More from the vocabulary of faith
I have now preached the last in my series of sermons on the ‘vocabulary of faith’ – looking at those words which are used both by the church and the world at large in different ways. Yesterday’s sermon was on ‘mercy’ – a word rarely used outside the church excepts in the tabloid press to describe assisted suicides as ‘mercy killings’. Shakespeare said that mercy was “twice blessed” by giver and recipient, and that it was an “attribute to God himself” – but even those words still leave it largely undefined. Within the Christian church we seem to interpret it in very different ways, as typified by the pictures below. On the left is a ‘misericord’ – designed to let a person praying off the hook, by allowing them to take the weight off their feet whilst apparently standing through long periods of prayer. On the right is a Salvation Army ‘mercy seat’ – seen as a place to transact serious business with God, and anything but being ‘let off the hook’.
Images: wikimedia commons
Jesus holds up the penitent thief as an example when he calls out for mercy, and he calls out for it himself when he asks his father to forgive those who crucify him. If mercy is an act driven by the quality of grace and a visceral response of compassion to those in need – we still need to know what it feels like in the heart of God. It is for that reason that I turned to Hosea 11. If I could keep only six words of the Old Testament, it would be the those to be found in Hosea 11 v. 8 “how can I give you up’.
God’s mercy has a deep root – stretching all the way back to the point where he ‘picked out’ Israel as a child -Hosea 11 v. 1. Like a father he taught him to walk, picking him up when he fell and holding him close to his cheek to comfort him. Through the killing fields of the desert years he provided sweet water from the rock to drink, and manna falling daily like flakes of his goodness to eat. If God cannot help but treat his people with compassion, it is because mercy is buried deep in hos very character – like a tree root hidden deep in the sol beneath our feet.
God’s mercy has a strong bond too. When Israel persists in turning from him (v.7) and looks back with longing to Egypt (v.5). When they persistently defy him and slander his name (v.12) he still calls them ‘my people’. The clear answer to the rhetorical question in v.8 is that God cannot give them up – any more than a mother can forget the child she nurses. (Isaiah 49 v.15).
In the book I reviewed last week by Pope Francis, Church of Mercy, he states that :
Only someone who has encountered mercy,
who has been caressed by the tenderness of mercy,
is happy and comfortable with the Lord
Time and again we are told in the Bible that if we have tasted, or encountered, mercy – we are to pass it on. Maybe, like grace, Christians only know what they mean by mercy when they show it…
