Hear me out:
All of us have rules about how the world works.
There are rules about who's good and who's bad, who deserves what, and what should happen to people when they break the rules that are rooted deep in our psyche.
Some of these rules we agree upon and they become cultural norms and sometimes they're even codified into law. But lots of us have a sense of justice that runs much deeper than what the laws of our particular jurisdiction predicate. And even when something isn't technically against the law, we often have a much richer and complex sense of ethics and morality.
Often we think that our rules about how things should be are universal truths.
Usually this takes the form of something like: "people should get what they deserve". Which, mostly relies on our personal sense of fairness to determine what it is that we and others deserve.
But sometimes mercy, for all of it's goodness, threatens to violate our sense of justice: our rules about how we expect or demand that the world be.
And mercy can really mess with this. Mercy can be disorienting, because sometimes mercy challenges how we think certain people should be dealt with. Mercy can feel like chaos because the order we try to impose on the universe is not always exactly the way God acts.
Why do bad things happen to good people?
But why do good things happen to good people?
We like to try to reconcile these questions with our sense of fairness, that people get what they deserve...even if only eventually. However at some point most of us are confronted with a reality that people don't get what they deserve. Innocent people are victims. Perpetrators seem to get away with things. And the quandary of mercy is that it sometimes feels like it's lining up with that world of unfairness - or at least letting people off the hook when we would rather see them punished.
Again, the story of Les Miserables captures this human difficulty with mercy. In the musical version we have this excerpt from the ruthless inspector Javert. The prisoner Jean Valjean, who he's hunted over 20 years for a parole violation, after serving 20 years for stealing bread, has the chance to let Javert die. But Valjean shows him mercy and lets him go rather killing him when he has the chance. Afterward Javert sings this:
I am the law and the law is not mocked! I'll spit his pity right back in his face! There is nothing on earth that we share! It is either Valjean or Javert! How can I allow this man To hold dominion over me? This desperate man that I have hunted... He gave me my life! He gave me freedom! And must I now begin to doubt Who never doubted all those years? My heart is stone and still it trembles... The world I have known is lost in shadow Is he from heaven or from hell? And does he know That granting me my life today This man has killed me even so? For Javert, the experience of mercy is akin to death. While he is not physically killed by Valjean, the world he "knows" is destroyed, amounting to a kind of psychological death. (spoiler alert: Javert kills himself after this song because the idea of living in the world of mercy - the idea of doubting his
entire life - is too much and death is preferable.
Seem dramatic? I don't think it is. I think lots of us choose a kind of death while alive instead of
living in the world of mercy. We narrow our lives, we cut ourselves off from the world in ways that
isolate us from mercy because our vision of justice is so precious to us, so integral to maintaining a
sense of psychic balance and orderliness, that we prefer it to what seems like a fair scarier version of death - living in a world of mercy.
Mercy is a gift. A flow in the universe we can tap into. But it comes with a challenge. Mercy
threatens our claims to be arbiters of right or wrong. It threatens our illusions of control by suggesting that the order we want to impose and live by is perhaps open to being challenged and even violated when we treat people better than we think they should, or when we are treated better than we deserve.
The religious people of Jesus' day hated him because he kept violating their rules and practices in
favour of caring for people. He tells them, "go and learn what this means, 'I desire mercy and not
sacrifice'" He challenges their conception of how the sacrificial system (the religious purity laws)
should be prioritized over the needs and care of human beings. He introduces the revolutionary idea
that mercy should be prioritized over the law when it comes to dealing with people in their failings
and weakness. Is it any wonder we have such a hard time following this Jesus who models a response to human brokenness that is at times so disruptive to our sense of how things should be?
I find the Jesus who's kind to the outsiders like women and ethnic minorities a beautiful thing. I have a harder time when he hangs out with tax collectors. Imagine Jesus going to a party with Bernie
Madoff, Donald Trump, and George W Bush, and loving them. That's the Jesus I find harder to follow.
Imagine Jesus having mercy on you. Imagine Jesus having mercy on you in such a deep and profound way that you can no longer be so hard on other people.
Mercy brings a kind of death, because when we fully accept it, we can no longer hold on to our
personal notions of how the world should work. It's that disruptive.
It's so much easier to close our eyes to the flow of mercy in the world than to have to face the
challenge mercy poses to our categories of who's good and who's bad, of who deserves what, and of what we deserve.
Perhaps it's a kind of death worth embracing. Maybe our egos and their sense of what
people deserve, need to die - to be crucified. It may feel suicidal - but it's not - because on the other
side we find a life of abundance we can only dream of in our worlds of narrowly defined "justice" and "fairness".
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