“Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful”
Suffering and glory. Mercy and justice. They seem to stand in opposition one to the other yet our readings suggest otherwise and illuminate the nature of the Christian pilgrimage of the soul. It is nothing less than our participation in what has been fully and completely accomplished for us in Christ’s sacrifice but which remains to be more fully realized in us. We live by faith in what we have been given to know. We live by hope in what belongs to the truth and end or purpose of our humanity in God. We live by love that unites faith and hope and sustains us in the journey of our souls to our homeland in God both now and evermore. In short, we await “our full adoption as sons.”
That sense of participation highlights a sense of agency in our taking a hold of the life of Christ. Our seeking is our finding in order to seek all the more. It is not about possessing the truth, as if it were a thing, a consumer product, or simply a fantasy of our own devising; rather it is about being possessed by the truth. What that means is further illustrated in the witness of John the Baptist whose nativity was this week. In the tradition of the church we meet within the Octave of that feast precisely because of the significance of John the Baptist in the pilgrimage of sanctification.
An intriguing and challenging figure, his life and story is only about one thing and one thing only: he points us to the truth of God in Christ. The whole purpose of his being from his birth to his death is to point to the one who is greater than himself, the one whom he names as “the Lamb of God”. John the Baptist prepares the way of Christ by preaching of repentance. Repentance is our constant turning to God, a twofold turning, a turning towards God and a turning away from our sins which separate us from God; in short, conversion and contrition. John the Baptist preaches a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins; Christ is that forgiveness. Christ’s baptism by John in Jordan reveals the truth of God and the meaning of that truth for us in the restoration of the image of God as Trinity in us, for that is the radical meaning of our pilgrimage, our sanctification in embracing and growing into Christ.
The Father’s voice from heaven, the descent of the Holy Spirit as a dove upon the figure of Christ in the body of our humanity, all manifest the Trinity as our home and end in which we participate now through the ordered life and ministry of the Church. The Church lives and exists only “in the obedience to the Word of God made manifest in Jesus Christ” not by any devisings of ourselves but only by what is “divinely given in the Word revealed.” It stands on no other ground. The mission of John the Baptist is nothing less than the mission of the Church captured in his words about the advent of Christ and its meaning to the Priests and Levites from Jerusalem who go out into the wilderness to ask him, ‘Who art thou?’ He is not the Christ, but the voice crying in the desert who prepares and points our way to Christ.
This signals the universal desire of our humanity for truth and righteousness, a truth and righteousness which is found in God. That seeking is a constant activity, a constant metanoia or repentance, a constant turning and circling around and into the mystery of the Trinity revealed in Christ. Metanoia, our thinking after the thoughts of God, means “bring[ing] all things to [our] remembrance, whatsoever [Jesus] has said unto [us]” through the Holy Spirit, the remembrancer of all truth and the principle of our adoption as the children of God.
The reading from Romans is theologically rich and profound. There is suffering, to be sure, as Paul tells us but “reckons that our present sufferings are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed unto us.” The suffering is not just personal but cosmic. Why? Because of our separation from God and his creation through sin. But to know this is conversion, a turning to God and contrition, a turning away from our sins and failings. In other words, it deepens our desire for God and his truth; a constant learning about Christ as that truth in us.
We badly need the witness of John the Baptist as the strong counter to the cynicism and the nihilism in our contemporary world that despairs of any objective ethical ground whether in matters human or divine, on the one hand, and as the corrective to the vain attempts to make the world, the church, and even God in our image in the presumption of opinions, on the other hand. The Gospel story for today speaks profoundly to these matters. It is sometimes known as the ‘Mercy Gospel’. Mercy is the overflowing love of God that redeems and perfects our lives if we will let it live in us.
So often mercy and justice are seen in opposition as if mercy eclipses and negates justice. Yet mercy is the justicia dei,the justice of God who seeks our good in spite of our follies and the wilfulness of human sin. It is an axiom, Richard Hooker says, “that natural desire cannot be utterly frustrate,” but the true, the good, and the beautiful that we seek cannot be attained by our own wills which are in disarray. Hence the need for the grace of God that redeems our broken and fragmented selves and gathers them into their wholeness and salvation as found in God. “Our sovereign good desired naturally” by natural means has been “utterly disabled” by the Fall in us but God provides through revelation another means by which “that which is desired naturally may be attained supernaturally;” in short, by the grace highlighted in the Gospel as the super-abundant mercy of God.
But if we neglect what is given for the perfection of our humanity then the whole ministry is like the blind leading the blind. Instead of discovering paradise in the wilderness, we remain trapped in the self-delusions of our hearts, trapped in “the tyrannies of feeling and opinion,” lost in the “conformity to arid and graceless secularity.” At issue is whether we will learn what God seeks for us through his grace and mercy.
Portia’s famous speech about “the quality of mercy” in Shakespeare’s play The Merchant of Venice reminds us of this. Mercy is more than but not less than justice. “It is an attribute to God himself; And earthly power doth then show likest God’s/ When mercy seasons justice.” The context is the trial scene where Shylock under the guise of justice seeks revenge against Antonio for injuries both real and inflated. Demanding his “pound of flesh” means the death of Antonio.
She speaks directly to Shylock but really to all of us. “Therefore, Jew,/ Though justice be thy plea, consider this:/ That in the course of justice none of us/ should see salvation./We do pray for mercy,/ And that same prayer doth teach us all to render the deeds of mercy.” The real question in the play is who will learn to do what she says and “render the deeds of mercy”; in short, to act upon what has been taught.
In the reversal of situation, Shylock’s claim to be demanding justice makes him subject to justice and thus in need of mercy. Antonio, having been literally under the knife of Shylock, is asked what mercy he can give him. What he offers is the reconciliation of Shylock with his family, his daughter, Jessica, and son-in-law, Lorenzo, with whom she had eloped, leaving the household of Shylock, albeit taking much of his money and jewels, as well as the reconciliation of Shylock to the state of Venice with the provision of monies to allow him to pursue business. It is a reconciliation which is difficult for us and challenges our assumptions since it requires Shylock becoming a Christian. Yet that is the only way he can be a citizen of Venice owing to the early modern understanding of cuius regio eius religio, ‘whosoever the region, his the religion,’ the idea that the unity of the state requires unity in religion. If the prince was catholic, the state was catholic. Religion had in this sense a political and civic dimension and not simply something personal, cultural and ethnic.
There is indeed hatred between Jew and Christian on both sides in the play. Shylock says he hates Antonio because he is a Christian but even more, he says, because he ruins his business as a money-lender. Antonio despises and berates Shylock in the market-place because his business as a money-lender means usury, a sin formally speaking for Christians for centuries but one about which Christian Kings and Bishops were completely hypocritical. Both Antonio and Shylock betray their religious principles: Antonio for the sake of his friendship and love for Bassanio, Shylock by reducing his religion, first, to economic ends and, secondly, to justify revenge.
Yet, mercy seasons or perfects justice and seeks the greater reconciliation of opposed and different views. Shakespeare explores how we deal with differences between people on matters of sex, race, ethnicity, religion, and class in terms of friendship and marriage, and shows how money can infect and distort our relations with one another; all of which goes to the question about what it means to be human. Shakespeare knows only too well about human prejudices but also knows that mercy is not solely a property of Christians. It is an important feature of Judaism and Islam, both of which figure in the play. Hypocrisy and self-righteousness are universal aspects of human fallenness.
For under a strict sense of justice or law, divine and human, we all stand condemned to some extent or other: “none of us should see salvation.” We are imperfect and implicated in the injustices of the world to some extent or other. It is not for us to judge and condemn nor to confess the sins of others but only our own while compelled by the love of God and the love of neighbour to seek the good of one another as found in the goodness of God. That goodness of God is found in Christ who alone directs our way to our end in the homeland of the Spirit: “forgiving and being forgiven.” It is a kind of justice “for with the same measure that ye mete withal, it shall be measured to you again.” Mercy for mercy is the greater justice.
Why mention these things? Because the Gospel speaks to all of the things that matter to reconciliation and unity. Not in an immediately practical sense but in a way that reminds us of the deeper principles that belong to our humanity and its dignity. There is the disturbing phenomenon in Canada and elsewhere about anti-semitism, essentially a racist theory about who is and is not fully human. This is a long way, it seems to me, from the realm of prejudices, conceits and opinions that Shakespeare is dealing with, let alone the Scriptures which belong to a long and deep tradition of ethical reflection on what it means to be human. I don’t presume to have the answer to the divisions of our times other than to point to the ways in which we are given to engage with the confusions that are part and parcel of the history and truth of our humanity. And even more to see how one might transcend the divisions in the pursuit of a deeper understanding of what unites us and belongs to the dignity of our humanity in communion; in short, the communion of saints.
Such is the divine mercy that reconciles all things in God, the mercy to which John the Baptist points us.
“Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 4, 2026