Thursday in the Fifth Week of Easter: Just? Mercy?

Lessons: Psalms 70-71; Wisdom 14:27-15:3; Romans 14:1-12; Luke 8: 26- 39.

 

Recently I have been trying to guide my mother through an issue of deep care.  The details are not important except to know she is trying to love well a younger person in trouble.  As in most times of trouble, there is disappointment in the area of choices made and worry for the choices that are ahead. There is concern for right actions on Mom's part and that of this younger person.  And there is judgment which looks over the shoulder at the past, stares at the present, wants to see into the future.  Any one of us knows this place. 

On the one hand one wants to be wise, to do the right and just thing, to add no foolishness to the past path.  We can get stuck here and not act. Yet this does little to satisfy us inwardly, spiritually, in the place of love.

On the other hand there is the desire to feel whole in our relationships.  For many of us that means to reflect in our dealings God's nature.   The Book of Wisdom describes the nature of God to the believer thus;

"But you, our God, are kind and true, patient, and ruling all things in mercy.  For even if we sin we are yours, knowing your power; but we will not sin, because we know that you acknowledge us as yours. For to know you is complete righteousness, and to know your power is the root of immortality."  Wisdom 15:1-3

Thus in times of decision we are left to sort out not merely what is just but what is kind, true, patient and merciful as well as wise.  Justice tempered with mercy is often a wise place.  But even this is complicated by the tension we often experience between what feels just and what feels merciful; what feels harsh and what feels like runaway kindness, too gentle.  In 12 Step work we learn to avoid behaviors that enable a person's addictions or negative behaviors.  Perhaps it is this desire not to enable destructive behaviors that can help us discern right or better actions.

A parish I served was very close to the center of a drug infested community.  Always there was a knock on the door for help.  Our challenge was on the one hand to do what we could that helped some who came our way.  On the other we did not want to enable self destruction with our limited staff hours.  Hunger was often the presenting issue, yet we lacked the available person power to run a soup kitchen where we both fed and monitored.  We came to two actions.  One was to refer people to a very well run soup kitchen which we helped support.  The other God gave us.  A Italian baker came by offering us daily several large boxes of his day old bread.  To this we added whatever we could get in the way of canned goods from parishioners.  We gave daily only a few cans at a time until they ran out.  While it cost us more hours of care (two a day), we were comfortable that what was given was sparse enough to feed daily and not enough to sell for drugs. Not only were we helpful but a community of kindness and wisdom was generated in the parish.  It was tested at times by our own need to judge and by some of our clients need to judge from their own inner hurts.

Time and again in scripture we are called to emulate God's generous nature.  Time and again we are plagued by self protection masked as doing the merely just thing.  Micah tells us we are to "to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?" Micah 6:8  What is just is the right thing.  What is merciful is the loving and kind thing. Wisdom I believe is born in the middle where we walk humbly before God.

St. Paul found the same issues alive within the early Church.

Why do you pass judgment on your brother or sister? Or you, why do you despise your brother or sister? For we will all stand before the judgment seat of God. For it is written, "As I live, says the Lord, every knee shall bow to me, and every tongue shall give praise to God."  So then, each of us will be accountable to God. Romans 14:10-12

In the end we do the best we can.  In the end we hold out this same hope for others.  In the end we are all accountable to God for our actions and our attitudes as we approach those actions.

One thing I know to be true for me.  If I am going to err in discerning what is just and what is kind, my better nature arises when I err toward the kind end of the spectrum.  The other end is too often very close to self-protection and not enough like Jesus.

 

How is it for you?