Beyond justice: Mercy as forgiveness and forebearance
In this installment we begin to look at love and in particular, mercy, as a realm of relationality and reciprocity that is parallel to justice, but in very important ways transcends justice, without in any way abrogating or diminishing it. Specifically we will focus the expression of mercy as forgiveness and forbearance, because I think that’s something that’s immediately practicable in the sense that you can send a text message before you go to sleep, or hold your tongue when clearing the dinner table, as a way by which to begin to practice this virtue consciously as a virtue.
Why be merciful?
The short answer is, because God is merciful. But if we’re going to come before that pronouncement and welcome it with open arms, we need to admit our need for mercy. Now, setting aside discussion of psychopathic characters for the moment, we’ve all experienced our impotence and faced bankruptcy to some degree. The Apostle St Paul, a man who described himself “as to righteousness in the law, faultless,” nonetheless was later able to cry “O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death!” Implacable justice (Nemesis, in Greek) is always chasing us, wearing us down.
Without mercy, we naturally are going to wallow in our pitiful weakness, distance ourselves from relationships in which we feel judged and inadequate and then, turn tail and run, saying “better to die alone”. Mercy in the abstract is not at all an obvious solution – nay, as we saw previously when discussing justice, it is even scandalous. But what if there was something concrete that we could do which is, as Chesterton pointed to, ennobling and dignifying? There is indeed and that is: candidly admitting not only our lack, but our need.
You see, we’re not victims. We’re fallen men, rebel sinners. Those are very, very different things. A victim is always looking for an apology, always looking for an overture, is always looking for an accommodation. There is a sense in which this is reasonable, but it stands to be proven that he is in fact a victim, and not just one who feels so. Further, such a victim must seek outside of himself the source of his equilibrium, and there’s no guarantee that he’ll either find it, get it, or be satisfied and restored by it. We could set ourselves up as belonging to ourselves, but that as we’ve seen, that won’t do at all in a world of reciprocal duties. No, imperfect creatures that we are and in need of improvement, we won’t do to get us out of the hole that we’ve gotten ourselves into unless we see ourselves rather as all rebels, as part of the trouble. then all we must needs do is simple: realizing that we’re on the wrong track, laying down our arms, saying sorry, starting over and surrendering to mercy.
Here’s a word from CS Lewis:
“This process of surrender—this movement full speed astern—is what Christians call repentance. Now repentance is no fun at all. It is something much harder than merely eating humble pie. It means unlearning all the self-conceit and self-will that we’ve been training ourselves into for thousands of years. It means killing part of yourself, undergoing a kind of death. In fact, it needs a good man to repent. And here comes the catch. Only a bad person needs to repent: only a good person can repent perfectly. The worse you are the more you need it and the less you can do it. The only person who could do it perfectly would be a perfect person—and he would not need it.”
We find ourselves utterly without recourse, except the recourse that God Himself conceded in mercy, whereby our Lord Jesus Christ the Son of God took up our human flesh and offered satisfaction on our behalf so that God the Father might bestow upon us an abundance of grace, to reconcile us and to conduct us into the company of the Father with the angels and saints as sons of god ourselves, restored to our destiny yet raised even higher thereby, than if our first father Adam had never sinned and fallen… which is a wildly unexpected and fortuitous turn of events when you think about it!
But… Is mercy justified?
We didn’t merit any of that. This is not a reward for anything that we’ve done, nor have we in any positive sense can we say that mercy is the natural effect of anything we have caused, as might be said of the contractual aspect of justice (We’re not talking about the conditions for mercy here, but the causes. We’ll come to conditions later). No. Mercy is gift of a certain species. God, who as a Creator, gives us our life, as a wounded creditor forgives us our debts. God forgives for the same reason that He gives: God is Love. God forgives because He is abundantly generous, because he’s good, because he provides, because He loves us, wills our good, and wills a loving relationship with us and not our condemnation.
In an objective sense, strictly speaking, mercy is unjustified, but here’s the thing: in deriving from the subjective power and will of the injured party, mercy, which may be unjustified, is not unjust.
In this offer of redemption (to be ‘bought back’) extended by the wounded party to the repentant rebel, the narrow bounds and strict limits of justice are, in a manner of speaking, transgressed. Mercy goes beyond justice, because it is much more than justice; it’s an offer of reunion, even of intimacy.
God through forgiveness doesn’t remain at a distance, pushed away from us by our sin. He already dwells at the centre of our life by virtue of the fact that He’s the Creator, the Being present to all of creation in its innermost nature with all things being transparent to His gaze. But God wants to dwell in us with yet greater intimacy by the life of grace, through relationship which, by the fact of our fallenness, requires mercy. He wants to adorn our interior lives as one adorns a temple so that he might be worshiped therein. And he wants to stabilize that life such that it lasts forever, with no distinction between grace and glory, a grace that you can’t ever lose. So God draws near, not at a distance. He overcomes the distance, the inequality, which we have experienced in our alienation and instead dwells at the heart of our life through our surrender to His loving mercy.
So. when we tell ourselves, “I need to take these antecedent steps and make amends in order thereby to be worthy of the mercy that..” No. It’s gratuitous, free. It’s given. A gift. You are not at risk of losing the love of God. You may turn from it, but it’s always there on offer, and it’s abundantly generous, hauntingly so, St Paul in Romans reminds us, in that God’s mercy pays absolutely no heed to the balanced accounting of justice: “God shows His love for us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”
Mercy is sharing in the divine life
A Pelican is an animal that feeds its young from its own flesh. In his remarkable hymn on the Eucharist, Adoro te devote, St Thomas Aquinas calls Jesus the “Good” or “Pious” Pelican, whose blood wins forgiveness and life for the whole world of sin. Fr Gerald Manly Hopkins SJ left us with a stunning translation, in particular of these momentous final stanzas:
O thou our reminder of Christ crucified,
Living Bread, the life of us for whom he died,
Lend this life to me then: feed and feast my mind,
There be thou the sweetness man was meant to find.
Bring the tender tale true of the Pelican;
Bathe me, Jesu Lord, in what Thy bosom ran
Blood whereof a single drop has power to win
All the world forgiveness of its world of sin.
Jesu, whom I look at shrouded here below,
I beseech thee send me what I thirst for so,
Some day to gaze on thee face to face in light
And be blest for ever with Thy glory’s sight. Amen.
St Thomas is showing us the abundance of God’s paternal desire for our reconciliation and the fact that he makes the most ostensive and horrific offer thereof. He chooses that gesture which is most transparent to the transformative love which it mediates. If you had any doubts as to whether God loves you, that’s the point of his passion, death and resurrection.
Now the thing is, God doesn’t want us just to be passive recipients of this overwhelming mercy. He wants us to be active participants in the manifestation and communication of this mercy from one end of the earth to the other. So God begets or generates our participation in his agency. Think here the Parable of the Wicked Servant, who was forgiven a great debt by his lord, only in the next moment to throttle one of his own debtors for the full sum, though far inferior to his accounts forgiven because he can’t see the logic of the gift of Mercy translated to his own activity. That parable is preached for us because, in recognition of how much we have been pardoned, we are then freed, we are then dignified and ennobled in such a way that we can then give pardon, not as an act of like condescension or patronization, but one of fraternity and abundance and divine sonship. Nietzsche hated Christianity in part for this reason, namely, that Christ made forgiveness universally possible, and since the forgiveness of debts (clemency) was previously only in the gift of the feudal lord of the manor (the nobleman), therefore Christ also makes us all lords and noblemen alike, by and through the power of forgiveness.
Forgiveness is not a matter of do-goodery or a gesture haughty condescension. It’s a matter of deification. The point is to be like God, because God wants to make us like Him. And here is God’s secret of it all, revealed: the purpose of creation, of the fall, the redemption and our regeneration in Christ; a participation in the divine life, relationship with God, unto ages of ages.
Good acts triumph over both good or bad feelings
So we can forgive, because God has made it possible for us. It is to put a gate where there was a fence, to put peace where there was enmity or rancor. And that is a decision, not an impulse. We have very little control over the various registers of life, the physical, the emotional, the psychological, the socio-political (in which justice resides). Where we have some control is over the spiritual and you can say, I choose to forgive this person. Notice how, physically, emotionally, psychologically, resentment, hatred and scandal are going to well up within the minute, within the hour, of your choice. Your friends will criticize you. And then you’re going to have the moment to mentally ratify your choice or collapse back into into double-mindedness and cowardly regrets. You say, Lord Jesus Christ, I beseech you, in your infinite mercy, continue to give me the grace of forgiveness. That’s all it is. Choosing to forgive another human being is not inconsistent with feeling terrible about it, even thinking poorly about it. Because love is an act of will, not merely passing thought or feeling.
On the other hand, and the history of the power of the martyrs tells this truth boldly, Christ-like forgiveness has the power to convert individuals and entire nations.
A personal anecdote: this writer, before his conversion to the Faith, fell into a petty dispute with a childhood friend over the matter of ownership of an old car, which the friend had offered to the writer upon his returning from living overseas, for the price of a moderate amount of necessary repairs. Over a year later, the friend wanted ‘his’ car back because he was to move to Tasmania and needed to transport his affairs across the Strait. Your writer, a lawyer, having paid for all the repairs, believed that the car legally belonged to him, and arguments ensued over what justice required in this instance. Sentiments attained levels of animus and rancor from both sides such that, in themselves, it demonstrated objectively not only an end of friendship but the beginning of hostilities. However, your writer had already begun his path to Christ by reading Christian materials, and was awakened to the possibility of an alternative route: the route of forgiveness (of rights and debts). Taking the initiative to end the dispute, your writer recognized to his old friend that it was only he who had extended the hand of friendship to help him upon his return to Australia, and that the friendship mattered more than the price of the car (or any petty words exchanged), and therefore, the car would willingly be returned to the friend, with no expectation of any payment. The friend was left speechless, then spontaneously offered a sum which exceeded what this writer had originally deemed just. Next, the friend – who had probably never been treated mercifully in his life – soon shed a tear, begging to know “what just happened?” Your writer, perhaps too esoterically, replied, “Catharsis.” Both men were changed.
Therefore, what matters is choosing well, that is to say, choosing forgiveness, in recognition that God has made His will known in this matter, and it’s a will for forgiveness – and we are most like God therefore (ie., lords ourselves), when we forgive.
Forgiveness and personal relationships
So you put pardon where there was offense, you put peace where there was rank or an enmity. You put love where it wasn’t. And you’re capable of doing that because God is capable of accomplishing that in you.
Does this mean becoming a doormat, condemned to subsequent exploitation? Not at all. As we see in the Parable of the Wicked Servant, forgiveness is of some debt, and in no way diminishes the dignity of the one who forgives, nor excuses future trespasses in perpetuity of the one forgiven. Likewise, while forgiveness is a unitive act that is supernaturally efficacious vis-à-vis God, it doesn’t necessarily follow that it is temporally efficacious vis-à-vis the forgiven; the forgiver may have to reconstitute his relationship with this person differently as before the abuse, for sentimental or prudential reasons. The forgiver must, at least will that this person comes to know merciful friendship, and that he comes thereby to grow in love and service to the God of merciful friendship in this life so as to enjoy Him eternally in the next. You need to love this person, at least in that most basic of way. So then this gives us a vision of a kind of redeemed justice, because at the end of the day, justice isn’t enough. But let us keep in mind the Parable of the Wicked Servant, where forgiveness is shown to be conditional on one thing, and enduring mercy, on one other condition:
Firstly, that one ask for, or be receptive to, forgiveness; and
Secondly, that one be merciful others as one has himself been mercifully treated.
The thing about all this is recognition that our hearts, constituted in sin by Adam’s fall, aren’t rightly oriented, even toward justice, which in the hands of fallen men becomes a thinly veiled conceit for vengeance. Justice is done all right in mercy, but in mercy only, is love possible. Think now about the Parable of the Hired Labourers. The last hirelings work for an hour, the first work for twelve. Both agree to be paid one denarius, but the first are scandalised at the end of the day to discover the others’ wages: one denarius, for fewer hours. In their rancor, not only do they conceal the justice of what they themselves agreed to, they refuse to mercifully or cheerfully tolerate a good, that their unemployed neighbour was able to negotiate for himself work and a wage. Further, by bringing their claim of ‘unfairness’, they tacitly accuse the master – God – of injustice. Instead, the Master responds:
‘I am not being unfair to you, friend. Didn’t you agree to work for a denarius? Take your pay and go. I want to give the one who was hired last the same as I gave you. Don’t I have the right to do what I want with my own money? Or are you envious because I am generous?’
“So the last will be first, and the first will be last’”.
The Master, like the Father of the Prodigal Son, so loves each man as a unique person that he treats each as a special case, and respects their autonomy and their particular need, when bestowing his gifts. Compare these characters to ourselves and ask: are they better or worse than us? None of us naturally wants justice, but power and revenge; and we are naturally little inclined to mercy, but envy and resentment. It is only in weakness, that we then all want God, which is to say, justice, mercy, or charity. How rarely still do we compare ourselves to the Master!
Conclusion
How does one come voluntarily in weakness if he fears God? We can get ahead of implacable justice by humbly seeking Him as our generous and merciful Master, begging for a share in His abundant gifts, like the last hirelings, or by conniving to get whatever we can and waiting for the final, implacable and humiliating judgment, like the first hirelings. CS Lewis follows up his earlier thought, as follows:
“It is true that this process of surrender is made easier for us by the fact that Christ has done it perfectly, and we can be united with Him in it. But even so, it remains a real death. And this is where the Christian idea of atonement comes in. We are not just imitating Christ when we repent: we are somehow ‘in Him’ when we do it, sharing His death and His victory over death. That is why the Christian is in a different position from other people who are trying to be good. They hope, by being good, to please God if there is one; or—if they think there is not—at least they hope to deserve approval from good men. But the Christian thinks any good he does comes from the Christ-life inside him.”
We know that even as God gives His gifts in a differentiated fashion, we all have the assurance that we can have Him to the full, because He’s not sparing in the gift of Himself, that is enough for each one of us.The sister of St Therese of Lisieux beautifully illustrated the point by filling both a drinking glass and a thimble with water, asking St Therese which was fuller. Each soul can contain as much of the divine life as it was created to hold, and you can experience that in the here and now when you embrace God’s gifts of grace and mercy, when you worship the Blessed Sacrament, and specifically when you receive it in a worthy state. It matters not whether you have the smallest piece of the host or the biggest piece of the host, because regardless of the size you receive the whole Christ. He comes to you and he weds himself to you so that he can make you yet more perfectly a member of his mystical body, in which you personally have a place – yes, you! – in which you have a role, in which mercy goes well beyond justice, in which love brings to perfection all of our aspirations and all of our strivings. Although God is just, He does not want to ask for justice. He wants you to ask for Him because He wants to give you Himself. In the end, there’s no commerce with God. There’s just Communion. So lower your heavens and come down, Lord. Indeed, we beseech Your mercy.