The merciful in our midst – 8 March 2013

Jesus said, Blessed are the merciful.  John Knox, the formidable reformer of the Scottish church, as long ago as 1564, wrote a liturgy for the reception back into the congregation of a forgiven offender.  I am not aware that any branch of the Christian Church in NZ these days has such a liturgy.  In it, Knox wrote this sentence:  No flesh can be justified before God’s presence, if judgement proceed without mercy.

Our culture, which includes our churches, has become very good at judgement.  The Sensible Sentencing Trust lights the way for many these days.  It is considered best when people have been publicly humiliated, named and shamed.  Some have indeed committed hideous crimes and are a danger to us all, some have cynically betrayed trust.  There is often no question about whether punishment is deserved – it usually is – but we still get much debate about whether the punishment will be sufficient, whether the culprit has been made to suffer enough…  I do know that penology is a deeply complex matter.  Society’s need to see an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth is usually considered superior to the plain teachings of Jesus.

But John Knox, himself in the midst of a singularly brutal age, 450 years ago, reminds his church that Jesus requires mercy.  Mercy is that we cannot pass judgement if we don’t deeply understand what happened and why.  Mercy is that the one judgement we cannot pass anyway is to write someone off.  Mercy is that we bear in mind at all times, as Knox put it in his liturgy: what nature we bear, what corruption lurketh in it, how prone and ready every one of us is to such and greater impiety.   In John’s Gospel Jesus, it is told, confronted with a publicly humiliated woman caught in adultery (note the absence of any guilty bloke at this point), said that any of her accusers without sin might throw the first stone.

Mercy is what God requires.  It is God’s nature, and true prayer will always direct our journey more towards what God is and what God creates in us.  The silence and stillness of our prayer bring us into that space where, as we inwardly consent, mercy begins to take precedence over the poison that may remain in our memories, and the need to see someone suffer...  That someone, sometimes, may be ourselves.  This is why the Psalms of imprecation are so important, in all their unpleasantness.  They are real.  They are prayers of the hearts of many.  They come from real events.  And they may be dissolved in mercy, so that we do not live the rest of our lives in anger or resentment. 

Jesus said:  Blessed are the merciful, they will receive mercy.  Perhaps it means that God recognises them as kindred souls.  I have quoted John Knox.  Another famous Presbyterian, Robert Burns, wrote:

What’s done, we partly may compute,

But know not what’s resisted.