Grace, mercy, and forgiveness always get jumbled together in my mind. Do they all mean the same thing? Can we use them interchangeably? Does it matter?
Grace, mercy and forgiveness, as beautiful words as they are, can easily become abstract. Abstractions lose their energy, their focus, and go stale.
“Blessed are the merciful” is perhaps the easiest of the beatitudes to gloss over. The others require some work. What does “poor in spirit” mean? How can mourners be happy? Hunger and thirst are sensory verbs we can grab on to. Mercy, on the other hand, is something we think we are familiar with and aren’t really excited about. Like the meek, the merciful sound like doormats that allow others to walk all over them or maybe even more like how we use the word “pity” nowadays. You’ll often hear someone in a movie or television program say, “Don’t pity me.”
Mercy sounds like something kings would give when a poor peasant was caught stealing bread. My guess is we don’t like to think of ourselves as either poor peasants in need of mercy nor as kings with the power to determine another’s fate.
What is mercy?
I have always defined grace as getting the unexpected gift that you don’t deserve and mercy as God withholding the just consequence or punishment that you do deserve. So, God is merciful to us when he does not count our sins against us (Psalm 103). He extends grace to us when he adopts us into his family.
But, after reviewing the uses of “mercy” in scripture it seems to be more than just withholding deserved judgement. The BDAG (the authoritative dictionary of Biblical Greek) definition of the greek word Jesus uses is: “to be greatly concerned about someone in need.”
So in Matthew 9:27, two blind men plead with Jesus to “have mercy on them.” He, in turn, heals them. In Matthew 15, a Canaanite woman asks Jesus to show her “mercy” by healing her daughter. In Romans 12, “mercy” is listed as one of the gifts given to individuals for the church - “the one who does acts of mercy, [should do them] with cheerfulness” (Romans 12:8). In each of these cases, “mercy” isn’t directly connected to forgiveness or withholding of deserved punishment but to the active alleviation of suffering.
The Samaritan is said to have shown “mercy” when he helps the man waylaid by robbers on the Jericho road (Luke 10:37). I know this is just a parable but the Samaritan doesn’t even know the man on the side of the road.
John Stott distinguishes grace from mercy by saying that mercy seeks to alleviate the effects of sin and grace brings pardon and restoration to the sinner.
Most of the other beatitudes are about the admission of our own needs. Mercy is about meeting the needs of others. The two, however, go hand in hand. Our attitudes and response to the needs of others provide a litmus test of whether we understand the gospel.
Blessed are the merciful for they will be shown mercy.
It almost sounds as if Jesus is saying that God will extend mercy towards us if we extend mercy towards others. In fact, it sounds exactly as if Jesus is saying that. So, what is the connection here between our mercy and God’s mercy?
Tim Keller puts it this way, “My experience as a pastor has been that those who are middle-class in spirit tend to be indifferent to the poor, but people who come to grasp the gospel of grace and become spiritually poor find their hearts gravitating toward the materially poor.”
When we come to fully see the mercy of God toward us we realize that we are helpless and in need (which is why spiritual poverty is the beginning of our faith). This then becomes the lens through which we see others in their suffering and need.
The Scottish minister Robert Murry M’Cheyne once provocatively preached about the common arguments against showing mercy. In this case he had giving financially to the poor in mind but it rings true for other types of mercy ministry as well:
Now, dear Christians, some of you pray night and day to be branches of the true Vine; you pray to be made all over in the image of Christ. If so, you must be like him in giving….” Though he was rich, yet for our sakes he became poor”...Objection1. “My money is my own.” Answer. Christ might have said, “My blood is my own, my life is my own”...then where should we have been? Objection 2. “The poor are undeserving.” Answer: Christ might have said, “They are wicked rebels...shall I lay down my life for these? I will give to the good angels.” But no, he left the ninety-nine, and came after the lost. He gave his blood for the undeserving. Objection 3. “The poor may abuse it.” Answer: Christ might have said the same, yea, with far greater truth. Christ knew that thousands would trample his blood under their feet; that most would despise it; that many would make it an excuse for sinning more; yet he gave his own blood. Oh, my dear Christians! If you would be like Christ, give much, give often, give freely, to the vile and poor, the thankless and the undeserving.
If we don’t see ourselves in the suffering and broken, the hurting and the vulnerable, then we have not yet understood the full depth of the grace of God. Though we wouldn’t say it this way, indifference to the suffering of others reveals that we still believe that there is something good in us (and not in others) that God saw and therefore we somehow merited his mercy.
This is why our attitude and response to the suffering of others is such a clear litmus test to our understanding of grace.
The elder brother in the parable of the Prodigal Son in Luke 15 has every reason to object and be angry. He has been steadfast in his service. If he did not serve his father out of delight he at least did so out of duty. He did not go on a months-long bender, wasting his father’s money and shaming his family. His brother is poor and wretched both materially and spiritually.
The younger brother’s suffering is self-induced. He created his own mess. When he comes crawling back and his father lavishly forgives, embraces and celebrates his homecoming we can all understand the older brother’s reluctance to join in on the festivities. He knows he is deserving of his father’s favor and his younger brother is not. And it is right there that Jesus exposes our hearts.
Do you see how the attitude and response to his brother’s suffering exposes the elder brother’s heart? Extending mercy has nothing to do with the deservedness of the one who is suffering. Extending mercy has nothing to do with whether or not the individual’s suffering is self-inflicted. The younger brother is a fool, debauched, lazy and disloyal.
The scandal of grace, and our only hope, is that the Father welcomes him home anyway.
This is why we tend to gloss over this beatitude. Because Jesus seems to think that his followers should do the same.
What would it take to create this degree of mercy within us? How is this possible? It is possible by the same grace. It is possible when we come to see that we all, like sheep, have gone astray. Our ability to extend mercy to others - to be greatly concerned about others in their time of need - is in direct correlation with our ability to see the concern our Lord had for us in our time of need.
Blessed are the merciful.
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