Emma Stokes is the lecturer in Bible and mission at Carey Baptist College. This article is an excerpt from the 2024 Baptist Hui panel discussion on how the Hui themes of justice, mercy, humility relate to the church today and in the past. Watch the panel discussion in full here.
Justice, mercy, and humility are all theologically rich terms with deep significance for our faith.
I chose to focus on mercy as I find it particularly astounding. God’s mercy towards us and the mercy that we are to show each other is world-transforming stuff!
We often have a limited idea of what mercy is, perhaps thinking of it simply as ‘having pity on someone’. Even when we look to a lexicon to define the Greek and Hebrew terms translated as mercy and find something like, ‘kindness’ or ‘concern expressed for someone in need,’ these fall short of elucidating all that is caught up in that idea of mercy.[1]
I find it helpful to consider that mercy, or merciful, is one of the ways God chooses to describe God’s very self. God proclaims to Moses in that glorious passage in Exodus 34:6, The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness...’ Psalm 85:10 describes God as, ‘where steadfast love and faithfulness meet,’ and this ‘steadfast love’ refers to that same word, mercy.
Ultimately, God’s mercy is shown to us in Christ, ‘but God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ’ (Eph 2:4-5). Titus 3:5 adds, ‘he saved us, not because of righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy’. So, if we look across Scripture, we find mercy is relationally embedded, it is covenantal in nature, and it is bound up with God’s faithfulness and the promises that God has made to God’s people.
When we encounter Jesus walking around in Galilee as the kingdom of God is breaking in, we should not be surprised to find that he embodies mercy. Jesus heals the sick, he casts out demons, he restores people to community, and he gives life and hope. This Jesus is found eating at the table with all sorts of people; people who are invited to experience the kingdom before being challenged to enter it. But there is something profoundly challenging about the mercy that Jesus offers, and it is often misunderstood. A passage where we see this is Matthew 9:9-13:
9As Jesus went on from there, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax collector’s booth. “Follow me,” he told him, and Matthew got up and followed him. 10 While Jesus was having dinner at Matthew’s house, many tax collectors and sinners came and ate with him and his disciples. 11 When the Pharisees saw this, they asked his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” 12 On hearing this, Jesus said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. 13 But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners”.
This scene is so familiar to us that it is hard for us to imagine how strange and unsettling it was for Jesus to be seen keeping company with this sort of group. Tax collectors were associated with the oppressive Roman regime, yet Jesus is found eating a meal with them and others known as ‘sinners’. In the eyes of the Pharisees, these are certainly not people that a respectable teacher should be identifying with! But when Jesus retorts, ‘it is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick’. Jesus is claiming that he is exactly where he needs to be to do the job he has been sent to do.
Jesus then instructs the Pharisees to go and learn what it means that God desires mercy not sacrifice. As we know, this is a quote from Hosea 6:6. At its core, this is a challenge to an unfaithful people to acknowledge God in every aspect of life and not just to bring offerings or sacrifice to the Lord as if this alone was enough. Primarily, sacrifices and the activity around the temple were about ensuring God’s presence among God’s people. What God’s presence meant was that God reigned. Under God’s reign things were done God’s way across all of life and that brought peace and flourishing for all. Sacrifices were just one aspect of living in the way God had instructed his people to live. However, if sacrifice was done purely as ritual, divorced from God’s life-giving presence that brought order and flourishing for all, it became a meaningless gesture.
Hosea was calling God’s people back to the fullness of a faithful relationship with God. Here Jesus is doing the same. He is challenging the Pharisee’s preoccupation with purity and external rituals and pointing out that by neglecting the weightier matter of mercy, they render their other actions of purity and ritual, (sacrifice), meaningless.
Jesus can eat with tax collectors and sinners; because ‘the rule of God is now breaking into the world and Jesus is inviting them to return to a loving and forgiving God’.[2] Note that Jesus neither denies that the people he is eating with are sinners or takes their sin lightly. Rather, as Evans points out, he summons sinners to repentance.[3] Yet somehow, these sinners and tax collectors want to be around him. His posture of mercy, demonstrated in his moving towards them, makes Jesus a compelling person to be around. But the Pharisees cannot see that this is mercy at work. They also cannot see that they themselves are sinners who are dependent on God’s grace and in need of that very same mercy.
This is perhaps why Jesus uses the formula, ‘go and learn’. Mercy must be experienced. It is not simply that we seek God’s mercy for this or that sin as if, somehow, we are otherwise self-sufficient. We must recognise at a deep soul-shattering level the incredible mercy that has been shown to us in Christ. It is only from this position as people who have received this unbelievable mercy that we are able to show mercy to others.
Mercy is a verb, not a noun! It is action that flows from God’s prior action of mercy shown to us. This is quite a confronting thought because it means that if we want to know what we believe about mercy, we need to look at what we actually do as individuals, families, and communities.
Mercy is a distinctive trait of the church that has drawn many to faith. It is the tenderness of God made visible, in particular through reaching out to the poor and marginalised. It is central to God’s identity and to our identity as God’s people. As people of mercy, we not only offer a profound invitation to people to taste and see that the Lord is good, but we create a space in which people can encounter God.
The church exists because of God’s mercy, and it is as people of mercy that the profound truth of the Gospel is made tangible. We have not had God’s mercy poured out on us so that we may hold it to ourselves as a possession, but so that it may form us into people of mercy who show mercy to others. The gift of mercy demonstrated in our daily lives is part of what makes God’s redemptive action in the world visible to those around us.
Cover photo: Luke Kaa-Morgan, John Tucker, Emma Stokes, Charles Hewlett at the Baptist National Hui 2024. Photo by Emma Diack.
Endnotes
[1] Arndt, William, Frederick W. Danker, Walter Bauer, and F. Wilbur Gingrich, in A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
[2] Craig A. Evans, Matthew, NCBC, (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2012), 205.
[3] Evans, Matthew, 203.
