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“Mercy Me!” Matthew 5:7

Dr. Randy Working Christ Presbyterian Church

When I was 13, I got in a big argument with my dad and mom and ran out of the house in a snit. The last thing I heard as I ran out was my mom’s voice telling me to get back in there (I know you have a hard time imagining I’d do that.) I rode over to my friend’s house on my bike and stayed about five hours without telling my parents where I was. (Okay—it’s not a very good running-away-from home story, but it’s mine.) When I finally cooled down, I started to ride home, when a station wagon pulled up next to me. It was ours, and my dad was driving. I thought, “I’m really in trouble now.” I expected to be grounded, but instead, my dad took me home, told me to get dressed to go out, and he took me to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in downtown Los Angeles to see The Sound of Music. I guess he thought we needed a little time together. I deserved to get in trouble, but he showed me mercy.

Matthew 5:7 is a very short verse about a very important subject. Let’s look at mercy and think about how it’s important in our life.

So far, we’ve looked at the four beatitudes:

• Blessed are the poor in spirit (those who know they need God),

• Blessed are those who mourn (those who grieve over their sin, or repent),

• Blessed are the meek (the humble, those who trust God instead of pushing themselves forward),

• Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, because when you’re empty then you hunger.

These are all talk about a condition of emptiness, and Jesus says in a sense that when you’re empty of all the wrong stuff the world thinks is so important, then you experience God’s blessing. When that happens, you have it better than you know. The first four beatitudes also make it clear we’re saved by grace through faith, because they aren’t so much what we do, but what we can’t do.

Then, Jesus describes righteousness, which is really just living in right relationships with God and with others, in three ways. Right relationships mean mercy, purity, and peacemaking.

If you’ve felt your emptiness and the fact you need God; if you’ve ever grieved over the fact that you’re not the person you want to be; if you’re learning to wait meekly on the Lord, making him your leader and not yourself; then you’ve got a heart where God can cause mercy to grow.

So, if you’ve ever been on the receiving end of someone else’s mercy, some time when you didn’t deserve help or consideration but got it anyway, like when I had punishment 2 coming but my dad offered mercy instead, then you know that’s what causes us to be able to extend mercy to someone else in turn.

The Lord teaches this in different ways, not just on the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus told a parable about a man who owes a huge amount of money to someone. His creditor told him it’s time to pay up, and the debtor said, “Please, have mercy on me, I can’t pay it!” Then the creditor responded, “Alright. I’ll cancel your debt.” But the next thing you know, the man with the canceled debt saw someone who owed him just a little money, and he got mad and started to yell, and threatened to throw the poor guy in prison till he could pay up.

Guess how the creditor reacted when he heard about that? Jesus said,

Then the master called the servant in. 'You wicked servant,' he said, 'I canceled all that debt of yours because you begged me to. Shouldn't you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?' In anger his master turned him over to the jailers to be tortured, until he should pay back all he owed. (Matthew 18:32-34)

The point is, we receive mercy so we can give it away, and when we live in that way, God will cause good results. It’s why Jesus teaches us to pray, “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.”

It’s so important to know we’ve been forgiven. I makes a difference in our whole outlook on life. One time, Jesus was having dinner with a man named Simon when a sinful woman who anointed his feet with perfume and her tears . Simon looked down on both the woman and on Jesus for this display of emotion, so Jesus told him, “Simon, I’d like to tell you this little story.”

"Two men owed money to a certain moneylender. One owed him five hundred denarii, and the other fifty. Neither of them had the money to pay him back, so he canceled the debts of both. Now which of them will love him more?"

Simon replied, "I suppose the one who had the bigger debt canceled."

"You have judged correctly," Jesus said. (Luke 7:41-43)

Jesus was saying that Simon didn’t show love for Jesus or even much of a welcome when he had Jesus over for dinner. But a woman everyone considered a rotten sinner poured out her heart to Jesus. Her sins had been forgiven, and she knew it, so she was deeply grateful. It changed her whole perspective to know that.

See, Jesus loved to spend time with people who didn’t deserve it. And when he took the heat from the respectable people for doing that, he said,

Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means, “I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.” For I came not to call the righteous, but sinners. (Matthew 9:13)

This is Jesus’ way: he shows underserved love to people, in fact what the Bible commentator Kenneth Bailey calls “costly demonstrations of unexpected love.” I know 3 that’s a mouthful, but I think each word of that phrase is helpful. Let’s look at each in turn.

1. Costly: if it doesn’t cost anything, then it’s not worth very much. God’s love is free, but it isn’t cheap, because it cost the life of his Son. In fact, all through his ministry, Jesus pays the price to lift up someone: they go up, and he drops down. That’s his way, when he defends the poor, or the outcast, or children, or women, or the sick. When other people think they’re not worth his attention, he elevates them, and in the process he is diminished in his opponents’ eyes. He pays the price.

2. Demonstration: it’s more than simply nice-sounding words for Jesus, but it’s a demonstration of real changed lives. When Jesus wanted Zacchaeus to know God loved him, he didn’t just say it, but he invited himself to share Zacchaeus’ hospitality when no one else would dream of spending time with him. When he wanted a young couple to know about God’s blessing, he changed water into wine so they could celebrate. It’s like being a good writer: show, don’t tell, and that’s what Jesus does.

3. Unexpected: if you expected it, it wouldn’t be a gift, it would be wages you earned, and it wouldn’t be grace. It’s important to treat people with justice, but how much more powerful when we don’t deserve kindness, and someone gives it anyway?

4. Love: at its heart, that’s what mercy is about. It’s not costly demonstrations of unexpected vengeance, or retaliation. In fact, that’s the world’s way, so it wouldn’t be unexpected at all. But love in action, that’s a surprise, and it’s powerful.

How can we become merciful? It has to do with being broken. When we know how much God has done for us—when we’re empty, when we’re poor in spirit, when we know we come empty-handed, that’s when we get the power to be merciful. That’s when we can be joyful and free.

The opposite of mercy is putting programs or procedures ahead of people. It’s getting priorities wrong, it’s forgetting the weightier matters of faith, and getting caught in the trivial.

In Luke 10, Jesus is talking with a lawyer who tests him about how to receive eternal life. Jesus answered, "You have to love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your mind, and all your strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.” In other words, believe in God, and show your faith is real by loving others. The lawyer pressed on, and he asked, “Who is my neighbor?” And to answer him, Jesus tells a story that we call the Good Samaritan.

In that story, a man is beaten up, robbed, and left for dead. A priest and a Temple official see the man lying by the side of the road, but they keep right on going. Maybe they’re not sure if it’s a dead body, and they don’t want to defile themselves, so they keep right on going. But then a Samaritan, a person Jews hated, showed up. He took the man and bandaged his wounds and brought him to an inn to recover. He paid so the victim could get care, and promised to come back and check on him. Jesus ended the 4 parable by asking, “Which of the three men do you think proved neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?” The lawyer answered, “The one who showed mercy on him.” And Jesus said, “You go and do the same.”

This story helps us with some important ingredients to mercy.

1. Mercy sees when people are in pain. The Samaritan was just going down the road, but when someone needed him, “he saw him” (Luke 10:33b). He had time for someone else.

2. Mercy feels compassion. When he saw someone in pain, the text says, “he took pity on him” (Luke 10:33c). He had compassion for him. His heart was moved.

3. Mercy does something. The Samaritan put the man on his own donkey and brought him to the inn (Luke 34-35). Sometimes I think we don’t respond to needs with mercy because we don’t know if we’ll have the resources to meet the need. The Samaritan didn’t set up a pension fund for the rest of the man’s life, but he brought him immediate care in practical way. That’s powerful.

It’s what John talks about in his letter to the church. He writes,

This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers. If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him? Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth. This then is how we know that we belong to the truth, and how we set our hearts at rest. (1 John 3:16-18).

That’s what the Samaritan was like in Luke 10: he had an eye for someone in pain, a heart of compassion, and hands to help. That’s what mercy is.

So mercy is a big deal to Jesus, and he says, don’t get so focused on the mechanics of life in the church that you miss the bigger point in the kingdom. Don’t lose your eye for people’s need, your heart of compassion, your hands to make God’s love real in their lives. Sometimes we let that happen not because we want to be bad or lazy, but we just get too distracted to care. Too much TV, too much computer, too much noise, and sometimes we just don’t see the more important things.

Now, we don’t always know very well when to show mercy, and when to show justice. God is concerned about both. But we do best when we stick close to Jesus’ heart, because there’s mercy in his justice, and justice in his mercy. And all of it is tempered, because we have to be poor in spirit, sorry for our sins, hungering and thirsting for what is right. We have to see the pain of another person, to feel compassion for their pain, and to act for their good.

That’s what Jesus does. Mercy matters to him, and it marked his whole earthly career. There’s a story in John 8 about some religious leaders who drag before Jesus a woman caught in adultery. They want to test him to see if he will uphold the law that says she must be executed. But Jesus says, “Let the one who is without sin throw the first stone.” At that, the crowd melts away. Jesus asks the woman, “where are those who accuse you?” She says, there is no one, Lord.” And he answers, “I do not condemn you either. 5

Go and do not sin any more” (John 8:11). That’s mercy, and it’s also truth, and both come together in Jesus, just like John said they do in Jesus: “We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.” (John 1:14).

I mentioned the commentator Kenneth Bailey, who has been one of my teachers. He tells about a story about the late King Hussein in Jordan. One day, word came to the king that seventy of his army officers were plotting a coup to overthrow the government and put a military dictatorship in its place. The secret service had determined that the plotters were all gathered together in a military barrack. A palace official brought the news to Hussein and said, “We can wipe them all out if we act now.” He asked, “Do you want me to give the order to attack?”

The king said, “No, but just order my helicopter.” Hussein immediately had the pilot take him to the military barrack in the desert where the plotting officers were gathered, and the king walked unarmed right into the middle of the room. He told them he had heard of the plot. And he said, “If you do this, then civil war will break out. Thousands of civilians will die, as well as soldiers and their families. Instead, you can kill me now. I alone will die, and our people will be spared.” When the officers heard that, they fell before him, kissing his hands, and they pledged their loyalty for life.

The king showed mercy, and he offered himself for them. It’s a powerful thing. Jesus says, “Freely you have received, now freely give in turn."

Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.