According to
the Prophet Micah, God’s second requirement of us -- after doing justice -- is that we love
mercy. It interests me that while
justice is to be done, mercy is to be
loved. That is to say, not only done but sought and
enjoyed. It is as though choosing mercy
is one of our highest human functions.
Anyone can punish, anyone can exact retribution, anyone can make sure
the punishment fits the crime, anyone can make someone else suffer for what
they have done… But it is more human and
more Godlike to understand and to show mercy.
As Robert Burns put it: What’s done we partly may compute, but know
not what’s resisted.
The Hebrew
word which Micah used is chesed – it
is often translated as loving-kindness.
The Greek word is eleos – in
Greek it is close to the word which means olive oil, a soothing and healing
thing. But mercy is something widely
seen in our day as wimpish at best, even perhaps embarrassing when someone says
they prefer mercy and forgiveness as their response to being hurt. The media typically never quite understand
it. And there are huge ironies, anyway. One of the 99 names of Allah is Allah the
Merciful, yet the Middle East is currently swarming with sons of Allah exacting
hideous vengeance on all sides. In
Jewish history the Hebrew God in one place commands a tenfold vengeance… while
Hosea the prophet portrays God as agonising over the sins of his people and
asking, How can I give you up, Israel?
One of my
earliest lessons in ministry was from a senior minister I worked with over a
couple of summers. That down town parish
had plenty of homeless and pathetic derelicts and alcoholics – and this
minister said to me early on, Make sure
you’re kind. Nothing is achieved if we
are judgemental. I am not sure I really learned that, but I
certainly never forgot it. It did help
to realise that Jesus was not always kind and merciful. He was openly and blisteringly angry against
the legalists, the people who beat needy people over the heads with rules and
regulations, the people who require that you must first satisfy their protocols
before you are acceptable. Quite often that has been the church, failing
in mercy. Jesus portrayed a merciful
God. Neither
do I condemn you… he says to a publicly humiliated woman. In our day she would already have been
paraded through the mills of a self-righteous media.
The choice
of mercy is a human, Godlike, Christlike and loving choice. Of course it is risky. And of course there are times when someone
does have to be restrained and sanctions applied, for reasons of simple common
sense. But we are to prefer the option
of mercy. More than that… we are to love mercy, says Micah. We have
received mercy, says St Paul. And in
the silence and stillness which we practise we may become daily more merciful
in our hearts and attitudes.
It is worth
pointing out that to exercise mercy in our attitudes and decisions usually means
letting something go. It may mean
letting anger go, or the luxury and safety of the moral high ground, or the
assumptions and prejudices in which we were brought up. It may mean stepping outside the gossip
circuit, or simply not joining with the majority who want heads to roll or
someone crucified. It may mean deciding
not to say anything, or to express an opinion, but merely to think our own
thoughts and send our own prayers. All
of this is attended to in silence and stillness, away from the clamour of a
frightened and retributive world. We can
become people who prefer loving-kindness, who love mercy.
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