God of Mercy – the New Testament approachPope Francis is on to something, for two reasons. In the first place, once you start to look out for it, you find that mercy is everywhere in Scripture; and secondly, if you look at the outpouring of the chattering classes, or even the way people behave towards each other, it is easy to see that we live in a merciless world.

There is plenty of mercy in what we call (sometimes with a hint of disparagement) the ‘Old’ Testament; and the NT, too, is alive with it.

Matthew’s gospel: the ‘mercied’ must be mercifulIt may be good to start with Matthew’s Gospel, partly because it comes first in our NT, and partly because it can seem a bit ‘legalistic’ in places (think, for example, of Matthew 5:17 ‘do not think that I have come to destroy the Law…until heaven and earth pass away, not a single tiny letter or punctuation-mark shall pass away from the Law’. But ‘mercy’ runs through the whole of Matthew’s gospel, and he offers a mantra that you might translate as ‘If you have been mercied, then you must be merciful’. So in the fifth of his eight beatitudes (that is to say, just about half-way), right at the start of the Sermon on the Mount, which some people regard as Matthew’s greatest gift to us, we read ‘Congratulations to the merciful; for they shall be mercied’. That word ‘mercied’ does not of course exist in English, but it captures something of the sound of the Greek; the verb we all know from the Greek words for ‘Lord Have Mercy’, Kyrie Eleison, which has a very charming link to ‘olive oil’; and you may need to know that in that ancient culture they often used olive oil for easing and healing wounds and bruises.

Still in the Sermon on the Mount, now turn over a page or two to the Lord’s Prayer, which Matthew has placed (slightly awkwardly) right in the middle of this great discourse, at 6:9-13. In all of that prayer, what we are invited to utter is almost entirely a series of requests to God, with one exception, where we ask God to ‘let us off our debts, just as we let off our debtors’. In making that prayer, we sign an implicit agreement to ‘let off’ or ‘forgive’ (the Greek word can mean ‘let go’ or ‘untie’, but is most often best translated in the NT as ‘forgive’), because we recognise what God has done for us. It is of a piece with this that Matthew (and Matthew alone) twice quotes Hosea 6:6 (‘I want mercy/eleos’). He does this at 9:13 and 12:7. In both places Jesus is making an angry response to the Pharisees who are complaining about him, first because he has such terrible friends (‘he eats with tax-collectors and sinners’) and on the second occasion because he has such terrible disciples (‘they are doing what it is not permissible to do on the Sabbath’).

Indeed the reader may quite like to know that Matthew uses the Greek words Kyrie Eleison, at 15:22, when he depicts Jesus being waylaid by the Canaanite woman. That plea for mercy is one that Jesus can clearly not resist.

Then, as the gospel proceeds, Jesus tells the story that while never quite taking itself seriously makes it clear that if you have received mercy then you must be merciful: You will find this fascinating story (and never let them tell you that Matthew is not a good narrator) at 18:23-35. The setting is that Jesus has been teaching about what to do when members of the Church get things wrong, and it seems that Peter is so alarmed about all this stress on forgiveness, that he asks how many times he is supposed to forgive a fellow-Christian (which is what Matthew’s gospel means by ‘brother’); he thinks of the largest number that he can possibly imagine for such a heroic activity as forgiving, and says ‘as many as seven times?’ Jesus throws the ball back and says ‘not as many as seven times, I’m telling you, but as many as seventy-times seven’. And if you are now getting out your calculator and reckoning that when you get to 489 then you can really be making ready to let them have it, then you have missed the point.

What is the point, then? Listen to the story. It starts with Matthew’s familiar presentation ‘the Kingdom of the Heavens was likened to a man, a king, who wanted to draw up accounts with his slaves’. Then we meet Slave Number One, who turns out to owe no less than ten thousand talents. This is an immense sum, equivalent to the Gross National Product of many a sizeable city-state, and obviously no king or slave-owner in his right mind would ever have allowed a slave to mount up a debt of that sort: it is ‘gazillions of pounds sterling’. Instead, however, of reproaching himself for the ineptitude of his dealings with his slaves, the ‘Lord’ (so we are talking about God here) ‘gave orders for him to be sold, and his wife, and his children and all his possessions’. Now no number of wives or children or possessions (certainly not in the hands of a slave) would ever amount to ten thousand talents, so this is an absurd response to the situation.

Notice, however, the slave’s words: ‘The slave fell down and worshipped him’ [the word ‘worship’ is a very important idea in Matthew’s gospel] saying, “have patience on me, and I shall pay you back the whole lot”.’ The reader may at this point pause to reflect that there is absolutely no possibility of such a repayment, but this is the kind of thing that we find ourselves driven to say when under pressure of that sort.

Now look at the ‘Lord’s’ response: ‘he had mercy on that slave’. This time, the word for ‘mercy’ is not our ‘olive-oil’ word, but another root, drawn from the Hebrew, which it is possible to translate as ‘gutted’. In the Hebrew, this particular word for mercy is connected with our ‘entrails’ or with a mother’s womb, and is the place where our compassion lodges. We shall be meeting it again (in Greek it is the splendid-sounding splangchnizomai) elsewhere in the NT. The narrator continues: ‘the Lord of that slave set him free and forgave him he whole debt’

And what happens next? Our newly-mercied slave meets a fellow-slave to whom he has the chance to show mercy: ‘he found one of his fellow-slaves, who owed him a hundred denarii’. Now it has to be said that a denarius is often said to be a day’s wage (on the basis of the parable of the workers in the vineyard, in Matthew 20:1-16), but in fact Roman legionaries only got 250 denarii a year, so we are talking tiny sums. Anyway, be that as it may, see what happens next. For Slave Number Two uses exactly the same words to Slave Number One as he had to his Lord (which resulted in him being ‘mercied’): ‘have patience on me and I shall repay you’. This is a much more realistic promise, of course: 100 denarii is

a tidy sum, but nothing in comparison with ‘gazillions of pounds’. Slave Number One, however, is not in a listening mood, but ‘arrested him and started to strangle him…and he threw him into prison until he should pay back what he owed’.

Not unreasonably, fellow-slaves report the matter to ‘their Lord’ (the story of God is just below the surface of this tale), who then addresses him: ‘Evil Slave: I let you off [this is the ‘forgiving’ word that we saw in the Lord’s Prayer’] that debt. Should you not have “mercied” your fellow-slave, just as I “mercied” you?’ Then Slave Number One is ‘handed over to the torturers’ (whose ministrations invariably, of course, increase their victims’ bank balance) until he should repay all that was owed. Then the story comes back to Jesus’ ‘heavenly Father’, who (it is threatened) ‘will treat you in the same way, unless you forgive your fellow-Christian from your hearts’.

Luke’s gospel: pictures of mercySo Matthew’s gospel can be a rich source for our reflection on the nature of God’s mercy. Luke’s gospel, it hardly needs me to tell you, is also full of pictures of mercy; and indeed Luke works by painting pictures. In the first two chapters of his gospel he produces about seven beautiful pictures, which act as a kind of overture for the gospel as a whole. Here, however, I just want to reflect with you on the three ‘songs of the anawim, or ‘oppressed and marginalised’ that Luke places on the lips of Mary (the Magnificat, 1:46-55), of Zachariah (the Benedictus, 1:68-79), and of Symeon (the Nunc Dimittis, 2:29-32). I would invite you to read through these three songs, which do so much to set the tone of Luke’s gospel, and to notice how this works.

In the Magnificat, the word eleos appears twice (50, 54), but the whole tenor of the song, with its lifting up of the poor and disparagement of the powerful, fits the picture of mercy. The second song, the Benedictus, is given the context of what has happened to Zachariah’s wife Elisabeth, which Luke describes as ‘the Lord has made his mercy great with her’ (1:58); and Zachariah uses both our words the ‘gut-feeling’ and the ‘olive oil’ in the same phrase at 1:78, as well as eleos in verse 72. The third song, the Nunc Dimittis, does not use the word ‘mercy’; the tone, rather than the vocabulary is that of God’s mercy on the old man who has been waiting for the Messiah (not to mention the old woman Hanna, 2:36-38).

There is something else that Luke does to give us the sense of God’s mercy. For at the beginning of each of his first three chapters (though we must say that Luke knew nothing of chapters or even verses), he makes the reader (or hearer) look in the direction of the powerful authorities, only to turn our attention on those in whom God’s mercy is really given. So, at 1:5, Luke starts off sounding like a good Hellenistic historian, ‘in the days of Herod the King’, before showing us the direction in which the wind really blows, to the poor and marginalised: ‘a certain priest called Zacharias…and his wife from the daughters of Aaron, and her name was Elisabeth. And they were both righteous in God’s presence, walking blameless in all the commandments and decrees of the Lord…and they had no child, because Elisabeth was barren; and both of them were advanced in their days.’ These are the powerless on whom the reader just knows that God is going to show mercy.

Luke plays the same trick at 2:1-7; first he makes us look at the singularly merciless ‘Caesar Augustus’, with his sidekick Quirinius, who forces ‘the whole inhabited world’ into motion; but then our attention is drawn irresistibly to Joseph and Mary, as the people who really matter to Luke, whom the Roman oppressive classes have forced to go to a crowded Bethlehem. It is they, and their new-born child, placed in a feeding trough (for Heaven’s sake!), who are the objects of God’s mercy.

Finally, we look at where God’s mercy is directed at the beginning of the next chapter (3:1-2). It does not address itself to the most powerful people whom Luke lists, each one of them a fairly disreputable politician: ‘Tiberius Caesar…Pontius Pilate…Herod of Galilee, Philip his brother…Lysanias of Abilene…in the high-priesthood of Hannas and Caiphas’. To our astonishment it is to none of these that God’s merciful word comes, but to (of all people and in all unlikely places) ‘John son of Zacharias in the desert’. That is the unexpected mercy of God.

There are other typical Lucan examples, for example the story of the widow at Nain (7:11-17), where Luke tells us that ‘when he saw her [the widowed mother of the corpse] the Lord was “gutted” upon her, and said to her “do not weep”.’ Or think of one of the loveliest of Luke’s stories of mercy, the tale of Good Samaritan (10:25-37). To our shock it was not the professional clerics (a Jesuit and a Benedictine? A priest and a bishop?) who looked after the victim of muggers, but the hated foreigner. And when Jesus comes to the end of the story and challenges the lawyer to say who in this story acted like a ‘neighbour’, his opponent cannot bring himself to utter the despised name of ‘Samaritan’, so, grudgingly, he replies (verse 37) ‘the one who did the mercy (eleos) with him’. Or consider the three stories about Mercy that Luke tells in one of his loveliest chapters (15:1-32). First there is the man who lost a sheep, then the woman who lost a coin, and finally the father (or is it a mother) who lost a son (or was it two sons?). But notice how Luke depicts the father when the younger son is on his way home, with a speech ready-prepared: it seems that the parent has his binoculars out, looking for him (15:20), and, so Luke tells us, ‘he was “gutted” [our old friend] and ran and fell upon his neck and kissed him’. It is a graphic depiction of the mercy of God.Let me end with two final pictures painted by Luke of the divine Mercy dramatised. The first you will find at 23:39-42, where, quite unexpectedly, one of the two thieves crucified with Jesus unexpectedly speaks up for him, and then turns to him and says, ‘Jesus, remember me, whenever you come into your kingdom’. To our astonishment, Jesus replies with authoritative mercy: ‘Amen I’m telling you: today you are going to be with me in Paradise’. Neither of our words for mercy appears in this story, but the fact of it is there.

The same is true in the second instance of Mercy dramatised. It is the lovely story of the walk to Emmaus (24:11-32), where Jesus gives unobtrusive mercy to Cleopas and his partner, miserably trudging away from Jerusalem, so that by the end they know that Jesus is risen. Read it, and ask, ‘Where is the mercy here?’

Mercy in the rest of the New Testament Space does not permit us here to do more than point to the theme of mercy in a few places elsewhere in the NT; but it is clearly there. Look at Mark’s gospel, and consider the episode at the end of chapter 1, where Jesus heals the leper (1:40-45). The point to notice here is that instead of being horrified and repelled by this dangerous and contagious affliction, Jesus is ‘gutted’ (that word again) and ‘stretched out his hand and touched him’. Or, for the use of our other word (eleos), consider how the story of the Gerasene demoniac (Mark 5:1-20), ends; when the healed man asks ‘to be with him’, Jesus refuses, and tells him instead to ‘go to your house to your people, and tell them what great things the Lord has done for you and has “mercied” you’. It is a powerful picture.

Mercy is also to be found in Paul, though he does not use the word a great deal. One very interesting use of it is in the following passage, Romans 11:30-31, where we read:

For as you people once disobeyed God, But have now been ‘mercied’, So they have for the present been disobedient, for your ‘mercy’,In order that they too might be ‘mercied’.

This is obviously a deliberately clumsy translation, to bring out the way Paul is thinking here, and especially his use of our ‘mercy’ (olive oil) word to make the point that God’s disposition is to give mercy to both Jews and Gentiles. These verses come right at the end of the very important section, Romans 9-11, in which he has been considering what happens to Jews, given that the gospel of God is now open also to the Gentiles. Paul sees no limit to the mercy of God.

For other Pauline statements of this theme, you might look at Gal 1:15-16, where (without using the word) he speaks of his experience of the mercy of God in revealing ‘his Son in me’; or there is 2:20, where Paul exclaims ‘I live, no longer I, but Christ lives in me’ a clear sense of the mercy of God having achieved something that Paul could not have done for himself; or what about the famous passage Galatians 3:28, on the effect of baptism: ‘in Christ there is no such thing as Jew or Greek, no such thing as slave or free, no such thing as male and female: for you are all one in Christ Jesus’, a graphic description of what the mercy of God has done.

Nor is that the only way in which Paul expresses the idea of ‘mercy’; at 2 Corinthians 1:3-4, he speaks of God as the ‘Father of mercy’, though using a different Greek word. Here he uses ‘oiktirma’, a plural form which perhaps owes something to the Hebrew word rahmaim, which gave us the Greek ‘splanchna’ (or ‘guts’); and which he ranges alongside the idea of ‘comfort’ and ‘distress’, to indicate what God is up to. In the same letter he offers another image, that of ‘reconciliation’ (see 5:16-21), in which ‘everything comes from God who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and who gave us the ministry of reconciliation’. There are two things to notice here: first, the underlying meaning of this metaphor, for the root of the Greek word is the idea of ‘other’, so it has the notion of crossing the boundary of ‘otherness’, which sheds a new light on the idea of mercy. The second thing to notice is, once more, the connection of ‘mercy’ and ‘being mercied’. For in this passage, Paul sees

himself as having been given a ‘ministry of reconciliation’, precisely because of having been reconciled by God.

In Philippians 2:27, Paul speaks of his colleague (and the Philippians’ much-admired helper) Epaphroditus as having been ‘sick, very close to death’ but then ‘God mercied him, and not only him but me, so that I should not have grief upon grief’. Mercy, we see, is a quality that brings God very close indeed to human beings. Likewise the author of 1 Timothy, who is probably not Paul, but from that same stable says of himself that although he was ‘previously a blasphemer and a persecutor and a person of arrogance, nevertheless I was “mercied”.’ (1 Timothy 1:13), and a few verses later he repeats that ‘I was mercied’

We do not have space here to contemplate how John’s Gospel conveys the notion of ‘mercy’; indeed he does not mention the word. But consider chapters 4 (the Samaritan woman), 5 (‘Old Grumpy’, who is cured of his paralysis), and 9 (the man born blind), each of which shows a different way in which the mercy of God came upon someone. Read those chapters carefully, and ask: what does this story tell us about the divine mercy?

The opposition to Francis – and they are right!

So Pope Francis has struck a chord with his insistence on the importance of ‘mercy’ as a quality of God’s action with us. However there is opposition to him; and it has the same tone as the opposition to Jesus reported in the gospels. Think of the opening of Luke’s chapter 15, with those three stories about mercy, and how it starts, with complaints about Jesus’ terrible friends; or think of the Zacchaeus story in Luke 19:1-10, with its extraordinary portrayal of mercy, and the opposition that it arouses (verse 7). Or think of the opening of the chapter relating the fight over ‘the tradition of the elders’ (Matthew 15:1-2), or that other devastating opening to a chapter (23:2-7), where the ‘scribes and Pharisees’ are described as ‘sitting on the seat of Moses’, so Jesus’ hearers are to do ‘whatever they tell you’. Or consider the following three shocking stories:

Luke 7:36-50, where Jesus’ Pharisee host is very shocked indeed that such a woman should be allowed to perform such intimate acts upon Jesus.

John 8:1-11, where Jesus speaks to another woman who has done wrong, and treats her like a human being.

Mark 2:1-10, where Jesus forgives sins.

In each of these cases, Jesus is offending those religious people of a rule-observant disposition. And we need to take this seriously, for rules do matter; they act as important signposts to help us through the complications of life; but it may here be helpful to make a distinction between adolescence and maturity. When we are adolescent, we need the rules, to thread a way through life; but one of the things that we have to learn with maturity is that the rules are never able to cover every possible eventuality, and we need to grow in a certain sense of moral refinement that enables us, under the right circumstances, to break the rules and yet know that we are doing the right thing. Now we can always deceive ourselves, and we must be prepared to be wrong; but Jesus certainly saw the need to exercise mercy and not simply be hidebound by the rules. But if we follow him, in the way

that Pope Francis (a man obsessed by the gospel) has done, then we must be prepared for criticism on the part of those who feel that the deepest truths are being undermined.

So what are we to do? One thing that we might usefully aim at is the practice of the Corporal and Spiritual works of mercy. They are the following, and if we try and make them our guiding principles, we shall not stray too far from the understanding of mercy that we have found in the NT.

The corporal works of mercy are:

• To feed the hungry;• To give drink to the thirsty;• To clothe the naked;• To harbour the harbourless;• To visit the sick;• To ransom the captive;• To bury the dead.

The spiritual works of mercy are:

• To instruct the ignorant;• To counsel the doubtful;• To admonish sinners;• To bear wrongs patiently;• To forgive offences willingly;• To comfort the afflicted;• To pray for the living and the dead.

Nicholas King SJ, Academic Director Theology, St Mary’s University, T