Love Mercy

 

 

I want to take us on another exploration of a facet of the verse in Micah, which has been guiding us for the last two months or so in our search to understand God’s will for us as individuals, and as a community of people following Jesus. You will find the verse in Micah 6:8, the translation I’ve got might be a little different from the one you know:

He has shown all you people what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.

 

Last week, I spoke about doing justice. And you may recall that I said that we do justice out of our compassion for other people, a compassion that we receive from Jesus. Today, I want to talk about a second outworking of that compassion which is to love mercy, to love it when we see God come to rescue and to heal and to restore people in need.

That mercy, that coming to the rescue of people who need to be rescued, is at the heart of Jesus’ life and work from the beginning. In the gospel of Matthew, the first of the four biographies of Jesus in the New Testament, we’re told that Jesus began his teaching by saying, “Repent (that is turn around, change your course completely), for the kingdom of heaven has come near” or “is at hand”. What he meant was – turn around, because God is at work right here, right now, to rescue his people and to defeat their enemies. We spoke about this at the beginning of the year.

Part of that call wasn’t particularly controversial or unexpected. Throughout their history, prophets had been warning the people of Israel to turn away from the evil they were doing, usually that was worshipping idols and exploiting and oppressing each other, and to turn back to their god, the creator of the universe. But the prophets always called on the people to turn around in the context that their God was about to act to judge those who continued to oppose him.

What made Jesus’ call to repent different was this – first, Jesus claimed that God was at work right now to rescue his people and that this rescue mission was happening in and through Jesus himself. Second, Jesus claimed that God was not about to bring judgement on the enemies of his people – whether that was the Romans who occupied the land or the ruling elite who oppressed and exploited the poor. Instead, in Jesus, God was going to break into the lives of his people with grace and with mercy. The people of God’s kingdom would not be strutting victors lording it over their defeated enemies. Instead they would be people who love mercy, who love to see God rescue people. They would be peacemakers, they would turn the other cheek, they would give even more than others demanded of them, and so on.

Now, as we said at the beginning of the year, Jesus still invites us to become the people of his Kingdom – people who do justice, who love mercy, and who walk humbly with our God. At the same time, Jesus invites us, incredibly, to become part of his rescue mission. We, you and me, can become the agents he uses to bring his mercy to those in need of it.

So how do we become involved? Our involvement with his rescue mission is built on two pillars – the first is faith (or the nature of our relationship to Jesus) and the second is prayer (or our communication with Jesus). So, let’s look at how faith and prayer worked for those first people who heard Jesus and responded to him, because I think there is something for us to learn there. Turn with me to Matthew chapter 8. We’re looking at Matthew 8: 1 – 15

When Jesus came down from the mountainside, large crowds followed him. A man with leprosy came and knelt before him and said, “Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean.”

 Jesus reached out his hand and touched the man. “I am willing,” he said. “Be clean!” Immediately he was cleansed of his leprosy. Then Jesus said to him, “See that you don’t tell anyone. But go, show yourself to the priest and offer the gift Moses commanded, as a testimony to them.”

 When Jesus had entered Capernaum, a centurion came to him, asking for help. “Lord,” he said, “my servant lies at home paralyzed, suffering terribly.”

 Jesus said to him, “Shall I come and heal him?”

 The centurion replied, “Lord, I do not deserve to have you come under my roof. But just say the word, and my servant will be healed. For I myself am a man under authority, with soldiers under me. I tell this one, ‘Go,’ and he goes; and that one, ‘Come,’ and he comes. I say to my servant, ‘Do this,’ and he does it.”

 When Jesus heard this, he was amazed and said to those following him, “Truly I tell you, I have not found anyone in Israel with such great faith. I say to you that many will come from the east and the west, and will take their places at the feast with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven. But the subjects of the kingdom will be thrown outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

 Then Jesus said to the centurion, “Go! Let it be done just as you believed it would.” And his servant was healed at that moment.

 When Jesus came into Peter’s house, he saw Peter’s mother-in-law lying in bed with a fever. He touched her hand and the fever left her, and she got up and began to wait on him.

 

There’s a lot that can be said about these stories. But I want to focus on what they say about the people’s faith, and their prayer. Let’s look at the nature of their faith, their relationship to Jesus, first. Here I’d like to point out three things.

First, these people admit that they need Jesus. In each case, the need is obvious. The man with leprosy is not just ill, he is also a social outcast, he has no friends, he has no-one willing even to talk to him. The centurion’s servant is very seriously ill, as is Peter’s mother-in-law. In each case, these people come to Jesus and, even if only by implication, tell him that they need him. They need his mercy to come.

Second, the people believe that Jesus speaks the truth about himself, that he has received the authority and the power from God to act. They believe that Jesus has the power to do the things that the prophets of old foretold would happen when the kingdom comes, when God acts in mercy to rescue his people – the sick will be healed, the blind see, the lame walk, the people with leprosy will be healed, the dead will be raised from the dead and good news will be preached to the poor.

There is an element of risk in their faith in Jesus, though maybe not the risk we’d expect. We would think that the risk lies in believing that Jesus can act, that Jesus has the power to heal. But, if you are desperate, if you are already as low as you can fall, I think that risk will feel rather smaller. After all, what have you got to lose? The worst that can happen is that Jesus isn’t who he says he is and you are left in the position you were in before. Stack that over against the fact that this Jesus might be able to heal you and restore you to full participation in your society. Wouldn’t you jump at the chance, too?

The risk they do take is that there are plenty of people around Jesus who are adamant that Jesus’ promise of mercy doesn’t extend to a leper and to a centurion of the occupation forces, and these people are probably very vocal in their opinion. So the leper and the centurion risk being judged by others for coming forward. They risk that others will think that they’re foolish. They, like us, need to weigh the fear of what others will think against the chance that they will be healed, that they will see God’s mercy breaking into their lives. I must admit that fear has stopped me often from seeing God’s mercy come.

Third, these people all have spent time listening to Jesus. They have listened to what Jesus had to teach about who he is and what he has come to do, what his will is. I think that is where their courage comes from to approach him. After all, Jesus has just said that God’s kingdom is at hand. And because they have listened and understood him properly, they know that Jesus’ will is to bring God’s mercy into their lives here and now. As a result of that, they are in a position to say, in effect, “I understand that you have come to rescue us, now do to me what you came to do.”

Now, the same applies to our faith, our relationship to Jesus. We are no longer in direct face-to-face relationship with Jesus, as these people were, but the basis of our relationship is the same – we acknowledge our need for Jesus, we accept his authority and power to act, even in the face of our fear that we’ll look foolish, and we listen to what Jesus intends to do about it all.

Now let’s look at how they prayed, how they communicated with Jesus.

First, in each case, their prayer, their speaking to Jesus, is direct and simple. The leper says, “If it is your will you can heal me.” The centurion says, “You are like me, what you command will happen. My servant needs your help. Please heal him.” End of story. They don’t package their request for healing in holy words or fancy theological footwork. They do not pray a holy formula that will ensure their success. They don’t quote pages and pages of scripture to support their claim.

Second, they do not ask Jesus for a miracle in the way we tend to understand that word. We tend to think of a miracle as something that is impossible, completely out of this world. But what they ask Jesus to do is entirely possible for him. God has promised to heal and restore his people, and to do so through Jesus Christ. The Bible is so confident about the fact that God will restore the whole of creation that at times it speaks about that moment in the past tense, as if the moment has already happened. That means that everyone who follows Jesus and asks him to rescue and restore them will be healed, completely, when Jesus returns. Therefore, when we ask Jesus to have mercy, to rescue us, all we are doing is to ask him to do so a little earlier, to give us, in Paul’s words, a down payment now on the restoration that is yet to come in full.

Finally, these people do not ask our Lord to change his mind to be merciful, despite the many sermons I have heard to the contrary. Let me explain that. People who preach that our prayer changes God’s mind often refer to a story in the first book of the Bible, about a man called Abraham, chosen by God to be the ancestor of the people of Israel. One day, God tells Abraham that two cities, Sodom and Gomorrah, will be destroyed because the people living there are altogether and utterly and irredeemably evil.

We are told that Abraham stands beside God on a mountain overlooking the cities, and that Abraham pleads with God not to destroy the cities for the sake of the righteous people who might still live in them. Abraham says, “What if you find 100 righteous people in the cities, will you still destroy them?” And God replies, “No, if there are 100, I won’t.” And then Abraham asks, “Well, what if you find only 50?” And God says again, “If I find 50, I won’t destroy the city.” And Abraham keeps bringing that number down until he gets God to say that if there are 10 righteous people in the cities he won’t destroy them. Unfortunately, there are no 10 righteous people in the cities, so the cities are destroyed by fire and an earthquake.

Why does this story matter? Because Abraham does not change God’s mind to be more merciful. Before Abraham began ask God to have mercy for the sake of just 10 righteous people, God already knew that there was not a single righteous person to be found in either Sodom or Gomorrah.

What is happening instead is that Abraham still has to catch up with God’s will, and with how far God’s mercy extends. Abraham doesn’t know until he has asked that God would have been prepared to let tens of thousands of truly evil people live for the sake of the lives of just 10 righteous people.

In a way, that is the guiding theme of Abraham’s whole life – he spends his time catching up with the true extent and depth of the grace and mercy of the god he now serves, so utterly different from the brutality and vengefulness of the gods worshipped by people around him at the time.

The same applies to us. When we pray, we don’t change God’s mind, we do not convince God to have mercy where he had no intention to do so. What we do when we pray is that we come into tune with God’s will, and we come to realise just how far our Lord’s grace extends. And we, too, I think, still have a long way to go to realise just how far our Lord’s mercy does extend.

That is how we approach Jesus. Whatever happens next, no matter what it is, is a sovereign act of God. It has nothing to do with us – our merit or our ability to pray the right prayer or the level of our faith. Whatever God does he does because he is gracious and he is merciful.

And that is both extremely frustrating and immensely freeing, at the same time.

It is extremely frustrating because I can’t guarantee that Jesus will respond as I hope, or even at all. When I pray for someone to be healed, I can’t force Jesus to heal them. Jesus is not a slot machine to be played. You pop the right prayer in the slot here and the right outcome pops out there. He is the sovereign Lord of our universe.

But I can count on the fact that our Lord will be gracious and merciful in whatever he does. He will bring his grace and mercy to bear on the lives of his people, to heal and to restore and to transform us.

It is freeing because when I am praying with someone else, what I say or do not say won’t change what Jesus does. Once I’ve prayed, “Come Holy Spirit, we need you Lord”, that’s it, I’m no longer in control. Whatever happens next is entirely up to him. What he does is his responsibility now, not mine.

My job is to do the best I can to listen to him so that I can see what he is doing and then keep out of the way, to let him do whatever he wants to do. And yes, I can get in the way. I can pray for people in a way that binds them up in guilt. I can prophecy over people in a way that distracts them from Jesus by making them focus on me and what I say instead. I can pray things that are entirely me, and nothing to do with Jesus. The way I can tell the difference between what is me and what is Jesus is that Jesus will hardly ever say anything judgemental. What he will say is, “I love you. You are marvellous, you know. I will rescue you.”

Let me tell you a story that may illustrate how we participate in Jesus’ mission of mercy. Again, it’s not a story of how I got it perfectly right, I don’t have many stories like that. Last year I was at a conference – by the way, I don’t go to many conferences, I just don’t have that many stories to tell. It is fair to say that at the time I wasn’t in the best of moods. I was just distracted and feeling sorry for myself and generally rather disgruntled. You ever get that feeling?

At the end of the evening session, the speaker calls people to come forward if they want prayer and the people stream forward, I mean, literally half the room gets up and tries to make their way to the stage. And the people’s desperation for a touch of God’s mercy is intense, it’s almost like a physical force in the room, it’s so strong.

So, I’m sitting off to one side moping, thinking, nobody notices me, nobody cares about me, when I realise, I have a choice here. I can keep on being miserable, or I can get up and be of some use. These people need God, they are crying out in their desperation for his mercy, so the least I can do is to go down there and make myself available to God to use as he sees fit, and God can do whatever he likes.

So, I do. I go down in amongst the crowd and begin to pray for someone. I didn’t expect anything to happen. I mean, after all, I was about as far away from in a perfect place to pray for anyone as possible – I wasn’t suffused with a warm glow of faith, I hadn’t meditated on the Bible for an hour that morning, I wasn’t even really sure I was a Christian still. Well, I did know that Jesus saw what I saw – hundreds of people crying out to him to rescue them, to have mercy. And I was willing to do anything so that Jesus could reach them.

And, as it turned out, Jesus didn’t seem care about how prepared I was, as long as I was willing to do his will. The first guy I pray for, I get this word in my head and as soon as I say it the Holy Spirit just lands on him and he crumbles to the floor in a heap totally overwhelmed by God’s love.

At this point my wife will say, “You get much too obsessed with the physical reactions of people, Erik. Just because someone collapses doesn’t mean there’s anything more holy going on.” And she’s right – you don’t score additional holy points for people falling over, it’s just fun to watch.

Anyway, I move on to the next guy and Jesus gives me another word, and he crumbles to the floor, and I move on to the next and the next, and Jesus gives me word after word and every single one of them connects with the people I’m praying for and they just get swamped by God’s love and mercy, and it’s beautiful and messy, in the way that only God can make it.

I did not expect that, okay, let me be clear on that point – there is no way I’m responsible for any of it. It got to the point, and this is a bit embarrassing to have to admit, but hey, we have to be honest, it got to the point where inside I’m going, “Whohooo! Look at me go! Man, I’m on fire tonight. So are you of course, Lord, but, man, I hope someone else is seeing this!” None of you ever does that right? You’re all proper Christians.

That’s when Jesus decides to pull the plug. I see this guy standing there and I bound over and say, “Can I pray for you?” And I want to add, “Boy, you’ll be having a great time when I do!” He’s a bit reluctant but he says yes, and I pray, “Come Holy Spirit,” a bit like a general ordering his troops to advance by now, you know, and nothing happens. So I say something that really worked on the last guy I prayed for, but the guy just looks at me with this half-pitying expression, you know, as if to say, “I appreciate you trying but this isn’t going anywhere, is it?” So I close off the prayer with as much dignity as I can, which isn’t a lot by this stage, let me tell you, and I go to sit down.

And then it hits me – God, you were so merciful tonight. Your people cried out in their desperation for you, and boy did you respond. I was just this little leaf dancing in the middle of the rushing stream of God’s mercy for his people, and I loved it.

Let me recap to finish off.

We are called to be part of Jesus’ mission to rescue and to restore his people. God is coming for you and he is coming for me with grace and mercy in abundance. Our part in it is simple – we admit our desperate need for him, we accept his authority to act, we listen to understand his will, and then we surrender to him to do whatever he wants to do. Whatever happens next is a sovereign act of God, and it will be merciful, and quite likely a beautiful mess.