Jesus often spoke about the need for us to show mercy to the undeserving. “Blessed, he said, are the merciful, for they will receive mercy “ (Matt 5.7). Just as there were no limits to God’s mercy shown to us, so God expects us to show mercy to others, even when most people would argue that they don’t deserve mercy, for they have not only broken God’s laws for living, but as a result have caused others to suffer quite unfairly. As his parable of the Unforgiving Servant makes clear, God will not have mercy on us if we do not have mercy on others (Matt 18.23-35).
Earlier this year, when Paula Vennells was in the news for her failure to show compassion let alone justice to the 900 sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses who were treated so unjustly by the Post Office, with the result that many lost their lifesavings and some even committed suicide because they could not cope with the shame of it all, most people seemed to be delighted when she as the chief executive of the Post Office got her ‘comeuppance’ when she was summoned to appear and then be grilled by the inquiry about the cover-ups and the missed opportunities to halt prosecution. In spite of her tearful apologies, public opinion had made up its mind that she was weeping ‘crocodile tears’ and that she deserved the same misery as her victims.
This was the context in which I read an article by Natalie Williams headed ‘Paula Vennells deserves censure, but also mercy’ (The Times, 25 May 2024). As she rightly said:
Nobody truly wants a world devoid of forgiveness, because there may come a time when our own failures (even if they aren’t on the scale of Vennells’) find the spotlight; and we will want mercy then.
We see mercy supremely in the life of Jesus. In the words of Pope Francis, “Everything in him speaks of mercy. Nothing in him is devoid of compassion”. Mercy too was at the heart of what Jesus taught. Twice he quoted the words of Hosea: “I desire mercy and not sacrifice” (Matt 9.13.17). God expects us to show loving-kindness to others.
According to Frederick D. Bruner, “The gospel merciful are those who put themselves under another to support them, to be sensitive to them, even to feel sad with them”. He quoted Saint Remigius, the 5th century bishop of Rheims, who said: “The merciful is he who has a sad heart; he counts others’ misery as his own, and is as sad at their grief as at his own”. Similarly John Nolland commented: “Those who are merciful are kind to people in serious need. Their mercy is marked by generosity and by emotional identification with the situation of those trapped in their needs”. Mercy is not an attitude, but an activity – it is something to be done.
Others have equated mercy with forgiveness – and it is true that a forgiving spirit is an aspect of showing mercy. In that regard attention is often drawn to the Parable of the Unforgiving Servant in Matt 18 which tells of a slave who had been released by his master from a debt of ten thousand talents who then subsequently failed to release a fellow slave of a relatively piffling debt of 100 denarii. When the Master learnt of this, he was angry: “you wicked slave! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. Should you not have had mercy on your fellow slave, as I had mercy on you?” (Matt 18.32,33). The master promptly rescinded the cancellation of the debt and threw the slave into prison. Jesus ends the parable with the words: “So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart”. It is possible for a person who has already received God’s mercy to lose out on God’s mercy. It has been said: “Calvinists wince at this, but we must learn to hear it”!
Being merciful is not a condition for God’s grace, but it is a necessary consequence. If we do not reflect God’s lovingkindness, then it is because we have never grasped it in the first place. The one is the necessary consequence of another: For instance, if you go skiing in the Alps, you’ll get a suntan: if you return pasty-looking then almost certainly you only got as far as the departure lounge.
So to return to where we began: “Mercy must always accompany justice”.