Love mercy

“And what does the Lord require of you but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.”

Micah 6:8

The only sermon I remember from my 5 years in Melbourne was one where Tim Costello preached on Micah 6. He spoke about mercy in a way that I’d never thought about before. He said that mercy was knowing full well that you can get screwed over and still doing it anyway. That stuck with me because it wasn’t about being naive and being too stupid to realise what you were getting yourself into. It was about still making the seemingly stupid choice because that was what the Lord required of you and you trusted that He knew better. I wasn’t sure I could accept that. It goes against all of my economist/darwinist instincts. It still does.

The only sermon (or snatches of a sermon) I heard in my 4 weeks in the US was on the same passage. J and I had wandered into a Catholic church and they had just started mass so we sat down. The priest read out Micah 6:8 and I remembered Tim Costello’s sermon. Love mercy. If I had trouble accepting “love mercy” as an idealistic 20 yo in Melbourne, I definitely am 10 steps further away from accepting “love mercy” now. Now knowing the what mercy can cost me. Giving up my rights to self-defence. Still doing it anyway. This is what the Lord requires of me? Wow. And yet, I think I’ve seen enough to now also know that mercy is one of the only ways to break a really destructive cycle of tit for tat. An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.

One thing nice about the Catholic church is that they kneel to pray. There is something serious about that prayer. It seems more serious than praying sitting down in the pews somehow. In my highly logical, transactional way of thinking, I thought aloud to God (prayed, if you will) that mercy was an illogical concept. Which person (not me) in the right state of mind would do something knowing full well that they could get screwed over? And yet my heart knows that the whole point of being Christian is to live in a way that is counter-intuitive because it breaks the cycle. Is that not what I call “grace”? But still I cannot bring myself to get over the mental hurdle to love mercy – notjust  as a happy-touchy-feely idea but as a serious way of life. So I prayed for the uncomfortable disconnect between my transactional brain and my heart that loves God and takes what He requires of me quite seriously.  (Thorn in my flesh indeed.)

Blessed are the merciful for they shall obtain mercy. Urg.