| By Esther C. Baird, as written for the Silver Bay Spiritual Life Center, Silver Bay, NY. To subscribe to the mailing please email: pastoralrespite@silverbay.org Last summer I had the opportunity to lead evening Vespers a few times. It’s a great way to connect to the people on campus at Silver Bay and to hear some fantastic music by the Silver Bay String Quartet. But the traditional way Vespers end is by singing the hymn, “Now the Day is Over.” This was always intimidating for me because the hymn is, let’s just say, not the most melodic hymn ever written. If the congregation doesn’t sing along, the leader (me) is left to carry the tune, such that it is. Each time I struggled to not wreck this long-standing tradition, and I often would cut it short by a few verses to preserve everyone’s ears. I’d typically start by cutting the last verse because on top of my singing abilities, I also wasn’t sure about the words. The verse says, “When the morning wakens, then may I arise pure and fresh and sinless, in your holy eyes.” I kept thinking, ‘I don’t wake up sinless! I wake up often cranky – at least until I’ve had coffee. And that’s on a good day!” But the fifth beatitude has helped me consider a different way of singing that verse. The fifth beatitude says, “Blessed are the merciful for they shall be shown mercy.” Mercy. It’s a not a word we use very often in our every day language with the exception of an exclamation, “Mercy! That chicken is spicy!” etc. What is mercy, and how can we have it since Jesus says it’s something citizens of the Kingdom of Heaven have? Sometimes it’s helpful to understand a word by seeing how it’s used elsewhere in the Bible, and in this case Jesus himself uses it just a few chapters later in Matthew 9 and 12 saying both times, “I desire mercy and not sacrifice.” In each case he was quoting from the Old Testament prophet Hosea 6:6 which in full says, “For I desire mercy, not sacrifice, and acknowledgment of God rather than burnt offerings.” Follow the thread here: in Hosea, God was using the prophet to show the people of Israel that the sacrificial system was never about strict adherence to the rules for the sake of the rules, it was a way to help the people be in relationship with God as a way to bring their hearts to him. God desires mercy and acknowledgment of who he is. That’s what Jesus was saying. Not legalism, but mercy. Not showiness, but mercy. Not hollow actions, but mercy. Mercy is treating people with love and compassion when they might actually deserve punishment or rebuke. It’s the police offer letting you off with a warning when you know full well you deserve a speeding ticket. It’s the teacher giving a student a second chance when they both know the student didn’t study and deserves the zero. But at the highest level, it’s the King of the Kingdom of Heaven inviting us into his kingdom despite us not deserving it, despite us having no ability to be good enough or work hard enough to get in ourselves. It’s the rescue we can’t achieve on our own. It’s the right standing with God that is impossible for us to accomplish. But the King gives us his own right standing, his heart, and his perfect sinless life, so that when God looks at who is in his kingdom, he sees sinless people because he sees the King, he sees Jesus. That is mercy – – that we should be invited in and given this life that we did nothing to deserve. Do we still act selfishly? Yes. Do we still lose our tempers, cheat, lie, steal? Yes. But when we let the King bring us into his Kingdom we are given new lives and whether we measure up to them or not (pssst, we don’t), they are still ours. And so when we wake up each morning, though we are grouchy, rude, unkind (all before 8 am) God sees the sinless King’s heart, the sinless King’s compassion, the sinless King’s love. That is mercy. And in turn, if we understand this Kingdom structure and how it works, we should want to be merciful to others. To forgive their rudeness, to smile at their pettiness, to given them a second and third and fourth chance when in fact they deserve none at all. I’m not here to say the author of the Vesper’s hymn meant all that when they wrote it, but we can think of it in that way. Are we still broken? Yes. But Jesus calls us to follow him and to let him begin to mend our broken hearts by giving us his, and to treat others accordingly, and when we do that he will call us Blessed. |
| Extra Reading: If you want to read more, I’d encourage you to read Matthew 9, it has a lot of snapshots of Jesus in ministry, including his use of the quote above, they are great examples of Jesus living out a life and ministry that is full of mercy. Any translation will do, though I often find the New Living Translation to be an easy one to follow (you can use biblegateway.com to get quick free access to different translations). |
