Deacon Dave Etters
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Discover the true meaning of God’s mercy through the richness of chesed—a love that is compassionate, forgiving, and unwavering. This reflection explores how Christ reveals mercy and calls us to live it out in our daily lives.
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Mercy, God’s mercy. Mercy comes from a Hebrew word, chesed, and the word has a rich meaning. It’s so rich, one English word cannot express the fullness and the richness of that word, chesed.
It’s really an essentially a firm, an unwavering disposition of loving kindness, compassion, and forbearance shown to one who offends. It is precisely because of sin in the world that God cannot reveal himself otherwise than as mercy. Through Christ, God becomes visible mercy, mercy incarnate.
In a sense, he is mercy. God is merciful and he calls us, his people, to imitate his mercy. Blessed are the merciful for they shall obtain mercy, Jesus tells us in the Beatitudes.
In this Beatitude, Jesus emphasizes the reciprocal nature of mercy. In other words, God will show us his mercy to the extent that we are merciful to others. We cannot be forgiven for what we owe.
Only God can do that and we are supposed to emulate God and forgive and have mercy on one another. We naively believe that the world would be better if everything was governed by order, strict justice, and punishment for those who behave badly, ourselves exempted, of course. Now, while justice is not to be ignored, it must be tempered with mercy.
Otherwise, we would live in a sunless, dark world, eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, and what would we have? We’d have a world filled with people with one eye and hockey players. We must have justice in our world but that justice must be tempered with God’s mercy and his love. Consequently, the church must, in every age, proclaim the mystery of mercy, which is the supremely revealed in Jesus Christ.