Pastor Chris Rainey
9 November 2020
The Beatitudes describe the values of God’s kingdom, and this week’s kingdom value that allows us to experience the blessed life is mercy. What is mercy? Mercy refers to acts that address people’s misery that emerge from a sense of pity plus a desire to relieve their suffering. Mercy is what God did for human beings in sending Jesus to the Cross to address their misery resulting from sin and separation from God. Acts of mercy are also what human beings should do for one another to alleviate suffering. When one person shows mercy to another, it can be life-changing.
In the 1998 movie version of Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, Jean Valjean, a recently released convict unable to shake a life of crime, is caught by the police and brought back to a kind Bishop’s home from whom he had stolen several silver candlesticks after being invited to dinner and lodging for the night. But the Bishop’s response is unexpected; instead of invoking justice, the Bishop tells police that the silver is Valjean’s. He then pulls Valjean close and says in his ear:
Jean Valjean, my brother, you no longer belong to evil. With this silver, I’ve bought your soul. I’ve ransomed you from fear and hatred. Now I give you back to God.”¹
Valjean is changed by the Bishop’s mercy; he leaves his life of crime and begins his new life’s ascent to become the mayor of a small French community where he is known for his acts of kindness, particularly as an employer, and ultimately triumphs in the story over Javert, a police commissioner who believes only in justice. At the end of Les Miserables, mercy triumphs over judgment (James 2:13).
Photograph via Canva
Our beatitude also indicates that mercy has built-in reciprocity: if you are merciful, mercy will come back to you. If you are not merciful, it won’t. So how do we show mercy to others? Mercy is a quality within the reach of everyone at one time or another. All mercy requires is a position of advantage over another, even if only briefly. Most people, when they have an advantage over another person, even a temporary one, exploit it for their own benefit.² But in what we might call “the upside-down” kingdom of Jesus, His followers do not use their advantages to exploit others. Instead, advantages provide opportunities for mercy by either not exploiting the advantage or by using the advantage to alleviate someone else’s misery.
In a 2000 novel entitled Angle of Repose, Wallace Stegner captures the difficulty of extending mercy when the narrator of the book is faced with his wife’s abandonment in the face of a serious and irreversible illness. As the narrator tries to decide what to do about her, he says:
“Forgiving I have considered, though like my father and grandfather before me, I am a justice man, not a mercy man. I can’t help feeling that if justice is observed, mercy is forever unnecessary.”³
Stegner’s line points to two types of people in the world: justice people and mercy people. Like Stegner’s narrator, maybe you have been handed down a view that says “mercy is forever unnecessary.” It may also be your natural inclination to prefer justice over mercy. But in the upside-down kingdom of Jesus, blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.
How can we apply mercy? Let us reflect on the following…
- Am I holding a grudge over someone who needs mercy from me?
- Do I need to be more merciful in my words?
- Finally, what advantages do I have that I can turn into acts of mercy for others?
1Les Miserables (1998) movie script, Script-o-rama, Accessed November 7, 2020. http://www.script-o-rama.com/movie_scripts/l/les-miserables-script-transcript-hugo.htm
2 Ibid.
3 Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose, (New York, Penguin, 2000), 431.