(Exodus 34:4-6; Matthew 5:7, Colossians 3:12-14)
“Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.” Does that mean that those who are not merciful won’t receive mercy? You can certainly find support for that idea in the Bible—in the very next chapter, in fact, where Jesus says, “If you don’t forgive others, your heavenly Father won’t forgive you.” Mercy and forgiveness aren’t the same thing, but they’re closely related; is Jesus saying that we have to earn mercy?
Clearly, that isn’t the point. For one thing, remember what we’ve been saying: these are descriptions, not commands, and we need to be careful not to read them as commands. For another, remember the context here—remember the first beatitude, which sets the stage for the rest of them: “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” blessed are those who know they have no riches of themselves, that everything they have is of God and from God. These aren’t descriptions of things we’re able to achieve, but of the character that God is forming in us by his Holy Spirit. And third—mercy, by definition, can’t be earned. We cannot read this as law.
To understand this, first note that, like last week, Jesus does not say, “Blessed are those who perform certain actions.” It isn’t “Blessed are those who show mercy,” it’s “Blessed are the merciful.” You might think that’s a small difference, but it isn’t; it’s the difference between outward action and heart attitude—between law and grace, really. If the blessing is on those who do specific things, then the blessing is contingent—you’re only blessed as long as you keep it up. If once you fail to show mercy, you lose the mercy of God, at least until you correct your error; and then too, of course, you get into all the arguments about how much you have to do for it to count as mercy, and whether or not this or that act qualifies. That sort of hair-splitting is of the Pharisees, not the gospel; and the blessings of God are not contingent, they are absolute.
This is important . God makes it clear all through Scripture that his blessings are conditional—they are for those who seek him, who obey him, who are faithful to him, and he will not bless those who rebel against him—but they are not contingent on us, they are not dependent on chance. His blessings are absolute and certain; God pronounces what he has already done.
We should also note this nuance: our English translations don’t say, “they will be shown mercy,” but “they will receive mercy.” That’s a translator’s choice, either is possible from the Greek, but I think it’s a wise one. Just because you show someone mercy does not guarantee they will receive it; often people don’t, out of pride, or fear, or mistrust. Or, worst of all, out of their hardness of heart and lack of mercy for others. If you’re familiar with the story of Les Misérables, think of the suicide of Inspector Javert: to accept the mercy shown him by Jean Valjean would be to accept and confess that his entire life to that point had been wrong. He would have to repudiate the person he had been—to die to self in Christ, as it were—and he couldn’t do it. He found it preferable to reject the mercy that had spared his life, and simply to die. When we harden our hearts against mercy for others, we harden our hearts against mercy for ourselves, too.
The point here, as in all the Beatitudes, is: “Blessed are those whose hearts are being changed by the power of God.” I like the way the great British preacher D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones put it: “Our Lord is really saying that . . . the one condition of forgiveness is repentance. Repentance means . . . that I realize that I have no claim upon God at all, and that it is only His grace and mercy that forgive. And it follows as the night the day that the man who truly realizes his position face to face with God, and his relationship to God, is the man who must of necessity be merciful . . . to others.”
If we truly understand our need for Jesus and his grace, if we see ourselves in the light of his goodness and holiness and if we hunger and thirst for his righteousness, won’t that change how we see everyone around us? As Dr. Lloyd-Jones says, “Have you not felt sorry for people who show from the expression on their faces the bitterness and the anger they feel? They are to be pitied. Look at the things about which they get angry, showing that their whole central spirit is wrong; so unlike Christ, so unlike God who has forgiven them everything. We should feel a great sorrow for them, we should be praying to God for them and asking Him to have mercy upon them.” That’s not a command, it’s an observation: the more we understand that we owe everything to God’s mercy, the more this will be our heart toward others, and the more we’ll see others in this way.
As well, the more we grow poor in spirit and the more we hunger and thirst for the righteousness of God, the more we come to understand that our real treasure is something no earthly person or power can take away from us—yes, this points forward to a later section of the Sermon on the Mount—and the less we see other people as threats to us. The more we realize how blessed we are in Christ, the easier it is to be merciful.
Blessed are the merciful, not because being merciful is a precondition to receiving God’s mercy, but because the merciful are those who have already received God’s mercy, and are being changed by it. Blessed are those who show the mercy they have been shown, who live out the mercy in which they live, in the confidence that they won’t lose out by being merciful to others, because the mercy of Christ pays for all.