Sermon for the Fourth Sunday after Trinity
“Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful”
Luke provides us with an extended version of what we know as the Sermon on the Mount from Matthew’s Gospel. Only here it is a Sermon on the Plain, on the flatlands of our human existence, as it were. Today’s gospel is sometimes known as ‘the mercy gospel’ because of this opening line.
It complements one of the most powerful of the Beatitudes in Christ’s Sermon on the Mount. “Blessed are the merciful for they shall obtain mercy.” Unlike the other beatitudes which confront us with the paradox of difference, this beatitude is about the paradox of the same. Luke emphasizes that element in this passage and in a way deepens, perhaps, our understanding. There is the element of equality: judge not and not be judged; condemn not and not be condemned; forgive and be forgiven; give and it shall be given to you. But these conditions hang, it seems to me, on the opening statement. “Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful.”
It is, I think, a remarkably profound statement. It lies at the heart of Christian prayer, captured in the Lord’s Prayer: “thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” The point is that somehow the realities of heaven are what are looked for and expected on earth. But that is the point of Jesus Christ. He is God with us, the very Logos of God who “suffers in us at every moment”, as James Joyce notes in his rambling novel, Ulysses. What is opened out to us are the properties of heaven, of what is eternal and true, as being the measure and truth of our lives. “For with the same measure that ye mete withal, it shall be measured to you again.”
You get what you give, it seems. There seems to be a kind of justice in that idea, yet one which does not always equate with our experiences. (more…)
