I have a hard time with mercy. Why? Because I want justice. Justice is easy to understand. I can get my head around it. It makes things neat and organized, black and white. I can come up with a list of rules to follow, which determine who’s in and who’s out, and so everything is nice and tidy inside my mind. Justice is concrete. It’s methodical. It’s simple to understand. If I do such and such, I will get such and such. It makes sense, right? No questions. No gray area.
Mercy is more difficult. I don’t get it. I have a hard time accepting something for free. My ego would rather earn it. It’s not black and white. It’s vague. It seems unfair. There should be consequences for wrong actions, right? It’s mushy. It’s idealistic. It’s risky. I might be able to accept it for me, but not for those others out there that aren’t living correctly. And even for me, it’s hard to let someone love me for nothing. I bulk against it. It’s too good to be true. It can’t work. It just can’t.
Yet when I look at Jesus, God on earth, mercy is what I see. God being too good to be true. God being merciful, whether I can understand it or not. God being forgiving, whether I accept that forgiveness or not. God being welcoming, whether I think it is appropriate or not. God offering friendship, whether I’m worthy or not.
This passage from Romans 8:3-4, in The Message, speaks to me. (My words are in parenthesis.) “God went for the jugular when he sent his own Son. He didn’t deal with the problem as something remote and unimportant. In his Son, Jesus, he personally took on the human condition, entered the disordered mess of struggling humanity in order to set it right once and for all. (He entered our darkness, our ugliness, our sinfulness.) The law code, weakened as it always was by fractured human nature, could never have done that. (It only judges and condemns and shames.) The law always ended up being used as a Band-Aid on sin instead of a deep healing of it. (Which only mercy can do.) And now what the law code asked for but we couldn’t deliver is accomplished as we, instead of redoubling our own efforts, simply embrace what the Spirit is doing in us.”
I am slowly learning that it is only mercy that can deeply heal the broken parts inside of me, inside of you.
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