“Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father is also merciful.”
Known as the Mercy Gospel, this gospel passage has been read for centuries on this day. Paradoxically, it seems to me, the mercy lies in the realization that we are all hypocrites! The parable Jesus tells is precisely about that. And yet, this is the good news!
The text about the blind leading the blind has become a commonplace in our world; we are quick to use it in relation to political and institutional leadership, but we forget that we are included in its range. The blind who are the leaders lead the blind who are the followers. In other words, this parable forecloses on our tendencies to judge and condemn one another as if we stood upon some superior platform. Quite the opposite, the parable goes on to suggest.
“Thou hypocrite, cast out first the beam out of thine own eye, and then shalt thou see clearly to pull out the mote that is in thy brother’s eye.” This is a devastating reality check. We are utterly blind about ourselves. I love the language of beam and mote; more modern translations of log and speck just don’t have the same resonance. Think of the massive oak beams of this Church and, then, think of the tiny dust motes dancing in the morning light and you begin to get a sense of the contrast and the problem. And so, what is to be done?
The answer is captured, I think, in the opening statement of Christ. “Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father is also merciful.” It echoes the one Beatitude which is about the paradox of identity over and against the paradoxes of difference in Christ’s famous Sermon on the Mount. Most of the Beatitudes set up a paradoxical contrast, the paradox of difference: the poor in spirit shall obtain the kingdom of heaven; the meek shall inherit the earth, not the strong; those who hunger and thirst after righteousness shall be filled, and so on. But the merciful shall obtain mercy. Mercy has a special quality to it and this gospel passage spells it out: “judge not, and ye shall not be judged: condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned: forgive, and ye shall be forgiven: give and it shall be given unto you.”
We are offered another way of thinking and acting. Forgiveness, we might say, is the one of the distinctive teachings of the Christian faith. It is mercy in action and the action has a divine quality to it; something which is proper to the nature of God is allowed to move and have its way in us. This is the necessary counter to the limits of human justice. For “in the course of justice,” as Portia puts it in Shakespeare’s play, The Merchant of Venice, “none of us should see salvation.” We are all blind and hypocritical in one way or another. But far from being a way of beating up on ourselves which can itself be another form of blindness, we are offered the mercy of God. We are bidden to pray for mercy and, as Portia says, “that same prayer doth teach us all to render the deeds of mercy.” That is the point. The gospel challenges us to act not out of our blind prejudices but out of what God has given us – mercy. This is the whole burden of the Christian mission, the mission of the Church.
In a way, it is the glory that underlies and overcomes “the sufferings of this present time” as Paul puts it. This, too, is a kind of reality check. The mercy of God is that suffering can be seen as redemptive; not only can we learn from our mistakes but we need not be defined simply by what we do or by what is done to us. Suffering is not ignored but becomes the playing field for the glory of God to be at work in us.
The Collect, I think, draws these themes together. “Increase and multiply upon us thy mercy,” we pray, “that, thou being our ruler and guide, we may so pass through things temporal, that we finally lose not the things eternal.” It is one of my favourite prayers and one which I often use in a slightly modified way in hospital and pastoral visits, especially to the sick and dying.
None of this means that we should turn a blind eye to the forms of corruption in social and political life but it does temper the form of our reaction by reminding us of the forms of our own corruption or sinfulness. What is important about that? It makes us realize the most important thing; our collective and individual need for the mercy and the forgiveness of God. If that is alive in us, then our judgements of ourselves and one another will have an entirely different quality to them.
“Of course, God will forgive me. That’s his job,” the German Romantic poet Heinrich Heine is famously reported to have said on his death bed. Forgiveness is proper to God, to be sure, but as we have seen we have to want it in ourselves and for one another; it can’t be taken for granted. If it is going to live in us it has to be expressed through us in our hearts and our deeds. One of the features of the Trinity season is about the practical application of the creedal principles of the faith to our lives. And so the lessons challenge us about ourselves. It is all the mercy of God but mercy in specific ways. Here it is the counter to our complacencies and self-righteousness. We are reminded of our hypocrisies so as to seek the divine mercy which alone can save us from ourselves and one another. That means taking God seriously. That, and, that alone is the real counter to the follies and the wickednesses in the high places of power and in our own hearts, too. It is the business of the Church to speak of God’s mercy. It is what Jesus says and who he is. It is what we all and always need.
“Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father is also merciful.”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity IV, 2013