Mercy and justice and God’s Sacrifice
“I don't think these photographs you've taken do me justice.”
“You don't want justice - you want mercy!”
On his first day in the seminary on campus Father Ronald Patrick Raab saw a man collapse in front of him on the sidewalk. The man’s two young children screamed for help. Raab’s friend started CPR. A priest anointed him, an ambulance arrived, but the man died.
“Only Jesus shows us how to bend down to hold the mystery and beauty of illness, anguish, and even death,” Father Raab says. We are called daily to attend our neighbour, the ill, children, strangers and sometimes the dying. We hold the hope of heaven even as we struggle to help unburden others.
“Go and learn the meaning of the words: what I want is mercy, not sacrifice. For indeed I did not come to call the virtuous, but sinners” (Matthew 9:13). It takes a spiritual maturity, to attempt to think as God thinks, for us to grasp Jesus’s meaning here.
When it comes to accepting our personal suffering and our mortality, when the doctor tells us we have stage four cancer, we are reduced to begging God for mercy. And that is human. Jesus cried out on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
We have to unpack the meaning of the Messianic Psalm 22 to understand this seeming moment of despair. Laments describe an unbearable situation in which the author finds himself. He then declares a dependence upon the Lord and offers gratitude for the grace of God.
In these words of Jesus from the cross we recognize that only God can deliver Jesus and us. Humanity hung on that cross. The words of Psalm 22 refer to hope for deliverance. The terrible beauty in this death is that God loves us by taking our place on the cross and dying in our stead. God’s sacrifice.
Let us look at this in another human situation. We all face old age, sickness and death. In her song “Mercy Now” Mary Gauthier says:
My father could use a little mercy now
The fruits of his labor fall and rot slowly on the ground
His work is almost over, it won't be long, he won't be around.
The story continues: My brother could use a little mercy now. My church and my country could use a little mercy now, Gauthier says. Everyone could use a little mercy now. Gauthier draws on her experiences with adoption, addiction and growing up gay in the Deep South U.S.A.
Gauthier empathetic message:
Yeah, we all could use a little mercy now…
We hang in the balance, dangle 'tween hell and hallowed ground
And every single one of us could use some mercy now.
Every single one of us is called to serve God by caring for the marginalized and seeking to alleviate the suffering of our neighbours. “Happy are the merciful, they shall have mercy shown them” (Matthew 5:7).
We remind ourselves every day when we pray the Lord’s Prayer: Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. “Because there will be judgment without mercy for those who have not been merciful themselves; but the merciful need have no fear of judgment.” (James 2:13).
God is merciful and shows us his merciful love. We may not understand the mystery of God’s love in this world, but that love will deliver us to eternal life and a resurrection that surpasses anything we can imagine on this earth.
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