“Be ye merciful, as your Father also is merciful”
These are words we have heard before only two weeks ago in the Gospel reading for Trinity IV: there at the beginning and setting for the parable of the blind leading the blind; here at the end of an extraordinary passage about loving your enemies. The first suggests how mercy is the counter to our hypocrisy and self-righteousness; the second, the deeper reality of mercy itself is on display. Love your enemies is mercy indeed!
We live in a world of conflicts and divisions, of hatreds and animosities, of bullies and cowards. How do we deal with such things? The tendenz of our age is to assert our various senses of entitlement, our claims to what we are owed, to a sense of justice or more accurately, self-righteousness. We think we deserve certain things and if we can’t get them it is someone else’s fault and, of course, there are always things which offend us. What we assert as a culture is the right not to be offended and endlessly to demand redress. There is no mercy, no toleration, no compassion in this; only a sense of injury, the world of the perpetually aggrieved and the endlessly resentful. All because we think we are better than others.
Today’s collect counters the entitlement culture. God has “prepared for them that love” him, “such good things as pass man’s understanding” – something more. What God seeks for us “exceeds” – goes beyond – “all that we can desire.” This is the great mercy of God that is the true and only counter to the divisions and tensions in our hearts and culture. It is precisely the something more of God’s love for our humanity that transcends our hearts of hatred and enmity, of hurt and injury, of endless cries of entitlement about what we think we are owed.
Mercy is precisely what we are not owed. It is precisely what is given in spite of ourselves, in spite of our claims to certain rights. The contemporary ‘rights culture’ pits us against one another; it creates enmities. Mercy counters and transcends our hatreds. It is about deep love. “Love – and you shall be loved” as one character says to another in David Adams Richards’ novel, “Crimes Against My Brother.”
But why love your enemies? Will loving them change them? Will they suddenly become your friends? Maybe and maybe not. There is no guarantee and it is beside the point. Loving your enemies does not mean that the hatreds and animosities suddenly evaporate and disappear. No. The radical message of the Gospel is about love in the midst of such things; in the face of enmity there is to be love. But why? Because our enemies are part of ourselves. They, too, are human. In a way, they are us. We cannot think of ourselves as selves without being aware of other selves, of other people. Their otherness is part of our self-awareness. To know ourselves is to know other selves. That means that there is a connection and a commitment; our commitment to the other without which we are not ourselves. This already compels us beyond the usual tensions and animosities which are invariably about wanting to control others; in short, to dominate, to make others our own. It is to usurp a prerogative that belongs to God alone. He is the Lord and we are his.
It is not surprising that the entitlement culture is also the culture of bullying. But it involves a contradiction. To dominate – to bully – denies the common humanity of each of us. It is to claim a special status that ignores a common reality.
The Gospel takes this further, I think. It goes beyond the calculating nature of our dealings with one another – the ‘what’s-in-it-for-me’ approach. It locates our humanity in God and, more importantly, in terms of the relationship of the Trinity, the community of divine love, “love divine all loves excelling,” as it were.
Jesus reminds us of the nature of that most excellent way of love, the love of the Highest. God’s love is about being “kind to the unthankful and to the evil,” about the intrinsic nature of the good which is greater than all evil. We are the enemies of what is good and true, the enemies of God, and yet, God is “kind to the unthankful and to the evil,” to us in the enmities of our souls. Nowhere do we see that more fully and more clearly than in Jesus Christ. This is the point of the Epistle reading from Romans which is about our being incorporated into the life of God, about our being “baptized into Christ.” It means nothing less than death and life.
“Now if we died with Christ. We believe that we shall also live with him.” Death, the great enemy, has been overcome. “For in that he died, he died unto sin once; but in that he liveth he liveth unto God.” Mercy is about living unto God. It transcends the limits of death, the limits of sin which are always about a kind of enmity towards the good, towards God.
David Adams Richards’ novel, “Crimes Against My Brother” is a kind of sequel to his great novel, “Mercy Among the Children,” and like it, reveals a mercy that underlies and overarches a world of pain and sorrow, of cruelty and betrayal. As he says to the reader, “take heart and know that no betrayal is so self-infatuated, self-serving or brutal it cannot, in the end, be overcome.” The frontispiece quotes Vasily Grossman that “in great hearts the cruelty of life gives birth to good.” One of those great hearts in the novel is a character, Sara, who has been greatly betrayed by her fiancé and friend and has been sexually abused as a child, sacrificing herself to save her sister whom she also saves from drowning in an accident that leaves her deformed in her left leg. She goes on in spite of the many hardships and people’s meanness to become a medical doctor, serving around the world with ‘doctors without borders’ and in difficulty places like Rwanda during the genocide but ultimately returning to serve in the impoverished world of her rural maritime past – it could be Hants County. Though accomplished and compassionate, and at first celebrated by the progressives in the community she is then reviled by them for refusing in conscience and on principle to perform abortions. They think her position is self-righteousness: “she doesn’t have children, does she?” they say. “Well, what would she do if she was raped and got pregnant? People like this never think of abuse happening to them!” they say, little knowing what had happened to her and that as a result of sexual abuse, she is barren.
Working in the local hospital she tends an old man who is dying. There is the moment when she realizes that he is the one who had abused and harmed her. What does she do? She ministers to him “do[ing] what she could to allow him peace at the end.” Mercy is love towards your enemies, towards those who have hurt and harmed you even in ways that seem unspeakable, cruel and harsh. Why? Because there is something greater than human cruelty and human betrayal. That something greater is the mercy of God. How badly we need it. “The virtue of Mercy is not strained,” the narrator says to her, “misquoting Shakespeare and liking the misquote,” to which she replies “in her lilting Miramichi accent that seemed to cut the air with love,” “I have wrestled with that and found it true.” Precisely, it requires the struggle, the wrestle, to give birth to the good.
We can only be bidden to be merciful because “your Father also is merciful,” Jesus says. In him we see the love of God towards us “while we were yet sinners,” while we were yet the enemies of God, while we were in denial of ourselves as the children of God. The great mercy here is about our being returned to our sonship, to our life with God in Christ, to who we are in the sight of God. “Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord,” as Paul puts it.
Once again we are returned to the theme of the Trinity season: to the challenge of acting upon what we have been given to see and know. Here we have the radical demand to love our enemies. Why? Because of the mercy of God which alone can perfect and heal our wounded and broken humanity. Because of the deep love of God in spite of ourselves. Because of what we have been given to see and know in Christ Jesus.
The idea of mercy is not unique to Christianity but it takes a certain form that results in this strong and distinctive notion of loving your enemies. It has to do with the cross of Christ. There we see the ultimate mercy of God towards us “while we were yet sinners”. There we hear the words of forgiveness and mercy: “Father,” Jesus says, “forgive them for they know not what they do.” “Father,” Jesus says, “into thy hands I commend my spirit.”
Our challenge is to live the love that has been given to us.
“Be ye merciful, as your Father also is merciful”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity VI, 2015
Christ Church, St. George’s, All Saints’