Sunday, October 6, 2019

Mercy

“Go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.’” – Matthew 9:13

“What shall I do with you, O Judah? Your love is like a morning cloud, like the dew that goes early away… For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.” – Hosea 6:4, 6

Jesus quotes Hosea 6:6 twice so far in our readings in Matthew (chapters 9, 12). The Hebrew word for “steadfast love” is checed, translated often “kindness, mercy,” but coming from a root word that literally means “desire, ardour.” Which makes a poignant kind of sense in a story like Hosea’s. I desire desire. But both times Jesus quotes this verse to the Pharisees, he chooses the word for mercy, Greek eleos.

What is mercy? It’s often compared to grace, in that grace is receiving what you don’t deserve, and mercy is not receiving what you do deserve. Lloyd-Jones contrasts the two this way: “Grace is especially associated with men in their sins; mercy is especially associated with men in their misery. In other words, while grace looks down upon sin as a whole, mercy looks especially upon the miserable consequences of sin. So that mercy really means a sense of pity plus a desire to relieve the suffering. That is the essential meaning of being merciful; it is pity plus the action… we can describe it as inward sympathy and outward acts in relation to the sorrows and sufferings of others.”

God is not just a God of grace; He is a God of mercy. Look at Ephesians 2:4: “But God, being rich in [not grace, but…] mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses…” This is the essential movement of God, the impulse of his heart, and it is so tied up with his great love for us that in Hebrew checed can be translated both ways. If you miss this, Jesus says to the Pharisees, you don’t know God at all, despite all your ceremonial laws.

How has God shown me mercy? In many small daily ways: green lights when I’m late, Dave leaving work early to help with kids’ pick-ups, the hands of a Sweet Tomatoes lettuce-chopper so I don’t have to cook. Am I too habitually entitled to see his mercies, big and small? 

How am I moved to mercy? Sometimes, when one of our kids is crying, instead of letting annoyance rise up at the interruption or irrationality of it, I try to imagine how I would feel if I was crying like that. It moves me to just hold them for a bit. I see patients in my county clinic who have little social support, who can’t speak English, who have waited so long their cataracts have become complicated cases no one wants to touch. I don’t really want to do their cases, but I do, I have to. What does it mean for you?

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