Mercy and its Cost

As many of you know, I have been teaching at Wagner College again this term, this time a survey course on  Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.  I was recently teaching about the rise of rabbinical Judaism in the millennium following the destruction of the second temple in Jerusalem in the year 70.  One of my favorite things about teaching about rabbinical Judaism and its global spread through the Jewish diaspora is that it is a good excuse to read Rabbinical stories.  Jesus is not the only Rabbi to enjoy using parables and stories to convey truths about God and how God longs for us to live in response to God’s way of being.  Storytelling and parables are how rabbis teach. Like a story told about Rabbi Meier and his wife, Beruriah, about the mercy of God.

Rabbi Meier was a Jewish sage who lived in Judea in the 2nd century—about 100 years after Jesus.  He is one of the most frequently referred to wise rabbis in the Mishnah, the Jewish commentaries on the Torah.  His wife, Beruriah, the daughter of a famous rabbi, was regarded almost more highly for her learning and is sometimes quoted in the Talmud.  In one story, about the mercy of God, Rabbi Meier grows extremely angry at a group of hooligans who are wandering his neighborhood and have harassed him that day on the streets. His wife Beruriah walks in as Rabbi Meier is praying to God: “Sovereign of all worlds, I wish you would kill those bandits!”  But Beruriah, his wife, scolded him and said: “What are you thinking?” Rabbi Meier defended himself: “I am only asking for what it already says in the Psalms – let sinners disappear from the earth and the wicked be no more.”  Beruriah, who was a better Biblical scholar than Rabbi Meier, said: “That is not what the verse says!  “It says: let sins—not sinners--disappear from the earth.” She goes on to teach: “The wicked won’t just disappear because someone wishes them away. They will only disappear because they will repent and give up their sins. The wicked do not disappear because God takes vengeance on them, but because God has mercy on them.”  So Rabbi Meir changed his prayer about the wicked hooligans and instead, he said: “May God have mercy on them and may they change their ways.”

As Jesus Christ, son of God, reveals most clearly: our God is merciful.  Consider too this other rabbinical parable told in what is called the Bereshit Rabbah, a commentary on the book of Genesis from the 3-5 century, included in the Talmud.  It’s a parable that tries to account for both the nature of God and the need for the world to possess both judgment and mercy or as Lutherans like to say, Law and Gospel. The parable is this: “In the day that the Lord God made earth and heaven, God said, “Creation of the world may be compared to a king who had a craftsman make for him an extremely delicate, precious goblet of glass. The king said, ‘If I pour hot liquid into it, it will burst, if I pour ice cold liquid into it, it will crack!’ What did the King do? He mixed the hot and the cold together and poured it into it, and it did not crack.”  Even so did the Holy One, blessed be God, saying: “If I create the world on the basis of the attribute of mercy alone, it will be overwhelmed with sin; but if I create it on the basis of the attribute of justice alone, how could the world endure? I will therefore create it with both the attributes of mercy and justice, and may it endure!” God creates the world and enables it to thrive by pouring out justice tempered by mercy.  Justice alone Is too harsh and makes living unbearable and impossible.  Justice mixed with mercy allows for thriving.

Consider our Gospel reading—and our Old Testament reading about Jacob and his brothers—in the light of this truth: that God knows that judgment must be tempered with mercy.  That what gives life is mercy, what creates transformation is mercy, what creates progress is mercy.   What creates future Is mercy.

Our Gospel reading today is the continuation of Jesus’ Sermon on the Plain that we started to unpack last Sunday with Jesus’ holistic blessing on the poor and suffering.  Today, Jesus continues his ethical teachings with some hard lessons especially when we feel threatened or harmed or under attack.

Let’s start with “Do not judge.”  What does Jesus mean here?  I think a better translation is: do not act the judge over your opponent or enemy.  You might still identify that person or force to be your opponent or enemy, but don’t act the judge and determine the punishment.  Do not condemn.

Instead, when you have identified someone as your opponent or enemy, forgo revenge, and instead fill the space between you with a disarming action: turn the other cheek, love, give your cloak.  Or as Luke has Jesus summarize: Be merciful as your father is merciful.

Be merciful as your father is merciful.  We are to intervene in the moment of judgment with mercy.  But what, exactly, is mercy?  The Greek word Luke uses here for “mercy” is not the normal, common word for mercy, “eleon,” but rather a rare word in scripture---“oiktirmon.” It’s used only in two places--here and in the letter of James.  The word “oiktirmon” is a relational word, it is mercy sprung from intimate connection: it means to have a deep sense of compassion, heartfelt empathy for another person, and to be willing to intervene to alleviate suffering. Remember how last week we heard that Jesus healed all people.  Mercy here is a form of intervention that springs from connection and empathy, that heals people from the suffering of shame and violence.  Be merciful as your father is merciful, Jesus says.  Break the cycle of vengeance and violence and abuse by intervening with understanding and compassion. 

Why, in the face of harm and threat, should we intervene with love and mercy? Because love and mercy, not perpetuated violence--have the power to disarm and transform.  Love and mercy have the power to dissolve sin and heal the sinner.  Jesus says, if we suppress our right to vengeance, and we break the cycles of violence and vengeance with mercy, fear can turn to remorse, astonishment to relief, sin to forgiveness, bondage to violence may turn into liberty for the future.

But how difficult a teaching to embrace.   Love and mercy of an individual sinner we are in conflict with might lead to remorse and transformation and restoration of relationship.  We see that in how Joseph forgoes revenge on his brothers for throwing him in a pit and selling him to slave traders since his life at the Egyptian court turned out better than anyone could imagine.  But can love and mercy really transform the hearts of an oppressor?  Can love and mercy really bring freedom from violent and harmful power?

That is the question that religious ethics has wrestled with forever.  I was reminded this week of the debate between the Christian civil rights leaders of the 1960’s like Dr. King who embraced Jesus’ teaching of love and mercy in the form of non-violent direct action like the Montgomery bus boycott or the march in Selma.  And Malcolm X, whose assassination 60 years ago was remembered on Friday, who believed that oppressed people had the right to use violence if necessary.

Or to bring it closer to our Lutheran home.  The great German Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer himself struggled with this question: is love and mercy enough to bring freedom from violent and harmful systems like the fascism of the Nazi regime.  He, reluctantly, concluded that there were circumstances that were so extreme that violence—assassination attempts on Hitler’s life—were ethically permissible.

Personally, I believe that embracing Jesus’ teaching of love and mercy expressed as non-violent direct action can dismantle the power of oppressors.  The greatest examples we have are the Indian independence movement lead by Mahatma Ghandi, and to a smaller but effective degree, the American anti-war movement that contributed to the end of the Vietnam War.

Loving your enemy when the enemy is an oppressive and violent political regime takes masses of people, and the willingness to pay the cost—with your life if necessary—like Jesus, like Bonhoeffer, like Mahatma Ghandi, and Dr. King.  Yes, let us do as Jesus teaches: love your enemy.  Mercy shall bring transformation and future…but it also brings a cost.  Let us acknowledge the cost of mercy, and ask ourselves: are we prepared to pay the price?  Amen.