Lookahead: …(She wrote in the open letter,) “I would love to meet with you when circumstances permit. Maybe I will tell you my story, and you will tell me yours. I know we will learn that far more unites us, than divides us. And maybe together, Simone, we will find a way to shine light into our fractured world. I send you my love”… This survivor, of months of indescribable Auschwitz horrors, spared the neo-nazi, holocaust-denier from punishing verbal castigation if not legal action. If that isn’t mercy, I don’t know what is!
…whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it. For he who said, “You shall not commit adultery,” also said, “You shall not murder.” If you do not commit adultery but do commit murder, you have become a lawbreaker. James 2:10,11 Speak and act as those who are going to be judged by the law that gives freedom. For judgment without mercy will be shown to anyone who has not been merciful. Mercy triumphs over judgment. James 2:12,13 (these and all subsequent underlines mine)
Weighty verses deserving of a few posts. For some reason, I seized on the latter verses, 12 and 13, when I read the passage. They address mercy, which was the topic that my last post landed on. I got so caught up in studying mercy, that I forgot that I had skipped 10 and 11 until I was summing things up at the end. But now I’m thinkin’ we need the mercy/judgment groundwork first. So here it is. 🙂
And here’s the convenient segue from the last post! Jesus asked: “Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?” The expert in the law replied, “The one who had mercy on him.” Jesus told him, “Go and do likewise.” Luke 10:36,37. Jesus defined merciful behavior as: The Samaritans were bitter enemies with the Jews. And yet a Samaritan did not see his brutal enemy dying by the side of the road. He saw a brutalized victim and chose to rescue him from death.
So we see two aspects of mercy. A merciful person feels empathy/pity for someone else’s suffering. And a merciful person withholds retribution.
A few defs:
Christian–Mercy is the act of withholding deserved punishment…1;
Secular–Per Webster’s, “(Mercy is) compassion or forbearance…shown especially to an offender or to one subject to one’s power; also : lenient or compassionate treatment; imprisonment rather than death imposed as penalty for first-degree murder; … compassionate treatment of those in distress; works of mercy among the poor2
The Greek word, according to Bible Hub, has the aspect of helping the downtrodden: ἔλεος (1), ἐλέου, ὁ, mercy: that of God toward sinners; that of men: readiness to help those in trouble; kindness or good will toward the miserable and afflicted, joined with a desire to relieve them;
The Aramaic word, according to Dukhrana, emphasizes the heart state that results in mercy: ܪܚܡ to love; to be merciful, to have pity ; to be compassionate / tender-hearted, to be kind. It also includes the aspect of having pity, not only empathy. I guess, in a way, feeling pity is more selfless than empathy, because the “I” isn’t in the equation: it’s from the viewpoint of “that must be really terrible” versus “that was really terrible when I went through it.”
Example that comes to mind (that lines up with secular point of view): A villain in one of the Asian Period Dramas has finally been caught in the commission of murderous acts of treason in an attempt to seize the throne–and, we feel a strange sense of embarrassment as we now watch them prostrated before the emperor, crying and groveling and begging for life. Then the emperor mercifully agrees to exile them vs. the alternative (ordering one of the robot-like royal guards to disposition the criminal with a 50 pound broad sword). That’s what we call mercy!
In a seeming tangent (but one that will help us understand mercy better)…So what’s the difference between grace and mercy?
Mercy is the act of withholding deserved punishment while grace is the act of endowing unmerited favor. In His mercy, God does not give us punishment we deserve, namely hell; while in His grace, God gives us the gift we do not deserve, namely heaven.3
I approached our ministry leader about getting some formal training for our younger assistants. I didn’t criticize them by name–nor had she previously listened to an endless stream of my negative feedback. The leader, in fact, had to hit the pause button and drag the details out of me about why I thought they needed training. Her response was that I should “extend grace in the moment.” I didn’t get it. I told her, not a few times, that I always extended grace. I didn’t scold them or discipline them when they bugged me. I just tried to exemplify the behavior that I was looking for–and also forgave and prayed for them–so I never lost my agápē. Even if I felt that scolding might have been deserved, I withheld it. However, I continued to hold them to a high standard and it took nothing for me to (re)lapse into replaying “typical teens!” rhetoric silently, in my mind.
I now believe that I was extending mercy in the moment by not scolding them. However, Grace takes that extra step. In addition to not scolding them, I don’t put myself in the position of judge and jury. The reason: If I’m busy judging them, I can’t bless them. 🙂
That begs the question, does a sinner (actually a highly fallible, fellow sinner) even have the right to judge whether someone deserves mercy? (Matthew 7:1) I think that James is actually describing a scale-balancing process between mercy and judgment, in which mercy wins–and unmerciful people are themselves judged (receive justice). I, therefore, believe that James (also Jesus) incentivizes us to weigh one against the other.
Mercy triumphs over judgment because judgment without mercy will be shown to anyone who has not been merciful.
In addition, Jesus at one point seemed to juxtapose mercy with justice: in Matthew 23:23,“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! You pay a tenth of mint, dill, and cumin, yet you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy, and faith.” Justice then is the payback for someone who has been judged and found lacking. And actually the Aramaic definition for “judgment” in James 2:13 is “the thing owed, a loan, to become legally rendered.” Basically, instead of getting paid back for the unjust things that a person has done, they are granted mercy.
Expanding further on the subject of justice, here are excerpts from e-articles about the holocaust, one of which is entitled, Most Nazis escaped justice. Now Germany is racing to convict those who got away:
In her new book, “Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice,” (Mary) Fulbrook says that of the 140,000 individuals brought to court between 1946 and 2005, only 6,656 ended in convictions…Though up to a million people are believed to have actively participated in the extermination of millions of Jewish people during the Holocaust, only around 20,000 were ever found guilty of crimes, and fewer than 600 received heavy sentences…in the interest of the Cold War and fighting communism, there was a move to rehabilitate former Nazis and a general climate of amnesty… In the 1960s and 1970s a new generation of Germans pressed their parents and grandparents to answer: What did you do in the war?…But it was not until the trial of SS guard John Demjanjuk (2011), that prosecutors were able to convict Nazi suspects who may have not been directly responsible for specific killings.4,5
So where is the justice in that?? Later in this week’s web search, I was shocked and dismayed to see footage of a Hasidic Jew being cold-cocked from behind in a city street, as well as–in chilling effigy–different images and likenesses of Hasidic Jews being clubbed by children, burned, shot. This was new-millennial footage! How sickening to hear neo-nazi chants from protesters in Charlottesville, VA–and their rallying shouts of sheer poison: “Jews will die to cleanse us.” These video excerpts comprised the front-end of a documentary that was intended to honor a centenarian who was a holocaust survivor. She had miraculously survived internment at three different concentration camps, including a stay at the Auschwitz Death Camp during WWII. The documentary’s intro additionally showcased an abominable social media post. The show’s host recounted:
“A South African social influencer penned the most terrible things. She effectively denies the holocaust and blamed the Jews for burning people alive in Germany…”6 The “influencer’s” post, in addition to sick accusations of deviant behavior on the part of the Jews, that I won’t mention here, claimed that the Holocaust was a set-up and that Hitler was innocent.
The centenarian subject of the documentary had this open letter response: “I am sad because like me, you too were a victim of lies that seek to breed hatred and disgust…lies that seek to divide us and make us fearful of one another…Today they call propaganda “fake news” but it is the same thing. And it is no less virulent or dangerous…(During WWII) it was a lie….I know this because I lived the truth and I have carried it with me, in my heart, for more than 7 decades…You see Simone, you can never forget what I saw, what I endured and what I survived…I would love to meet with you when circumstances permit. Maybe I will tell you my story, and you will tell me yours. I know we will learn that far more unites us, than divides us. And maybe together, Simone, we will find a way to shine light into our fractured world. I send you my love…”7
This survivor, of months of indescribable Auschwitz horrors, spared the neo-nazi, holocaust-denier from punishing verbal castigation if not legal action. If that isn’t mercy, I don’t know what is!
Yet today cries still rise to heaven for justice/judgment. And unfortunately this mode will continue. Even during the end times, martyred souls in heaven will still be asking the “when” question: Revelation 6:10– And they cried with a loud voice, saying, “How long, O Lord, holy and true, until You judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth?” The answer: keep reading. 🙂
The Book of Revelation then goes on to describe God’s subsequent and overwhelming once-and-for-all judgment in painstaking detail.
When we see and hear about evil triumphing all around us, we cannot lose sight/heart of/in the assurance that judgment will definitely happen–and God will be the ultimate judge, as he continues to save His children. In the meantime, He is extending mercy, and He will help us to do the same.
More on this James passage in the next post…
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4https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/14/europe/germany-nazi-war-trials-grm-intl/index.html
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