It happened to me last week when a neighbour of mine was backing out of his driveway and didn't see my daughters walking to school. Fortunately I saw him...and a tragedy was averted.
He was mortified. And somehow in my state of relief, I found the capacity to be merciful.
I don't tend to think about mercy very often, do you?
I've mostly assumed mercy was something a person in authority or power gave to another when they treated that person better than they deserved to be treated. Like a judge giving a lesser sentence than the crime deserves. Or perhaps a teacher being lenient with a late assignment. To me, through most of my life mercy was reserved primarily for God forgiving our sins, and in the metaphor of penal substitutionary atonement: allowing wicked humans to escape from punishment.
And it may mean those things, but this week I've been experiencing a richer understanding of what it means to be merciful.
Mercy is the response of kindness and gentleness we extend to others in the midst of their weakness and failings.
Where it seems so reasonable and natural to respond with anger, vindictiveness, retaliation, indifference, or a demand for justice - mercy chooses a different path. It chooses to be kind and gentle.
We can extend mercy to all kinds of people.
Sometimes to the stranger - how might we show mercy to the refugees of Syria?
Sometimes to our spouse - how do we respond when they hurt us?
Sometimes to our children - how do we respond when they do their own thing instead of accepting our loving guidance?
Sometimes to our religious leaders and institutions - how do we care for them in the midst of their failings to accomplish what we expect of them?
Mercy may not be so difficult when the infraction is small. But when we've been hurt or harmed by another person, it becomes so hard, maybe even seemingly impossible.
Part of my ignorance of mercy is a lack of conceptual precision. I always lumped it in that heap with ideas like forgiveness and grace and compassion. And likely this is so because they all do overlap. To me, forgiveness is the act of relinquishing the debt of another. Grace is any form of unmerited favour. And compassion is the concern we have for another.
But mercy is slightly specific in being an action of kindness towards another in their state of weakness. Mercy may be an expression of grace, it may involve forgiveness, and we may feel compassion in the midst of it. But it may involve none of those either. It is possible to be kind and gentle in the midst of weakness to those who fully deserve it, owe us nothing, and evoke little feeling of personal care or concern. You might even argue that mercy sounds a lot like love when you break it down, and I would agree. But love takes many forms of expression, and I think mercy is just one of the ways we love others.
Fundamentally mercy is a decision about how we will respond to the weakness of others.
We are confronted with the weakness of others all the time. And those who are close to us bring expressions of their weaknesses most clearly and regularly, and they affect us most deeply with them.
Mercy is not easy, nor is it something we should expect ourselves to able to do in every circumstance. God's character is merciful - ours is not. We are becoming, but not yet like God. As humans we will find it very difficult at times to be merciful because most of us are relatively inexperienced in expressions of mercy. Like most things of value and character in life, mercy must be practiced. We must engage in an intentional practice of relating to others with mercy, learning to see the opportunities we have for it each day.
We talk in church about joining God in his mission of redeeming all creation. It seems such a grand and distant scheme at times. We struggle with the gap between our aspirations to be people engaged in mission compared to the reality of our corporate lives. We are frustrated with ourselves and each other about failures we have in accomplishing what we aspire to. But mercy is one of those specific and practical ways we can "be missional" without being fooled into believing that we must do "bigger" things to embody the kingdom of God. We can participate in God's saving of the world by being merciful in the small and the big of each day.
When our spouses live out their weakness.
When our friends seem to have abandoned us.
When our children don't listen or do what they're asked.
When our neighbours are selfish.
When our rights are trampled by the inconsiderateness of others.
When people we care about hurt us.
When the recklessness of others changes our lives in a tragic accident.
When leaders fail us.
When our values are attacked or violated.
When things that are sacred to us are scorned or ridiculed.
When we are betrayed.
We may not immediately recognize all of these things as signs of others' weakness...but almost always they are. They are expressions of failings and selfishness that are inherent in our human frailty. How we respond to them is an opportunity to choose mercy.
Most of us don't live lives where mercy is expressed in visible or dramatic ways. Few of us have opportunities like the bishop in Les Miserables who extends mercy to Jean Val-Jean by giving him a chance to restart his life with gift of those candlesticks instead of turning him over to Inspector Javert. (Did you know that the title "Les Miserables" can be translated: "the ones in need of mercy"?)
But the daily mercy we can give comes in those small moments of interaction when we choose to be kind rather than attack. It involves our tendencies towards "soft vengeance": mocking, criticizing, shaming, ridiculing, dismissing, or any of the things we do to place ourselves above those whose weakness we can so easily see. Instead of demanding "justice" as we define it, we take on God's perspective and meet people at their worst with an unexpected kindness.
My neighbour instantly learned his lesson about backing out without looking both ways- he has two small daughters of his own and I could tell by the look of realization on his face. But the other thing he didn't see coming was mercy. None of us do. Mercy is a shocking, life changing, better-than-you-would-ever-dare-hope-is-possible, gift from God. It allows us to be so much better than we could be on our own...and it might just save the world.
I think mercy is complicated and I want to unpack it further in my next post. But for now I invite you to rediscover mercy. Beyond our doctrinal notions of the place of mercy in the universe, I invite you to find and give mercy in your everyday mess. When weakness and its consequences invade your space, may you be open to trying on mercy as a practice, to yourself and to others.
“It is mercy, not justice or courage or even heroism, that alone can defeat evil.”
― Peter Kreeft, The Philosophy of Tolkien: The Worldview Behind the Lord of the Rings
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