As you breathe out, say “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.”
—St. Symeon the New Theologian
James Finley describes the boundless nature of God’s mercy:
What does it mean to ask Jesus Christ to have mercy on me? It’s to ask God to have mercy on me in the waywardness of my ways. I know by my own actions that I’m not true to the person I really am called to be. I know this in my weakness, so I ask Christ to have mercy on me. At the very heart of this prayer is the heart of Jesus because God is love, and when love touches suffering, the suffering turns love into mercy. Jesus is like a field of boundless mercy…. There’s an infinite love within us that we can in no way whatsoever increase—because it’s infinite. God is infinitely in love with us. But just as we can’t increase it, we can’t threaten it either. We’re an infinitely loved, broken person. In acceptance of the brokenness, the infinity of the love that shines through the brokenness gets brighter and brighter.
There’s a moral imperative to do our best not to continue with things that are hurtful to ourselves and others. You have your list, and I have mine. That’s important. But grounded in us is in an inner peace that is not dependent on the ability to overcome the hurtful thing. St. Paul had a thorn in the flesh and asked God to remove it, but God said, “Leave it there” (2 Corinthians 12:7–10). The thorn is the teacher, the place where it isn’t looking good, if this is all up to you. But it’s not up to you. It’s up to God giving Godself to you as infinitely lovable in your brokenness and incompleteness. This is experiential salvation. [1]
CAC faculty emerita Cynthia Bourgeault illustrates God’s ever-present mercy:
The story comes to mind of the little fish swimming up to its mother, all in a panic: “Mama, Mama, what’s water? I gotta find water or I’ll die!” We live immersed in this water, and the reason we miss it is not that it is so far away but, paradoxically, so close: more intimate to us than our being itself.…
[Mercy] is the water in which we swim. Mercy is the length and breadth and height and depth of what we know of God—and the light by which we know it.…
The mercy of God does not come and go, granted to some and refused to others. Why? Because it is unconditional—always there, underlying everything. It is literally the force that holds everything in existence, the gravitational field in which we live and move and have our being. Just like that little fish swimming desperately in search of water, we, too—in the words of Psalm 103—“swim in mercy as in an endless sea.” Mercy is God’s innermost being turned outward to sustain the visible and created world in unbreakable love. [2]
| The Magnitude of our Debt |
 In response to Peter’s question about forgiveness, Jesus told another parable. The story is about a king settling his accounts with his servants. The scenario would have been familiar to Jesus’ first-century audience. Kings collected taxes from their subjects by hiring financial ministers or governors to manage the process on his behalf, who in turn hired tax collectors in towns and villages. These roles were very lucrative because only a portion of the funds collected was paid up the chain of command, and those at each level pocketed some of the revenue for themselves. Therefore, the more tax collectors you brought under your supervision, the more revenue you could take for yourself. It was the ancient world’s version of a multilevel marketing scheme.One of the king’s tax collectors in Jesus’ story owed an astronomical amount of money—ten thousand talents. For some perspective, a first-century historian reported that the entire tax debt of Galilee, Judea, and Samaria was 600 talents, but in Jesus’ story this one man owed 10,000. A talent equaled 10,000 denarii, and one denarius was the normal pay for a single day’s work. Therefore, the servant’s debt of 100 million denarii would have required about 300,000 years to repay. Clearly, Jesus was using hyperbole to make a point. Being unable to repay the debt, the king ordered the man, his wife, and his children to be sold as slaves, and all of his property liquidated. The servant, however, fell on his knees before the king and begged for more time to repay what he owed. This would have provoked laughter from Jesus’ audience. They knew the man’s request was ridiculous. No amount of time would ever be enough to repay 10,000 talents.Jesus’ parable was intended to show the inescapable magnitude of our sin before God; the utter hopelessness of our position. There is nothing we could possibly do to free ourselves from its grasp, and those who think they can rescue themselves from sin are as ridiculous and delusional as the servant in the story. The parable should also make us question religious traditions that say the debt of my sin may be paid back with prayers, good works, meritorious rituals, or time spent in some kind of purgatory. Such traditions simply do not recognize the true nature of sin and the depth of our depravity. They diminish the magnitude of our debt in order to make salvation seem humanly achievable. The unintended side effect, however, is that these traditions also diminish the magnitude of God’s mercy.Until we grasp the depth of our sin we will never recognize the true scale of God’s kindness. In the story, the king is filled with compassion for his servant, and rather than merely granting him more time to repay what he owed—a pointless gesture anyway—the king canceled his debt entirely. The emphasis is upon the king’s mercy, not the servant’s effort to repay his debt. Likewise, in the cosmic economy of God’s kingdom, we are powerless to repay our debts, but thanks be to God that he is compassionate to everyone who confesses their sins and cries out for mercy. DAILY SCRIPTURE MATTHEW 18:21-35 MICAH 7:18-19 COLOSSIANS 3:12-13 WEEKLY PRAYER From Reinhold Niebuhr (1892 – 1971) Lord, we pray this day mindful of the sorry confusion of our world. Look with mercy upon this generation of your children so steeped in misery of their own contriving, so far strayed from your ways and so blinded by passions. We pray for the victims of tyranny, that they may resist oppression with courage. We pray for wicked and cruel men, whose arrogance reveals to us what the sin of our own hearts is like when it has conceived and brought forth its final fruit.We pray for ourselves who live in peace and quietness, that we may not regard our good fortune as proof of our virtue, or rest content to have our ease at the price of other men’s sorrow and tribulation.We pray for all who have some vision of your will, despite the confusions and betrayals of human sin, that they may humbly and resolutely plan for and fashion the foundations of a just peace between men, even while they seek to preserve what is fair and just among us against the threat of malignant powers.Amen. |
