There were two merchants - lifelong competitors and bitter enemies. One day, God decided that he’d had enough of their bickering and bitterness, and he sent an angel to deliver a message to one of the merchants. The message was this: “I, the Lord Almighty, have decided that you may have anything you want in this world - riches, wisdom, long life, children - whatever you may wish to ask for. But there is one condition. Whatever it is that I give to you, your competitor will get double. (If you ask for $10 million, he will get $20 million) Understand?”
The merchant scowled, thinking long and hard. Suddenly, his eyes brightened. He turned to the angel and said, “Would you be willing to make me blind in one eye?”
The human heart is a complicated thing, isn’t it? The same thing that we most desperately wish for ourselves we find it almost impossible to wish for others, particularly those who we consider competitors or ‘enemies’. It’s not enough for us to enjoy and be grateful for those blessings that come to us; we actually begrudge those blessings that come to other people. It’s called envy, it’s called bitterness, and it infects our hearts and robs our joy.
Of course, on our better days, maybe we can aspire to be more noble. When good things come to our friends or family, to those whom we love, or to another person whom we happen to decide “deserves” blessing for one reason or another, we can occasionally ramp ourselves up to feeling happy for and with them. But those aren’t the best test cases to determine the real condition of our heart. Where the rubber REALLY meets the road is when we’re confronted with the blessings that come to those people that we don’t like. When we witness success coming to people whom we feel DON’T deserve it. What about those people who have treated us poorly; injured, abused, wronged us? How does our heart respond to see THEM blessed? Our attempts at being noble come off the rails pretty quickly under that kind of pressure.
And this is where the Gospel of Jesus gets harder for us than we like to imagine, most days. Because we love experiencing the mercy of God. We are deeply and painfully aware just how much we we need to be forgiven and redeemed from our rebellion and brokenness. We look at the cross of Jesus - we witness the price our creator God paid in order to lead us back to himself; back to life and wholeness and blessing - and all we can do is fall to our knees in gratitude and praise. We know our only hope for life lies in the mercy of God. We know that Jesus died to cover the lifetime of sins that we have committed and will commit, and all we can do is thank him for that gift of grace. But how often do we consider that Jesus did not only die to cover those sins we commit, but also to cover those sins that have been and will be committed AGAINST us?
In all honesty, I think we’d rather NOT think about that, most days. This is our standard operating paradox, isn’t it? We cry out “mercy!” for ourselves and “justice!” for them, and we’re usually more than happy to pick up the gavel ourselves. But while God is, indeed, a God of both mercy and justice, that’s not the way things tend to break down. The Gospel truth that Jesus confronts us with, again and again, and does not let us sidestep, is this:
The mercy of God cuts both ways: forgiving those sins which we commit, as well as those which are committed against us.
This is a hard teaching, but it’s as we press into it, and allow Jesus to work in our hearts through it, that we will begin to truly understand the redemptive freedom that is forgiveness in Christ, and find ourselves moved from being mere consumers of mercy to becoming a PEOPLE of mercy.
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