Monday of the Second Week of Lent (February 26, 2018): The true meaning of mercy

Why be merciful toward someone who doesn’t deserve it? Because we don’t deserve mercy ourselves. God is merciful toward us, despite our unworthiness. We can do the same for others, with God’s help.

Psalm 79 speaks for us as it begs of God: “Please don’t remember the sins of my past! I need your compassion — and quickly!”

As today’s first reading points out, it is only God who is able to keep the covenant. We break the covenant repeatedly — we do something unloving and break our relationship with him daily — and yet he is steadfastly available to us, never moving away from us, always waiting for us to face our brokenness and renew our friendship with him. That’s mercy!

And because God gives us his mercy, we are to be merciful to others, says Jesus in the Gospel reading. The moment we refuse to give mercy to anyone (think of the most difficult person to love), we pull ourselves away from him again. And again he waits for us to return to him whole-heartedly.

Giving mercy doesn’t mean condoning the sins of others, nor ignoring them, nor allowing them to continue. Mercy means that while we wait for others to repent, we don’t judge them as unworthy of our love. God who is so great and awesome never believes that we are unworthy of a relationship with him, no matter how lousy and unholy we are! He never turns away from us, even though we turn away from him. This is the same love that we should give to others.

Mercy also means that while we wait, we hope for, we pray for, and if we can, we speak up for whatever is necessary to build a holy relationship. For a season, the relationship might not exist anymore, but that’s not our preference. If we’ve contributed to the break-up (for example, we’ve retaliated against evil deeds with our own sinful reactions), we need to seek forgiveness and reconciliation, doing whatever we can to restore what has been lost, but if the reconciliation is not equal and reciprocal, we continue to wait in brokenness and separation.

And mercy goes one step further. When sinners repent, God “forgets” the sins. How can he forget? Doesn’t he know everything? Do we have better memories than he does? Of course not. Forgetting simply means that he doesn’t hold the past against us, and likewise we don’t condemn others for what they did in the past and might do again.

Oh, this does not mean that we ignore the possibility of getting hurt again. Rather it means that, with wisdom gained from the past, we give the repentant sinner the opportunity to act upon the changes he or she wants to make, and at the same time we make adjustments in our lives to protect ourselves from that person’s particular vulnerabilities toward sin. We stay out of harm’s way while giving the other person room to grow.

Teach me to be merciful, Jesus, as You are merciful. Grant me the grace not to judge my neighbor, but to know that both he and I are children of the same Father who loves us equally. Amen.