June 11, 2023
Pentecost + 2
Friends,
I have been, forever, a student of language. In the main, I get it from Grandmama, my mother’s mother. Although my mother and father, between them, were speakers and students of a number of languages, it was to grandmama I oriented, and it is her voice I can hear in my ear.
I remember a time when, after supper, my grandfather, grandmother, mother and father would each be reading a section of the morning or evening newspaper in the living room after supper. Scanning the room, all faces were buried behind bits of type and the occasional photograph. You could smell the ink of once upon a time and often some of that ink would find its way to your fingertips.
One evening, out of the blue, Grandmama announced that there were, in her estimation, five dirty words in the English language. Around the room, newspapers dropped as the other three looked on with fear and trembling and no small measure of alarm. Said she, “Pee, po, belly, bum and drawers.” Five dirty words. Crisis averted, the newspapers were restored to their upright position, and everyone went back to their reading. Pee, po, belly bum and drawers. My brothers can all recite that at the drop of a hat. Now, we might, at a guess, choose different words. That’s because language has a life and language evolves as meanings come and go and old words are retired, or new ones invented.
So, I will be struck by a word or by some aspect of it. How it came to be, for example. The words hostile, host, hotel, hostel, hospital, and hospitality all spring from the same tortured roots but flourish in very different places. That fascinates me. Awesome and awful once meant precisely the same positive thing. As in “The lady of the house suffered awful comfort.” Suffer has also changed in meaning with only the negative remaining. Words are created, come into their own, endure or not, evolve or not, and abide or not. Once upon a time only birds tweeted. These days, humans who tweet do so at the pleasure of one of the world’s richest twits. Anyway, this is all by way of background.
When I was on the road as our church’s ecumenical and interfaith guy, it was part of my job to pay attention to what people said. Nuance was extremely important in the church’s diplomatic corps. One day, it occurred to me that our current pope loves the word “mercy”. I was struck by that. We don’t use the word very much in common speech. Not so Lutherans; not so Anglicans. But here we were, Lutherans and Catholics making peace together in the cathedral at Lund, Sweden on the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. And Francis used the word “mercy” in connection with our joint work of helping to heal some of the bruised and broken places of God’s world.
Generally, the word means to show compassion or offer forgiveness when it is within our capacity to ignore, punish or harm. So, it’s not the same virtue as the more popular Christian “love”. Well, not exactly. They are connected, as we shall see. In fact, though, we think of showing love, most of the time, rather than showing mercy. Not so Pontifex Maximus. Pope Francis often calls Christians in any sort of context to bring mercy to the table. To look at the world through the eyes of mercy. I find that interesting.
Now Pope Francis uses the word mercy because Jesus uses the word mercy, as in today’s Gospel. Go and learn what this means, “I desire mercy and not sacrifice.” Jesus is pretty peeved. The Pharisees sometimes had that effect upon him. To him, their conspicuous and elaborate sacrifices seemed as the tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. All blather; no action.
Showing mercy is thrown out by Jesus as a positive alternative to offering sacrifices. Presumably, Jesus’ detractors were better at sacrifice than at being merciful.
Now this is not new stuff. Jesus stands on the shoulders of Hosea where we read “For I desire mercy and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.” So, Jesus is quoting Hosea, the prophet. The word in Jesus’ mind, the Hebrew word we render as mercy, is “He-sed” in Hebrew. But the ancient text which is floating around in Jesus’ head has a different word order than we’re used to in English. The word mercy comes first.
“Mercy, I desire.” Think Yoda: Mercy, I desire.” The word “mercy” is given primacy, it’s emphasized when it’s placed first in the sentence or phrase. Emphatic. It’s about mercy and not about what Jesus or God desires. Being merciful ought to spring from one’s very core and not from the sense that Jesus is watching over you and is going to get you if get it wrong.
With the prophet Hosea, the word “mercy”, as I’ve said, means kindness or love between people. And it’s a particular sort of love of which kindness is the biggest part. “Loving kindness” it has sometimes been translated. The more refined meaning of “mercy” comes later. But kindness and love between people still echoed in Jesus’ ear.
I desire mercy… go and learn what this means. Mercy, I desire… Kindness, I desire… mutual love, I desire… go and learn what this means. Jesus is fastening on an ancient truth, an ancient idea, and making it his own.
In the same Gospel of Matthew, in chapter 22, Jesus is remembered to have said, in response to another lawyer, “’You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. Love God above all else. And the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’” Versions of this bringing together “love of God” and “love of neighbour” are also recalled in Mark and Luke and this connection was floating in the air among one of the liberal rabbinic schools of Jesus’ age. Jesus’ roots are in traditional Judaism with tentacles into the ideas and a strong embrace of some of the teachers of his time.
Showing mercy demonstrates two things: one’s love for God and one’s love for one’s neighbour. Those two dimensions are always at play when Pope Francis uses the word. Showing mercy is an invitation in two directions, toward God and toward one another.
Now, finally, when Jesus says “Go and learn what this means.”, such learning is learning by doing. In other words, life is the journey of figuring out what mercy means, because mercy always has a context in which to express itself and is always steeped in loving kindness.
When Pope Francis washed the feet of the young Muslim man a couple of years ago, he described it sometime thereafter, as I recall, as doing mercy. The opposite of mercy is not not loving, rather it is to ignore the young man. So when Francis uses the word mercy in connection with God’s astonishing sexual diversity or among the poorest of the poor—a world he knew well as a priest and bishop–or among the world’s millions of migrants and dispossessed, the common thread is that mercy is always an active word.
Back when Lutherans and Catholics were commemorating the Reformation together, and burying old hatchets, the Pope gave medals to some of those who’d worked on the project. One day, I pulled this off a shelf and began to study Pope Francis’ coat of arms. There’s a Holy Trinity there, but not the one we usually think of. There’s an image of Jesus which is the emblem of the order of Jesuits. Francis is first and foremost, and to his very core, a Jesuit. So, Jesus. There’s a star, that’s Mary. And there is a plant which is called “nard”, and which has traditionally been the emblem of Joseph. So, the Holy Trinity on the papal shield is the Holy Family. Then there’s a bunch of other stuff and then the Pope’s motto.
By the way, this was his motto back home as a bishop: miserando atque eligendo. And there it is. It means “because he saw him through the eyes of mercy and chose him” or more simply, ‘having mercy, he called him.” The phrase comes from a homily by St. Bede — an English eighth-century Christian writer and doctor of the church. St. Bede’s homily looked at Mt 9:9-13 in which Jesus saw the tax collector, Matthew, sitting at a customs post and said to him, “Follow me.” St. Bede explained in his homily, “Jesus saw Matthew, not merely in the usual sense, but more significantly with his merciful understanding of people.” Francis looks at people through the eyes of mercy and with the ancient meaning of “Hesed” he greets them with loving kindness.
Would that we might all share this sense of mercy and greet our world with the same regard for loving kindness.
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Silence
May the words of my lips and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in God’s sight. And let the church say “Amen.” R/ Amen.
André Lavergne, CWA (The Rev.)
Church of St. John the Evangelist, Kitchener