MERCY—THE MYSTERY OF FORGIVENESS
By Richard Rohr, OFM

Blessed are the merciful: they shall have mercy shown them. ~Matthew 5:7

   Mercy is like the mystery of forgiveness.  By definition, mercy and forgiveness are unearned, undeserved, not owed.  If it isn’t all those three, it won’t be experienced as mercy.  If you think people have to be merciful or, on the other hand, try to earn mercy, you’ve lost the mystery of mercy and forgiveness.  I believe with all my heart that mercy and forgiveness are the whole gospel.
     The Benedictus (Luke 1:68-79) says you’ll have knowledge of salvation through the forgiveness of sin (1:77). The experience of forgiveness or mercy is the experience of a magnanimous God who loves out of total gratuitousness.  There’s no tit for tat, no buying and selling in the Temple.  That is the symbolism of Jesus kicking over the tables:  The buying and selling of God is over.  One cannot buy and sell God by worthiness, by achievement, by obeying commandments.  Salvation is God’s loving-kindness, a loving kindness that is “forever.”  Read Psalm 136 for an ecstatic description.
      You don’t know mercy until you’ve really needed it.  As Thomas Merton once said—and I’ve quoted it often—“Mercy within mercy, within mercy.”  It’s as if we collapse into deeper nets of acceptance, deeper nets of being enclosed and finally find we’re in a net we can’t fall out of.  We are captured by grace.  Only after much mistrust and testing do we accept that we are accepted.
      I once saw God’s mercy as patient, benevolent tolerance, a kind of grudging forgiveness.  But now mercy has become for me God’s very self-understanding, a loving allowing, a willing breaking of the rules by the One who made the rules—a wink and a smile, a firm and joyful taking of our hand while we clutch at our sins and gaze at God in desire and disbelief.  So many things have now become signs for me of this abundant mercy, not grudgingly extended, but patiently offered—to this Church, to this age, to each of us.  As we grow older, it almost takes more and more humility to receive the mercy of God.
      Mercy is a way to describe the mystery of forgiveness.  More than a description of something God does now and then, it is who-God-is.  According to Jesus, ‘Mercy is what pleases me, not sacrifice” (Matthew 9:13, 12:7).  The word is hesed in Hebrew, “the steadfast enduring love which is unbreakable.”  Sometimes the word is translated as “loving-kindness” or “covenant love.”  God has made a covenant with creation and will never break the divine side of the covenant.  It’s only broken from our side.  God’s love is steadfast.  It is written in the divine image within us.  It’s given.  It sits there.  We are the ones who instead clutch at our sins and beat ourselves instead of surrendering to the divine mercy.  That refusal to be forgiven is a form of pride.  It is saying, “I’m better than mercy.  I’m only going to accept it when I’m worthy and can preserve my so-called self-esteem.”  Only the humble person, the little one, can live in and after mercy.
     The mystery of forgiveness is God’s ultimate entry into powerlessness.  Look at the times when you have withheld forgiveness.  It’s always your final attempt to hold a claim over the one you won’t forgive.  It’s the way we finally hold onto power, to seek the moral high ground over another person.  I will hold you in unforgiveness, and you’re going to know it just by my coldness, by my not looking over there, by my refusal to smile, or whatever.  Oh, we do it subtly to maintain our sense of superiority.  Non-forgiveness is a form of power over another person, a way to manipulate, shame, control and diminish another.  God in Jesus refuses all such power.
      If Jesus is the revelation of what is going on inside the eternal God (see Colossians 1:15), which is the core of Christian faith, then we are forced to conclude that God is very humble.  That is amazing, difficult to imagine.  Sometimes I think I could just stop and meditate on that for the rest of my life.  This God seems never to hold rightful claims against us.  Abdicating what we thought was the proper role of God, this God “has thrust all my sins behind his back” (see Isaiah 38:17b).
      We do not attain anything by our own holiness but by ten thousand surrenders to mercy.  A lifetime of received forgiveness allows you to become mercy:  That’s the Beatitude.  You become forgiveness because it’s the only thing that makes sense to you, the only thing that’s alive within you.  Mercy becomes your energy, your meaning.  Perhaps we are finally enlightened and free when we can both receive it and give it away—without payment or punishment.
      Meditate, if you will, on this frontispiece I wrote for my book Near Occasions of Grace:

            When Grace is a punishment for you, you are in Hell.
When grace and punishment are fighting within you,
you are in Purgatory.
When grace is received without payment or
punishment, you are in Heaven.

Reprinted from Jesus’ Plan For A New World: The Sermon on the Mount by Richard Rohr with John Feister, Copyright © 1996, Richard Rohr and John Feister, Chapter 8, “The ‘Happy Attitudes,’ Salt and Light,” pp. 136-138.

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