THE QUALITY OF MERCY

Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.(Matthew 5: 7)

Mercy is an interesting quality. We certainly want to be on the receiving end of mercy. The cop pulls us over for a minor infraction of traffic rules and we hope he’ll be merciful and just give us a warning. Or something awkward is said in front of the boss, and we hope that he’ll be merciful and ignore it.
So we do know what mercy is, on the receiving end.

But Jesus is talking about mercy from the active end. “Blessed are the merciful.”

To be merciful is to extend compassion to those before us, especially when our next action can have a major effect on the other person’s life. It’s easy enough to be merciful to those whose actions have not affected us, and who won’t really be touched by what we decide. That is why there is a certain hollowness to declarations of charity directed at third parties who don’t even know the charity was extended. Where is the mercy in that? If I declare that I have pity for a teen who robbed some money in order to buy food for his hungry younger siblings, yes, that is a certain amount of compassion for him. But is that mercy? He didn’t steal from me and I don’t even know him.

Mercy requires a direct connection. There is nothing merciful at a withholding of action from a remote distance; that is just something that did not happen. True mercy cannot be done at a removed distance or through proxies.

Ah, so that is where it starts to be difficult: it has to be done face-to-face!

Starting with the instances where we are just extending compassion to someone and no injury has been done to us, this isn’t too difficult. We can encounter a needy panhandler and easily give some money, because their need is evident. There has been no injury to us, only the discomfort of seeing someone who is in great need.

But when the offense is done to us directly, it is not so easy to be merciful. It requires us to accept the injury done, and present a compassionate front to the offender. That’s a very different game.

Start small: there are daily instances where we can be slighted or disrespected. How do we respond to these? Is that matter of such importance that we really need to behave resentfully and create a confrontation? If it is not, then Jesus' call to us to be merciful comes into play. That means being compassionate enough not to make a scene about it. The offender may not even know he or she has in fact offended.

And let us make no mistake: Jesus really is calling us to develop the qualities mentioned in the Beatitudes. He hopes that we will choose to be those described as “blessed.”

But refraining from getting into hassles with those around us because of small offenses, we do end up presenting an appearance of meekness. Unfortunately, many people take that as being submissive in the weakest way. And protesting that interpretation rather negates the whole of the choice. This is when we start to realize that the life Jesus calls us to is going to be constantly misinterpreted.

Does it matter whether others understand our choices in behavior? It shouldn’t.

But there’s more to this. As we become more practiced in being merciful about minor injuries, we learn how to be merciful about larger matters.

It’s not impossible to be able to extend mercy to someone over a major injury or infraction. But it can be a struggle to exercise it, when one has not practiced it much in the smaller things of life.

Jesus does say that there is a “pay off” to being merciful toward others, though. He says that such people receive mercy back.

Something in our character is changed by being merciful toward those around us, and that change is such that it attracts merciful responses from others. Jesus doesn’t say that the merciful receive mercy from those to whom they had extended compassion. He just says “they shall receive mercy.”

We don’t know when we might need mercy from others. Even if we go through life without intentionally doing harm to others, there will still be occasions where something goes wrong and we injure others. We all need mercy at some point. Wouldn’t it be a good thing to have developed a character which attracts the impulse for mercy in others?

The real challenge is the mercy in small things, those incidents that are slight. Not big dramatic moments where we can make a public display of our mercy to a terrible person, but rather the small moments when we’ve been sneered at or insulted and not only did the other person not realize what they had done, but we have to behave as if it did not happen. Refusing to exercise our anger in public can be an act of mercy not just to the person creating the injury, but also to anyone else within range.

So maybe this mercy thing isn’t so easy after all. But it is certainly well worth doing.