“The Blessing of Sacrificial Love”

Matthew 5:7

There is in Matthew’s Gospel a strong focus on mercy as a primary element of Jesus’ message. The mercy of God in sending Jesus was, in itself, an act of sacrificial love, that same love described by Paul in I Corinthians 13. It is a mercy that those who are in Christ have received. It is a mercy that those of us in Christ are called to show to others, especially those who have hurt, betrayed, humiliated or insulted us.

The Hebrew word sometimes translated as mercy is “hessed.” God’s hessed is also translated as loving-kindness. The deeper meaning of hessed, however, has to do with sympathy, empathy, and compassion. To be merciful, as God is merciful requires us to somehow put ourselves in the place of our enemies or those in desperate need. We need to feel in our hearts what they feel in theirs. We need to walk in their shoes for a while. Mercy isn’t just a brief emotional wave of pity, something to feel for a moment and then leave behind. Mercy is an ability to experience the suffering of another. It is to understand the whys and the hows of another’s situation, the reasons why they are behaving the way they do.

God calls us to do that because that is exactly what he did for us in Jesus Christ. Jesus experienced the headaches and heartaches of human life. He knew suffering, sadness, and betrayal. In his mercy he was able to not only understand human behavior, but ultimately to forgive it. He who transgressed against no one was the target of many transgressions. Yet he taught and modeled that phrase from the Lord's Prayer, “forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” He forgave seventy times seven. He turned the other cheek. He walked the extra mile. Why? Because he loved us with God’s very own love. He extended to us the very hessed of God: God’s loving-kindness, empathy, and compassion, and commanded us to extend that hessed to others.

When Jesus uttered today’s Beatitude he was speaking to a culture that wasn’t very merciful. As one commentator put it, the Romans despised pity, the Greek Stoics were distrustful of compassion, and the Pharisees, who should have learned of hessed from the Hebrew Scriptures, were harsh in their self-righteousness. The culture in which Jesus lived and did ministry taught that weakness and failure were to be punished, that the weak and unsuccessful were to suffer the consequences of their failures. There was to be no forgiveness or understanding. Any and all sin deserved immediate and severe censure and discipline. Mercy was something about which the Scrooges of Jesus’ time said, “Bah! Humbug.”

Such Scrooges are still with us. Sometimes we are they. The modern Presbyterian Christian’s ability and willingness to hold a grudge or be vindictive is equal to, and sometimes exceeds, the similar abilities and willingness of our pagan neighbors. Our modern American culture is too much about getting even, retaliating, and repaying evil with evil. We all too often get caught up in what I call the Al Capone syndrome. In the movie “The Untouchables,” Mr. Capone said of Elliot Ness, “If he messes with me, I’m gonna mess with him.”

In many ways we haven’t advanced very far beyond the attitudes Jesus faced. The Al Capone syndrome is very much still with us. Mercy, forgiveness, sympathy, and empathy are objects of scorn these days. Notions like humility and servanthood are not taken seriously, even in the church. We give lip service to such things, but our behavior quite often contradicts our theology. A politician I knew in Virginia, who was a faithful Methodist, once told me that he experienced church politics as much more vicious than any other kind. To think that the church exceeds society in merciless behavior is scary. It’s also depressing.

It is not my aim to depress you – or scare you. But a major task of Christians in any time and any place is that of discernment. It is important that we not only know what our surrounding culture thinks and believes, but also to be aware of to what extent the church has been infected by cultural behaviors and attitudes. It’s even more important that we be able differentiate ourselves from the surrounding culture when necessary.

Our culture very often applauds those who can overwhelm their opponents, punish their enemies, and coldly put their wants ahead of everybody else’s needs. But our Savior tells us that blessings and happiness will come to those who are merciful, and that as they are merciful to others so will they experience the mercy of God. Not only in the Beatitudes, but also throughout the whole Sermon on the Mount, Jesus turns conventional wisdom upside down and inside out. We who are his disciples are to live our lives in ways that more often than not contradict the surrounding culture’s conventional wisdom.

Discipleship isn’t about winning or getting even. It’s not about power and success as defined by the world. Jesus calls us to be faithful not successful. Being faithful involves believing and living the Truth that Jesus taught and practiced. And a major facet of that Truth is mercy. We are called to be empathetic, sympathetic, caring, compassionate, and forgiving people. We are called to model the very same sacrificial love that our Savior embodied: God’s love, God’s hessed.

Our call to worship and declaration of pardon this morning were taken from Psalm 103, a Psalm that lauds the indescribable, almost indefinable mercy of God. Our affirmation of faith was a responsive reading of I Corinthians 13; Paul’s great description of Christ like, sacrificial, servanthood-based love. Using Eugene Peterson’s translation, let us rediscover what that love is and what it is not.

“Love never gives up. Love cares more for others than for self. Love doesn’t want what it doesn’t have. Love doesn’t strut. Doesn’t have a swelled head. Doesn’t force itself on others. Isn’t always ‘me first’. Doesn’t fly off the handle. Doesn’t keep score of the sins of others. Doesn’t revel when others grovel. Takes pleasure in the flowering of truth. Puts up with anything. Trusts God always. Always looks for the best. Never looks back. But keeps going to the end.”

That’s love, Christ like love. That’s the very hessed of God. It is a love that is merciful, forgiving, caring, compassionate, empathetic, and sympathetic. It is the love Jesus modeled even on the cross. “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” At rock bottom, to quote Don Henley, “It’s about forgiveness.” Or to quote again from one of my favorite hymns: “I have long withstood His grace, Long provoked Him to His face; Would not hearken to His calls, Grieved Him by a thousand falls. Still for me the Savior stands, Shows his wounds and spreads His hands; God is love! I know, I feel; Jesus weeps and loves me still.” Please note that the title of this hymn is “Depth of Mercy!”

Jesus loves us. Jesus cares for us. Jesus perpetually stands ready to forgive us. In spite of our constant provocations, chronically hard hearts, and multitudes of grievous sins, Jesus, the very incarnation of God, is willing to show us a mercy that is unimaginably deep, broad, high, and wide. “For as the heavens are high above the earth, so great is his steadfast love [his hissed] toward those [us]; as far as the east is from the west, so far he removes our transgressions from us. As a father has compassion for his children, so the Lord has compassion for [us].”

In a world that despises pity and distrusts compassion, and in a church that can often be harsh in its self-righteousness, we are called to show mercy. We are called to forgive as we have been forgiven. We are called to really care about other people, even those who are our enemies – especially those who are our enemies. We are called to be compassionate. We are called to live out the self-sacrificing love of Christ. And when we do, we are blest, for in showing mercy we open ourselves to the wondrous mercy of God. Amen.