Matthew 5.7

[check out www.rawvision.com/back/wtthompson for picture details]
"Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy."
"You're blessed when you care. At the moment of being 'carefull,' you find yourselves cared for." [The Message].
Links so well to the phrase in the Lord's prayer about being forgiven as we forgive others. It must be one of the most persistant themes of Jesus' teaching, as we find it in the gospels, and yet for all that it seems to be very underrepresented in contemporary CHristian teaching and practice. I take it that the thrust of what Jesus is teaching through this is that when we participate in the divine 'economy' it is literally non-sense to expect that forgiveness can be received but can be withheld. If we think that we are participating in a logic which is not of God's Kindom; it is alien to God's way of being and doing. It's not that we earn forgivness by forgiving; it's that by being merciful people we will simply be the kind of people who will receive, are received will have received mercy. Mercy begets mercy begets mercy begets mercy ... Like love of which it is an expression.

'Mercy' is to withhold from someone some 'punishment' they deserve, mercy is to 'swallow' the pain/pride etc that it costs rather than pass it on to the 'miserable' [ie the person who is the object of mercy]. Forgiveness if it truly is forgiveness is never free; it costs the forgiver, the merciful; if it doesn't cost, it isn't forgiveness, it isn't mercy. At least so it seems to me; perhaps I'm missing something here. It further seems to me that perhaps this is a crucial thing about the atonement: it is the spacetime demonstration of God 'swallowing' the cost and pride to forgive a miserable humanity ... That's why God can't just forgive without paying a price; it isn't forgiveness otherwise: if God is not 'hurt' by our sin, then there is no sin, ultimately; there is just pain and suffering as of the brute beasts of the field.

The participatory notion of an economy of mercy gets scant liturgical recognition either: where are the penetiential litanies that encourage worshippers to forgive? [I know of only one where God is asked to forgive our persecutors -the Anglican great 'litany']. Where in our normal weekly and daily prayers do we find the equivalent of 'forgive us -as we forgive ...'? Where is the preaching on how to forgive and to participate actively in the economy of mercy? I'm not saying it isn't there, but compare how much we see Jesus teaching about forgiving others with, say, how much he teaches on sexual probity and then compare those proportions with what our churches are doing; with what we are doing. And yet, if my expereicne as a congregation member and as a minister is anything to go by, I know which of the two causes the greatest trouble and the hardest heartache -and it isn't sexual improprieties. I challenge you and the churches to disicpline themselves to dealing with lack of forgiveness with four times the energy and time that we/they give to matters sexual ... that alone would make the world a better place.