5. "Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy"
 (Matthew 5:7)

Psalm 136:1-9; Matthew 18:23-35

It is interesting. Where the evangelist Matthew has the important words in the Sermon of the Mount: "Be perfect, …, as your heavenly Father is perfect" (5:48), Luke says: "Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful" (6:36).

That is the first thing I would like us to hear this morning. God's perfection is not some abstract or spiritual quality – it is God's mercy.

That God is merciful has a long tradition in the Hebrew Bible. It is a word that describes the covenant loyalty between two partners. Like in a marriage covenant where we commit ourselves to each other "for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, until we are parted by death". This commitment is not the result of law and duty. It is the result of love. It results from the realisation that I want to seek and find my identity not over against, but together with my partner. I do not want to live and understand my life apart from my partner.

But our love needs to be lived and it needs to be protected. Love is a fragile plant. Mercy is the active engagement with the other so that the relationship actually works.

This commitment to each other results from the passion for life. It includes the dimension of empathy and sympathy and forgiveness when things go wrong. But at the basis of it there is the passion to live life successfully and meaningfully.

Illustration: Israel is in slavery. Since they are God's people, God is there with them. God feels their pain, God hears their cries, God feels the chains hurting, God knows their yearning for freedom. And God shows his mercy by finding ways to deliver them.

They now should echo what they have experienced. They now should become liberators to others. God has shown them a new way of life. Are they able and willing to walk it?

No, not then, not yet. Instead they grasp and cheapen God's grace, so that God has to remind them constantly of their covenant responsibility, to show mercy, to welcome the stranger, to care for the orphan and to help the poor.

Nevertheless, mercy constitutes a new way of life, a new way of being. That is the lesson of Jesus parable that we heard this morning.

There are two parallel stories.

The first story portrays a king wanting to settle accounts with his servants (what we would call public servants today). One servant owed him lots of money – millions in our reckoning. He can't pay. Now the king's honour is at stake. He needs to be tough to protect the system and his honour.

(We know the problem! Remember, that was and is the great challenge of the Jubilee scheme to forego debt repayment for those nations who would never be able to pay their debts. Those who opposed the Jubilee idea said, if we forgive people's debt we shall weaken the system. The world economic order will be threatened).

The law says that the servant with his family need to be sold into slavery so that at least some of the money could be recovered.

The servant falls on his knees and pleads for his freedom. Please give me another chance? The king listens. He suspends the law and shows mercy.

And now the second story which is exactly parallel to the first. The public servant who had experienced mercy, met a colleague who owed him some money. The colleague also could not pay. Now the challenge was: had mercy started a new way of life, so that he would pass on the same mercy that he had received. No! He reverted to the old ways and let the law take over. Since the amount he owed was much less than what the first public servant owed the king, he could not be sold into slavery, but he is thrown into prison.

All the public service knows about the two stories.

The king is now exposed. If he does not react, then his mercy is interpreted as weakness. The system will fall. The system needs the law. It cannot be run on mercy. So the new way of life, the mercy way of life, is frustrated, and the King reverts back, not to the order of mercy, but to law and order, and he punishes his servant.

How do we, the listeners, react to the parable?

Obviously, the idea is that we should be upset with the public servant who did not show the mercy that he experienced from the king. The central verse says:

But let's be honest. Would we react that way if we had not heard the first story?

Is it not our attitude that mercy is good, but law is better? If and when we grant mercy, is it not the exception rather than the norm. The law, rules, dogmas, they are the norm for us. Mercy is the exception.

But like with the other beatitudes, Jesus is painting a new picture of life. A life, where at its centre, its source, not the law, rules, dogmas, but mercy rules. And the question is to us, who believe in Jesus, will we risk this new way of life. Will we actually echo the mercy that we have experienced? Not as an exception, but as the passion of our life?

In this new way of life there are laws and rules and dogmas. But they are not the centre. They are not the norm. They are valid when they pursue mercy. Mercy is the norm!

Those who walk the talk. Those who risk the new way of life are blessed. They echo God's passion for life. They make God's life visible, real and public.

Since it is God's life, not God's law that they make public, we have to carefully guard this new way of life against the many dangers that lurk on the way.

Jesus underlines, for instance, that a legalistic mind set will have difficulties with exercising mercy.

"Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint, dill, and cummin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith. It is these you ought to have practiced without neglecting the others." (Matthew 23:23)

This "pharisaic" attitude is within each of us. Tithing the "mint, dill, and cummin" may not be easy, but it is convenient. That is the reason why we like laws and rules. Then we don't have to think, and we don't have to listen to the Spirit, and we don't have to take on responsibility.

For many things in life that has its place. Once you have thought things through or prayed things through, you don't need to do that each time anew. You make certain rules for yourself and follow them. The alarm clock rings the same time every morning; you come to church on Sundays; you give so much money and time and energy to church matters.

But not all of life can be regulated that way. Exercising "justice and mercy and faith" are much more elusive and much more demanding! When you are vulnerable to people in need, you can't say: "I have not considered your need in my budget." There are situations where the call for mercy suspends all pre-given rules.

That is the reason why Jesus broke the rules. Or better: why Jesus did not fit any rules. Jesus was a Jew. He went to the Temple for worship and he was quite happy to acknowledge and keep the rules of the Sabbath. But when he was confronted with the fact that the temple was not meeting the needs of the people, and when he encountered human need on the Sabbath, then his decision was clear. The call for mercy suspends rules because the God who is merciful wants to arrive in people's lives.

If we walk with God, then from God's side that relationship will not be broken. Those who tune into God's way "will receive mercy". That is a divine promise. It is the promise on which Jesus staked his life.

Judgment means intentionally clinking yourself out of God's ways. Following other gods. Letting other ways rule our conscience. If we refuse to echo God's mercy, if we refuse to risk walking the new way, then we are cutting ourselves off from God and that is what the Bible calls judgment.

But it is better to gratefully acknowledge God's mercy and hear the promise:

"Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy."

Thorwald Lorenzen
04/07/2004