Why is it so difficult to show mercy to another?
The Book of Sirach is full of wisdom sayings, maxims that were intended to help the people of Israel espouse right conduct and build community in the context of a faithful relationship with God. And so it is not surprising to find advice on dealing with anger and sin: when we enter into relationship with the Lord, can we live in a state of anger? Is anger not precisely the contradiction of the love we are called to? Sirach preaches mercy instead: Forgive your neighbor’s injustice, he says, and do not refuse mercy to another like yourself. And if we should sin, we are called to stand before God and request that he forgive us as well. Psalm 103 assures us that our God is kind and merciful, slow to anger, and rich in compassion, precisely because God desires relationship with us. God’s capacity for forgiveness exceeds our own; indeed, it is limitless.
Jesus will expound upon the limitless mercy of God in his parable of the unforgiving servant in Matthew’s Gospel. Although the man’s master forgives him his entire debt because the servant begged him to, that same servant shows no mercy to those who are in debt to him: he mercilessly has his fellow servant put in prison until he pays back his debt. To truly experience the mercy of God, Jesus is saying, we must know our own need for that mercy – we must be able to embrace our own brokenness in order to show compassion to our neighbor. Such recognition of our own need for mercy is essential to a shared life in community; it is a recognition of our own need for change, an awareness that Christ died to pay the debt for all humankind, for all time. What good is Christ’s sacrifice if it does not inspire mercy and compassion from our hearts? If we are baptized into a life in Christ, if we live for the Lord, as Paul tells the Romans, then we need to be ever conscious of how we are connected to the Body to which we belong, for our identity flows from that Body.
What kind of community are we creating if we cannot forgive? How can we create a place of mercy in our heart where God can be celebrated if we are unable to show mercy to another? How can there be mercy for us if there is no mercy for our neighbor? We all stand in a similar place of brokenness, before God and before one another. The Lord asks us to recognize the limitations of our neighbors and to be mindful of the unity he espouses, building community and relationship through the forgiveness and mercy he modeled for all.
This post is based on Fr. Pat’s Scripture class.
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