is it?
Jesus is echoing familiar ideas here. This way of combining justice and mercy occurs throughout scripture. The OT prophet Micah tells us that what God requires of us boils down to: loving justice, showing mercy and acting humbly. James, Jesus’ brother, puts a finer point on it: if we don’t show mercy, we ourselves will be subject to the full requirements of justice.
How do we make sense of what’s going on here?
There’s an idea famous in economics and the social sciences that might help illuminate the need for mercy even when we’re hungering and thirsting after righteousness. It’s has to do with the way unintended, unforeseen, sometimes negative consequences can occur even when we’re trying to do what’s right.
When the singer Barbara Streisand sued a photographer in 2003 for publishing pictures of her house on line, she was seeking justice for an infringement on her privacy rights. Prior to that only 6 people had viewed the pictures. But the media attention inspired ½ million people to visit the website. I tell you that because it shows how negative, undesirable, sometimes painful outcomes can occur in the pursuit of justice, and sometimes as a consequence of it.
Life is full of examples: working hard to provide for your kids what you never had can mean you’re absent during their childhood, and they feel you love your work more than you love them.
You introduce your best mate to a colleague at work, thinking they’re the perfect match, except your colleague isn’t quite who you thought and your friend ends up deeply hurt.
Even when you’re trying to do the right thing hurt and pain can result. And that’s before you factor in: mistakes, accidents and failures.
Hunger and thirst after righteousness, after justice, but what do you do with unforeseen consequences, or when you’re the unintended victim of people’s ignorance, laziness, or thoughtless disregard?
We need a protocol, a strategy, a way of behaving capable of helping in such situations. I think that’s partly why Jesus advocates mercy. Mercy recognises that very often the application of justice isn’t straightforward, and that the demands of justice aren’t appropriate to every situation.
There’s something else Jesus might want us to understand about Justice, at least in a retributive sense. The sort of justice that demands an eye for an eye, that wants to extract from an offender punishment proportional to their offense – that sort of justice is almost never satisfied.
In reality, no payment, no retribution that can put wrongs right. The victim of abuse can’t be un-abused, the betrayed can never be un-betrayed, the maligned are now marred, no matter what penalty or payment is extracted from the offender.
Retribution just comes up short.
And, if our response is always to demand proportional punishment, if that’s what we think it means to hunger and thirst for justice, we’ll only be frustrated. For as long as we hope that punishment is able to repair, we end up tying ourselves to the painful consequences of the wrongs committed against us – never being satisfied and so never really getting free from them. And that’s no recipe for happiness.
I think Jesus advocates mercy because mercy recognizes the ultimate impotence of retributive justice. Mercy chooses something different: to release the wrongdoers and the failures from the need to make things right. It isn’t easy. But the payoff is that it allows both parties to move on. Which, may not be satisfactory, but it at least opens up the possibility of going forward without the residue of unhealed relationships.
One caution: As I understand it, the witness of scripture is consistent in seeing mercy as issuing from a stronger to a weaker party – the father standing on the edge of the field waiting for his prodigal child to come home; the King writing off a servant’s debt that’s too big to be repaid.
Mercy can occur between equals, of course – where there’s no power disparity. But, where there is a power imbalance, mercy is shown by the stronger to the weaker party. I’m not saying weaker parties can’t forgive. But mercy and forgiveness are distinct ideas.
And I want to caution against expecting the coerced, the oppressed, or the vulnerable that they are called upon to act mercifully towards those with power over them. The abused child can’t be asked to act mercifully towards her abuser; nor the trafficked woman to her captures; nor the defrauded senior citizen towards the predatory lenders seeking to repossess her home. There’s more to say here.
But for the moment it’s sufficient to note that that’s not the idea in scripture. And it would be inappropriate to interpret texts like this as if it were.
Having said that, that leaves many social relations where mercy is appropriate. Towards your spouse, your co-workers, your friends and your children, towards the weak, the vulnerable and the poor, we can choose to acknowledge that life is full of unintended outcomes, of accidents and failures, that things go wrong even when we’re trying to do our best.
We can choose to adopt a posture of understanding, generosity and kindness, because we know that in the end the demands of retribution fail to satisfy anyway. Put differently, we can act towards each other as God acts towards us, which is to give us the gift of life, even when the just payment for our wrongdoing should be death.
Adopting that sort of disposition prevents us from being laden by the unsatisfiable need for retribution and revenge. It allows us to move on. And it empowers wrongdoers and failures the opportunity for redemption and to do better next time. That’s how God treats us. And that’s how God calls us to act towards each other in the context of his Kingdom. What he says should result is happiness – or at least the possibility of our flourishing. So, may be worth trying to put mercy into practice.