The asceticism of radical mercy

​Glory to Jesus Christ!

Our Lord taught, “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.” A novel and complicated thought, not just then but throughout time and even into our own. Mercy, perhaps the most misunderstood and certainly underutilized of virtues – it is for most of us something we understand in those off moments when we can see our own mistakes plainly, say when we accidently bumped into the car in front of us, and in other societally objective moments of judgement. Save for those select situations, we often live in a reality turned on its head. One where we are mostly nice people doing justifiable things, and any error on our part can be chalked up to a small personal foible; or its root is cosmically connected to some other set of circumstances, say my exhaustion from a long week of work, or perhaps some global affair; or perhaps the result of my irritability as a result of my fasting. Whatever the reason, we do not care to offer mercy to others, because ultimately, we have numbed into complete sedation any sense of our own need for mercy. After all, we are overall pretty good and reasonable people.

Spiritually speaking, this inability to offer mercy to others might very well be the trojan horse of the evil one, a subtle yet destructive passion that hides within the walls of the camp of our heart and yet will surely jeopardize our salvation. How many good people do each of us know who have said to us, I can forgive anyone, but this one, I will never forgive. How many of us know people who hold this position even as they are breathing their last breaths in this life. Though we pray that God’s mercy endures forever, we are prepared that ours is non-existent. We look forward to sitting down with our comrades and regaling them about our justifiable reasons that we will not extend mercy to those who have stolen from us. 

In today’s Gospel, Christ lays before us a simplistic vision of the human story. Before our master, we accumulate a litany of faults, so numerous we stand no chance being able to even recognize many of them. We might see our so called, “big sins”, but to digress very quickly, we know that every sin is a “big sin”. Even that which begins benignly if left unattended will eventually become the cause of our despair unto complete existential dread. So no need to say in your heart, well at least I am not a murderer, I’m probably mostly good. No need to reach for that to be your metric of bad - because even if a person were to commit no other fault than say the compulsion for overeating, gluttony, this benign passion might very well become unruly, growing so large that existential dread set off by one’s health or rather lack of will surely set in – and before they know it, they find themselves living it what feels like hell on earth. Even the path toward becoming a murderer might itself begin with the further upstream so-called small sins – perhaps even gluttony. So, all of us are found wanting and in need before our master who has gifted us with life. But in our ingratitude, with pleasure, we continually heap deadening actions on ourselves. Taking this blessing of life and trading it for death. And this gift of life was given to us at the creation of the world, and then once again emphatically under-written by our beloved Lord Jesus’ incarnation and violent death. Truly God so loves us, thus any rejection of this truth ought to loom large before our eyes when we stand before God. 

Yes, everything we know about God, revealed in His incarnation convinces us that He, in His benevolence has no desire to nickel and dime us on account of our short comings. On the contrary, like the king in today’s Gospel account, at the hour that He will wish to settle His accounts with his people, He is willing to operate at a loss. Though we will surely find ourselves coming up short by the standard of His goodness to us, He will not hold this against us – no, He has shown us already that before His judgement seat He will deal in mercy towards us. Ah but just a minute, return to your seats those of us that might think well then that settles it – let us do as we please regardless of how high a debt we run, the Lord is merciful and quick to forgive our debts. 

Dear brethren, woe to us for missing the most crucial part. As the pardoned debtor leaves from before His Lord’s judgement seat, he immediately forgets that he is in any way a debtor himself. He begins to see himself as a righteous lord himself, as one who has no debts. Put in other words, forgetting or completely not recognizing he is a sinner, he begins to see himself as a god. And with the authority of a god, he grabs those who have sinned against him by the throat, scripture tells us and demands to be made whole for all the losses incurred against him. We see this everywhere around us – the TV, YouTube, memes, online chat sites both right leaning and left leaning behave like this ungrateful servant. Not seeing our own sinfulness, we grab each other by the throat without even a single thought, and we begin demanding satisfaction for the debts of others, be they perceived or real. We have become a world lacking mercy. The larger fallout is not simply the vitriol that has become so commonplace for us to see slung from one to the other that it barely causes us to stop when we see it, but worse still, our participation by behaving like gods demanding satisfaction, will cause our soul’s capacity to ask for mercy to atrophy. 

And if we no longer ask for mercy, but demand satisfaction, when we find ourselves standing before the throne of God on that dread day of Judgement, we will be full of excuses and complaints, wanting to justify ourselves, and perhaps we will offer a few halfhearted observations of our own fallenness, but all the while being more concerned about those others who deserve to have their up and comings delivered swiftly to them. Such a person cannot and will not enter into the joy of the Lord. 

When I cannot forgive others, and worse still, am a habitual demander of being made whole, I will find that the tears of my heart will dry up – and my heart will become like an empty well in the middle of a desert. Spiritually speaking, though I might attend church, I find myself focusing on the externals of the Faith, the community, the politics, the activities, everything but God Himself, because my lack of mercy towards others has, in a roundabout way turned off my sense of need for God’s mercy, and over time has made God less relevant to me, perhaps to the point of becoming functionally atheistic. 

Find me any saint, find one for me, and see how much he or she struggles to continually forgive those who wrong them – in turn they recognize all the more their own weaknesses before God. When they pray, Lord have mercy, they mean it. To those who practice mercy, God is very much alive. You say to me, father, I no longer find God relevant, I have even begun to doubt His existence, have you ever truly lived as though He exists, and His word is truth? Have you ever practiced gratuitous holy mercy, or is your understanding of mercy consistent with the advice your atheist therapist might offer to one of his clients? 

What would the world look like if we practiced radical mercy towards each other. What dysfunctionality could once and for all be left behind if we could forgive the debts of others. Oh, how sweet and pleasant it would be for brethren to dwell together in that vision of unity. Rather than each grieving in their hearts over the violence committed against them, their hearts would be heaven bound, concerned only how I have fallen short of God’s high calling for me. If only we surrender the need to have the wrongs against us righted, oh how whole we would become. In many ways, the reason we don’t do this, is because if we were to be honest with ourselves, we are not convinced that God exists. We think this is all there is, and so if I am not satisfied here and now, then when will I ever feel whole again? For the saints, those who truly believe in God, they see the pursuits of worldly completeness as a shallow waste of time, hardly worth fussing over. And so, what if I manage to twist a sorry out from this person who spoke to me rudely, or cut me off, or who took everything away from me. The saints, like their master, practiced radical mercy, the kind of mercy that could accept the insult of the spitting, the buffeting, the crown of thorns, and even the Cross and still say as one of His last words, Lord forgive them, for they know not what they do.

My brothers and sisters, let us learn to love God, and abandon our delusions and self-idolatry. Let us be attentive to the Lord’s teaching, let us forgive all, so that we can been forgiven all. Let us concern ourselves with our own sins, and like Christ, provide others and not ourselves with excuses for sinning. Let us take seriously that high calling Christ has called us the faithful to and let us practice the asceticism of radical mercy.