Mercy is a Work

As human beings we have feelings, attitudes, likes and dislikes. Do we perhaps think that mercifulness is concentrated in one of these aspects of our life? I do not think so. In fact we can have merciful feelings, attitudes of compassion; we can feel bad while we see the reports about suffering people on the news, but these affective possibilities do not embrace what the word “mercy” means, because mercy is a work.

 

No one can deny that our Lord Jesus Christ was merciful, and it is clear that we do not know this simply because he harbored certain feelings or attitudes. What the Lord lived were not simply attitudes or feelings, but actions. The Lord Jesus Christ healed the sick, comforted the afflicted, he taught those who didn’t know the ways of the Kingdom. He acted in a merciful manner. His deeds were born from the depths of his merciful heart and this is something we should all seek. But we must say it clearly: we know Jesus’s heart as a fount of mercy because he showed this fount by his concrete actions.

 

We know that God is good and merciful because he acts in a good and merciful way. The good God descended from heaven to show us his goodness. But pay close attention, this goodness is expressed as a remedy to our suffering, and that is why we confess that the goodness of God is, for us, a mercy.

 

Once descended from heaven, he continued to dedicate himself to the grand work of mercy. In fact, his deeds helped to identify him as the promised Christ. “In those days, John summoned two of his disciples and sent them to ask Jesus: “Are you the one who is to come, or should we look for another?” (See Saint Luke 7, 19.) And what was the Lord’s response? "Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind see, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor have the good news proclaimed to them.”

 

Jesus’s merciful actions identify him as the One promised and sent.

 

We could say that all the whole mystery of our redemption, from the Incarnation to the pouring out of his blood on the Cross and the pouring out of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost, was the grand unfolding of an immense act of divine mercy. All this is for the healing of our afflictions. And, what is it that afflicts us? Well, put simply, our lack of mercifulness.

 

To have faith in Jesus’s great work means to embrace God’s kindness manifested in our Lord. The effective sign that we have embraced the Lord shows itself in our renewed life in that grace that encourage us to seek the way of mercy. To be renewed as agents of mercy is the principal effect of the mercy of Christ working within us. He wishes to heal our lack of mercy.

 

 

Feeling bad when we see someone suffering on TV doesn’t mean that we are counted among the merciful. Maybe we feel good when we feel bad. But be careful with that, because the world can feel badly when seeing the afflicted, but many times does nothing to remedy the situation. An attitude doesn’t make us merciful. Searching for ways to alleviate suffering is the step that God asks us to take in order for us to enter the mystery that he began with his Incarnation.

 

“What shall we do?” People asked this of John the Baptist when he spoke of the proximate arrival of the Christ. He responded: “Whoever has two cloaks should share with the person who has none. And whoever has food should do likewise”. (See Saint Luke 3, 10.)

 

God took our nature to apply an anointing over our wounds and by being able to go out and encounter those who suffer, we participate in his divine nature. The Lord is merciful and he wants a merciful people. Let us try, during the Year of Mercy, not simply to think pious things related to mercy, but rather to search for how we can attend to those who suffer.

 

If Jesus’s merciful works identified him as the Christ, our merciful works ought to identify us as Christians.  

 

+df