A Revolution of Tenderness

Seeking to show mercy rather than vengeance or justice

02/26/2018

Luke 6:36-38 Jesus said to his disciples: "Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful. "Stop judging and you will not be judged. Stop condemning and you will not be condemned. Forgive and you will be forgiven. Give and gifts will be given to you; a good measure, packed together, shaken down, and overflowing, will be poured into your lap. For the measure with which you measure will in return be measured out to you."

How do you react when someone hurts you, which someone will sooner or later? For instance, when a coworker sabotages the project you have worked on for weeks, or a spouse cheats on you and divorces you, or a sibling belittles your best efforts, or you get pulled over for speeding while another car going much faster gets away? These injustices happen frequently, and most people react in one of three possible ways. They either seek vengeance, or they want justice, or they show mercy. Let me describe each one, and you try to see in which way you tend to respond to unfair treatment.

First, some want vengeance, which is retribution taken to an extreme or to excess. If a neighbor runs over your yard in their car, you destroy their car. If another girl wears a prettier dress to the prom, you try to catch her dress on fire. This first level of response is the “code of the mafia” where, if you kill one member of my family, I will kill your whole family.

The second level of response to unfair treatment is to seek justice, or as it said in the 18th century B.C. Code of Hammurabi, “an eye for an eye.” Now, that may sound extreme to us, but that rule, often called the “lex talionis” (the law of equal retribution), was intended to limit vengeance. Instead of people going to extremes to feel their wrong had been redressed (like the mafia does), the lex talionis required that the injured party take “only” an eye for an eye, and not any more than that. This second level of retribution required you to show equity or proportion in your response to a wrong.

The third level of reaction to unfairness (and this is the highest level) is to show mercy. That is, you do not seek vengeance, nor even very reasonable justice, but you go beyond both and respond with clemency, forgiveness, mercy. John Henry Newman gave a classic definition of a gentleman (and he argued this was the purpose of a university to form gentlemen) when he wrote: “It is almost a definition of a gentleman to say he is one who never inflicts pain” (The Idea of a University, Dis. VIII, Ch. 10). In other words, even though someone else has inflicted pain on you, you should not retaliate in like manner, rather, you should show mercy.

Jesus gives the ultimate motivation and ground for mercy saying in Luke 6:36: “Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.” Mercy, therefore, is a God-like quality because it requires super human effort and super human humility. It is much easier and much more emotionally satisfying to stick it to someone who hurts you, or to give them what they deserve; they had it coming, after all! But if someone wants to call himself or herself a Christian, they must go beyond vengeance and even beyond justice and reach the height of holiness in human relationships, in a word, they must be merciful.

Examples abound where someone feels slighted and how they might be merciful. A very subtle form of vengeance is holding a grudge against someone who says or does something hurtful. We feel we are somehow punishing them by withholding our friendship and forgiveness, but we only hurt our own hearts. Vengeance and justice, instead of mercy, are only too common in divorce situations. One spouse feels deeply wronged and wants the ex-spouse to feel a similar pain, and it is especially tragic when children get caught in the crossfire. These feelings are found even in the church where one person or group feels they are treated poorly while another group gets special treatment. Mercy may also be a challenging virtue for modern Americans to grasp because we put such a high value on justice – which is a good thing in itself – that we almost feel like mercy is being “unjust.” Could this be one reason we still have the death penalty in our country: it is simply a matter of justice, an eye for an eye, a life for a life. That may be a matter of justice, but that is not a matter of mercy.

Pope Francis, on the other hand, is calling all Christians to a “revolution of tenderness” (Evangelii gaudium, 72), which is another name for mercy. We can either follow the code of the mafia, or we can choose the code of mercy.  We know which code Jesus followed, and so did his Father.

Praised be Jesus Christ!