Mercy
Grace to you and
peace from God our Father, and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
“Be merciful just as your Father also is
merciful.” This is what Jesus requires of you. But it’s not easy. Mercy
requires that you always act for your neighbor’s welfare without considering
yourself. Mercy demands that you seek only to serve others. Mercy insists that
you be quick to forgive, slow to get angry. It demands that you bear no
grudges. Mercy teaches you to suffer undeserved punishment quietly, to shoulder
the blame for wrongs you have not done—and even wrongs that have been done to
you. Mercy orders you to love the unlovable, to help those who abuse you, and
to reach out to those who spitefully and meanly mistreat you.
That is what your heavenly Father has done for you. That is
what our Lord Jesus endured for your sake. That is how the Holy Spirit deals
with you. You were not turned away from the waters of baptism. And even though
you continue to abuse God’s kindness, He does not refuse to forgive your sins.
And the Holy Spirit still gathers you within the Church, still invites you to
pray to the Father, and still allows you to partake of God when you turn to Him
in repentant faith. In fact, the Lord eagerly waits to embrace you, to shower
you with the riches of His mercy—riches you don’t deserve.
Do you see, then, how mercy goes? Mercy requires you to lose
yourself entirely, to give yourself over to another—even a stranger—without any
hesitation, without any question, without any fear, without any vengeance,
without any thought for your own well-being. After all, that is what our Lord
Jesus did. And He is the Mercy of God in the flesh. But who can “be merciful
just as your Father is merciful?” Does that not ask the impossible? Does
that not demand that you somehow become like God?
That is precisely the point. Our Lord is not demanding that
you be something you cannot be. He is not commanding you to change yourself
from imperfection to perfection. He is not ordering you to change from creature
to Creator, or from human to divine. Rather, our Lord is urging you to become
more and more what you already are.
And who are you really? By God’s grace, you are a child of
the heavenly Father. Through the waters of Holy Baptism, you are born of God.
And by the kindness of the Holy Spirit, you are no longer a child of
disobedience, a child of fear, a child of rebellion, a child of slavery to sin
and death. Instead, you been freed to live in holiness and righteousness. You have
been delivered to live without fear of being short-changed or abused. You have
been rescued to live as you ought to live. You have been freed by the Spirit to
live the mercy that Jesus lives in you.
So Jesus is saying that you should become merciful, just as
God your Father has been merciful and gracious towards you. Become as merciful
as Jesus has been to you. He became what you are. The Son of God joined your
death-riddled, sin-filled flesh to His holy and life-giving divinity. In the
unity of His Person, He joined God and Man, joining you to Himself. He did this
so that in His Body you would become what you can never be apart from Him: so
that you would become the mercy that He is.
So become merciful—that is what the Mercy of God urges
you to be. Become merciful—that is what the Spirit of Mercy invites and
implores you to be. Become merciful—that is why Mercy died and rose, why
He ascended, why He then descended into the font and continues to descend upon
this altar in His body and blood. Our Lord Jesus comes to you in His Supper so
that you would become the person He died for you to be: a child of the Father
who resists the evil spirit of revenge, who strives in Christ Jesus to live the
spirit of patience and love that He has graciously given to you. In the name of
the Father and of the Son (†) and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
The
peace of God which passes all understanding will keep your hearts and minds in
Christ Jesus always. Amen.
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