Sermon – “The Way of Mercy” (Psalm 67)

Ever had the feeling you’d bitten off more than you could chew? Well, that’s exactly the sense that began to come upon me as I got more and more deeply into preparing my sermon this week. It was my intention to focus on Psalm 67, a psalm I committed to memory years ago in the old-fashioned idiom of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer:

God be merciful unto us, and bless us;
     and show us the light of his countenance…
That thy way may be known upon earth,
     thy saving health among all nations.

When I looked at it a couple of weeks ago in the New International Version (the translation in our pew Bibles), I found these words:

May God be gracious to us and bless us
     and make his face shine on us…

It’s not that different, except that the word “merciful” has become “gracious”. In fact, virtually every English translation since 1952 has dome the same thing, substituted that word “gracious” in place of “merciful”. This whetted my curiosity. And so a few clicks on biblegateway.com revealed that, while the words “mercy” and “merciful” occur 310 times in the King James Version of the Bible, they are to be found only 144 times in the New International Version. Why the change?

First of all, there are half a dozen words in each of the languages of the Old and New Testaments that can be translated “mercy” and each one has a different shade of meaning. There is one that carries the notion of “faithful devotion” and is often translated “loving kindness”. “I will sing of the Lord’s mercies forever; with my mouth I will make your faithfulness known through all generations” (Psalm 89:1). The word that is used in our psalm this morning has been defined as “the gracious favour of the superior to the inferior, all undeserved”.[1] A third term in the Old Testament is related to the word for “womb” and so has the meaning of “motherly care” or “tender love”. It is the word the psalmist uses when he prays, “Surround me with your tender mercies so I may live” (Psalm 119:77).

When we come to the New Testament there are again three words that are often translated “mercy”. The first simply means kindness: “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy” (Matthew 5:7). “If your gift is to show mercy, do it cheerfully” (Romans 12:8). “Mercy triumphs over judgement” (James 2:13). There is a second word that means “compassion”. Thus Paul exhorts the Christians at Rome, “I urge you …, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice,” (Romans 12:1) and James declares, “The Lord is full of compassion and mercy” (James 5:11). But the most colourful term in the New Testament really means “bowels”—suggesting that we’re talking about a powerful emotion that comes from deep within. It’s the word that the desperate father uses when he comes to Jesus imploring him on behalf of his epileptic son: “If you can do anything, have mercy on us and help us” (Mark 9:22). And on more than one occasion, when Jesus saw the crowds that gathered around him and their neediness, the gospels use that same word. Today we might easily say, “Jesus’ heart went out to them” (Mark 6:34, 14:14).

The Nature of Mercy

My suspicion is that our contemporary Bible translators have moved away from that word mercy because in today’s world it has taken on negative implications. For many people “mercy” has become one of those outmoded words like “charity”. For them it carries with it a sense of condescension, of pity. While claiming to help, in reality it demeans its recipients, who end up being beholden to the one who bestows it. But that is certainly not the mercy that we find in the Bible or in the psalm we read this morning.

One of the characteristics of Hebrew poetry is that it often takes the form of a series of parallel statements, in which one phrase amplifies or enhances the one that precedes it. And this is what we see in Psalm 67:

May God be merciful to us and bless us
and make his face to shine upon us.

One of the things I’ve always loved to do on a hot summer day is to go body surfing. I stand out in the water up to my waist and a little wavelet passes by. Then there’s slightly larger one that wets me a little higher. And that is followed by a great rolling wave. I plunge in front of it and it carries me right into the shore. It seems to me the same is happening in this opening verse. It’s a kind of crescendo. May God be merciful to us; may God bless us; may God smile upon us. Each phrase builds on the previous one until it carries us like a wave into the shore.

You see, mercy is not about sparingly dispensing something when people beg for it. It’s not as though God grudgingly bestows his mercy only when we plead to him long enough and desperately enough. (Do you remember the story Jesus told about the persistent widow who pleaded her case before the unjust judge? The whole point of that parable is that God is not like that.) No, we have a God who desires nothing more than to show mercy. “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercy and the God of all comfort …,” writes the apostle Paul (2 Corinthians 1:3). “The Lord is full of compassion and mercy,” echoes James (5:11). “His mercies never come to an end,” sings Jeremiah, “they are new every morning” (Lamentations 3:22-23).

And so mercy is about abundance. It is about generosity. It is about the lavishness of grace. It is about a shepherd who leaves his ninety-nine sheep in the fold to go in search of the one that is lost. It is about a father who kills the fatted calf for his errant son and runs down the road to embrace him. It is about a God who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all.

The Need for Mercy

The tragedy is that that kind of mercy is a rare commodity in our world today. You can see the evidence of its disappearance in the social media on a daily basis. How quick people are to become judge, jury and executioner often on the slimmest of evidence! They hide behind the anonymity of the internet to lash out with torrents of insults and invective, with the result that whole lives have been ruined through unsubstantiated defamations. And then there is road rage, where a forgetful moment behind the wheel on the part of one driver can lead to unbridled fury on the part of another.

Lest we think that we in the church are immune, let me tell you a little story from Don Posterski, who used to be vice-president of World Vision Canada. His position often involved travel and therefore eating in restaurants. He tells of how he would occasionally ask the wait staff what were their best and worst times of the week. Almost invariably the answer would be Sunday lunch. Why? Because that was when they received the lowest tips. And who makes up a significant proportion of Sunday diners at restaurants? Churchgoers. Sadly we have gained a reputation among at least one segment of the population of being stingy and thankless. It wouldn’t take a lot of effort to turn that around when you consider that a five percent difference on a tip in most cases doesn’t amount to more than a dollar or two.

How transforming it would be if we who claim to be followers of Jesus could recapture the Bible’s vision of God’s mercy! And it seems to me the only way we can do that is to pursue it, to experience it, to cast ourselves upon it, on a daily basis ourselves. New Testament scholar Tom Wright has written, “The church is never more in danger than when it … forgets that every day it too must say, ‘Lord, have mercy upon me, a sinner,’ and allow that confession to work its way into genuine humility… ”[2]

Wright is echoing one of the earliest of Christian prayers: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” It is known by many as “the Jesus prayer” and is prayed repeatedly by believers in the Eastern Orthodox tradition. Of this prayer Franciscan writer Richard Rohr comments,

This is not a self-demeaning prayer, nor a self-defeating prayer, nor is it a disempowering prayer. Relying upon mercy, in fact, protects you from the arrogance and pride that wants to judge others, even in your mind. It situates you in freedom from any sense of your own sufficiency or superiority, and affirms a non-need to justify yourself, and thus keeps your heart open for others and for God. It is basically a prayer for detachment from the self, both mind and heart, and its endless games of self-validation. “Lord, have mercy” seeks validation only from God and not from any inner or outer attempts to be worthy, independently “good”, or not-in-need-of-mercy.[3]

The Fruit of Mercy

Before we close, there is another aspect of God’s mercy that we find in Psalm 67 and that we cannot overlook. I spoke of God’s mercy being like a wave that washes over us. One of the things about that wave is that it doesn’t stop with me. It continues to surge forward until it reaches the shore. So too, God’s mercy does not stop with us. Look at the psalm again:

May God be merciful to us and bless us
     and make his face to shine upon us—
that your ways may be known on earth,
     your saving power among all nations.

In fact apart from the first verse the focus of the entire of the psalm is not on “us” but on “them”: “Let the peoples praise you…” “Let the nations be glad…” “Let all the ends of the earth revere him.” God shows mercy to us so that we in turn may show that same mercy to others. And if we didn’t hear that message in the psalm, it certainly comes through loud and clear in Jesus’ parable of the unforgiving servant.

Do you remember the story he told about the king who thought it was time to settle accounts with his servants? As it turned out, one of them owed him an incalculable debt, far more than he could ever hope to pay in several lifetimes, so the king ordered that he and all his family be sold into slavery. When the servant got wind of this, he threw himself face down before the king and begged, “Be patient with me, and I will pay you everything.” Jesus tells us the master had mercy on him and cancelled the debt. No sooner had he left the king’s presence, however, than he sought out one of his fellow servants who owed him what was by comparison a trifling amount. He grabbed him by the throat and shook him and demanded, “Pay back what you owe me!” In response his fellow servant pleaded with him, “Be patient with me, and I will pay you everything.” But he refused and had the man thrown into debtors’ prison. When the king heard about this, he was enraged and said to the servant, “You wicked servant! I cancelled all that debt of yours because you begged me to. Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?” And with that he handed him over to the jailers.

The point of the parable is that that is the way it is with God’s mercy. He does not intend it to end with us, but to flow out from us, to bring freshness, renewal, joy and hope into the lives of others.

In his remarkable little book, The Name of God Is Mercy, Pope Francis relates the story of when he was Archbishop of Buenos Aires and a priest came seeking his counsel. The priest felt guilty because he feared he was too prone to offer forgiveness to the penitents who came to him in the confessional. The pope asked him what he did when he had these doubts. His reply: “I go to our chapel … and say to Jesus, ‘Lord, forgive me if I have forgiven too much. But you’re the one who gave me the bad example!’ ”[4]

Praise God that there are no limits to his mercy! And may it be our highest privilege and greatest delight to share God’s mercy in a world that desperately needs it.

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[1]     “Mercy”, The New Bible Dictionary, 809

[2]     Evil and the Justice of God, 99

[3]     “Why We Need to Say, ‘Lord, have mercy!’ ”, Huffington Post, 16 Sep 2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/fr-richard-rohr/why-we-need-to-say-lord-h_b_3935884.html

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