Pentecost 18
13 September 2026
Vineville Baptist Church
Macon, Georgia
W. Gregory Pope
FROM MERCY TO MERCY
Matthew 5.7. Psalm 51.1-3. Luke 10.25-37
When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up to the mountain, and after he sat down, his disciples came to him, and he began to speak and taught them, saying:“Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.”
We’re halfway through the beatitudes and Jesus has extended blessing to us in the midst of some of the most difficult things we can experience. He hasn’t blessed the circumstances that create these inner aches, but he has blessed us by naming what can happen within us when the world around us crumbles.
People who have studied these beatitudes have noticed a shift between the first four and the last four. The first four seem to be naming what happens in us when we suffer. The last four describe people who show up and help put things back together: the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, the persecuted. These blessings of Jesus begin as words for those who suffer and then become words for the healers. It’s not a clear-cut separation, but there is a noticeable gradual turn. We’re turning the corner from the blessings that teach us to value our suffering to the ones that speak new possibilities about a way of moving forward.1 Today: Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.
I don’t think we need a dictionary to define mercy. We know it when we see it. We know it when it happens to us. It is the twin sibling of grace. It is actions of love toward people who need help the most, but perhaps, we think, deserve it the least. This suffering world cries out for mercy – for teenagers trapped in addictions, for the poor trapped in a cycle of poverty almost impossible to escape, and for children neglected by parents and society. Many of us have a list in our minds of people we think deserve mercy and to whom we enjoy showing mercy. We have another list hidden in the sock drawer of our minds of those for whom we hesitate to show mercy.
But mercy runs deeper and is more complicated than good people helping bad people. Mercy is recognizing the good and bad within us all. We all of us live from mercy to mercy. And mercy does not let out that sigh – you know the one – the wordless disapproval toward the person in the check-out line whose toddler is having a meltdown.
I recently came across an old Ann Lander’s column where someone wrote an irate letter because he saw a woman ahead of him in the grocery store checkout line buying an expensive cake with food stamps. A few weeks later Landers received a response to that irate letter: Dear Ann Landers, “I’m the woman who bought a $25 cake with food stamps. I thought the checkout woman in the store would burn a hole through me with her eyes. What no one knew is that the cake was for my little girl’s birthday. It will be her last. She has bone cancer and will probably be gone within six to eight months. So please, let this be a lesson to those who sit in judgment of others without knowing all the facts.”
Mercy makes a habit of giving others the benefit of the doubt. Mercy understands that there are reasons people are the way that they are and do the things they do. We need to keep asking what another’s suffering feels like. We need to get inside another’s skin, see with their eyes, and feel with their emotions. In Jesus Christ, God got inside our skin and understands what it means to hurt.
We’re all a complicated combination of good and bad and whatever else, and only by God’s grace are we anything better than our worst stuff. We all live from mercy to mercy. We all need to pray with David: Have mercy on me, O God. According to your steadfast mercy, blot out my transgressions and cleanse my heart. The fact that we’re all offenders in need of grace does not mean that all offenses are equal. It just means no one is innocent of wrongdoing and all are in need of mercy and grace.
Every day we are all of us held in the mercy of God, and every day we can be mercy to others. God is not dispensing tiny drops of mercy as from a cosmic medicine dropper. God’s mercy is like the rain that drenches us, like the sun that warms our faces. Mercy is one of the names of God. Mercy is God’s character. God is always on the side of mercy. God himself is filled with mercy.
We are told in the letter to the Ephesians that God is rich in mercy. We were dead in our sins far from God but the God who made us loves us unconditionally and is rich in mercy and has compassion for our condition and moves to do something about it – he made us alive in Jesus Christ.
The Jewish tradition from which our faith flows tells us that mercy is God’s central attribute. From the prophet Hosea, we hear God tell God’s people, “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.” The prophet Jonah gets mad at God because he knew God would be merciful to the people of Nineveh.
And the word of God became flesh in Jesus of Nazareth full of grace and truth offering mercy to everyone he met. He described our God in the running mercy of the father of the prodigal son who when he spied him on the road coming back home sprinted to meet his son, embraced him, and kissed and kissed him, and then called for a homecoming feast for his son lost now found. Repeatedly the Bible tells us that our God is merciful, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love.
But the merciful work of healing, forgiving, and loving unconditionally cannot be God’s work alone. Jesus turns it back to in this beatitude and in twice quoting Hosea through whom God said: “Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’” We are called to the work of mercy because we all share with our offenders a dependence on mercy and we’re all in the same boat with the people over whom we sometimes stand in judgment.
Nadia Bolz-Weber is an author and pastor known for speaking truth to those who abuse their power, her fierce commitment to radical grace, as well as being very open about her struggle with substance abuse. There was a public event where she was set to interview Lance Armstrong.
Many of you will remember Armstrong as a legendary cyclist. He won championships all over the world, including the Tour de France seven times, some of those wins coming after a potentially fatal battle with cancer. Lance also endured a severe fall from grace when it was revealed he had used performance-enhancing drugs for years in a sophisticated scheme to win races. His fan-base felt betrayed.
As far as I understand it, no one in the audience the day of the interview had been directly affected by what he did. And yet a lot of people pressured her to go hard on him and read him the riot act. She began the conversation with Lance by saying to him: “So, I see from my notes that
you took some drugs you weren’t supposed to and then you lied about it? OMG! I did that . . . SO MANY TIMES!”
That’s what the offering of mercy looks like when one is humble enough to know we all need the same mercy.
Through the centuries as the church has interpreted this beatitude, two meanings have risen to the top. One has been mercy as compassionate action. Like the action of the Samaritan in Jesus’ parable who at great personal risk and expense stopped on the road and saved the life of the Jewish man who had been robbed, beaten, and left half-dead. He bandaged the man’s wounds, carried him to an inn and nursed him through the night. The next morning he left the inn-keeper his Mastercard number and said, “Charge me for all the man will need.”
Mercy is like that. Mercy is an action that rescues someone from need or bondage. It is generosity. It is love. It is compassion and action, getting inside the skin of one who is hurting, no matter how different they are from you. We see mercy in those who risk their love on failures, who bear warm compassion toward the poor, the defeated, and the guilty.
Just as mercy flowed from the heart of Jesus in story after story – mercy overflows from the heart of God through our hearts into the hearts of others. Practicing mercy is our entry into God’s kingdom, God’s desire for the world. Anytime we encounter someone in need or crisis, we can choose the merciful giving of our money, our connections, our listening, and our efforts. Every time we are hurt, disappointed, or disregarded, we have the chance to be slow in looking for fault and quick to forgive with mercy. Every interaction we have that challenges us, we can choose to seek understanding, to soften, to mercifully love without condition. Mercy is our choice, and if we commit to it, it will slowly heal the pain that gets passed around from person to person.
So there is mercy as compassionate action. And there is mercy as forgiveness: God’s forgiveness of us, which make possible our forgiveness of others. Forgiving may be the hardest spiritual work we do. If forgiveness were easy, why would Jesus put in the Lord’s prayer: “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” The early church prayed it three times a day: morning, noon, and night. We need it that often, don’t we?
The gift of forgiveness sets us free and seeks to set free the person who has harmed us from guilt and remorse. Louis Smedes calls forgiveness “healing the wounds that bind us.” It helps free us from the hurts of the past.
And when you cannot forgive, not now, know that God in Christ has forgiven them. It’s not all up to us. From the cross Jesus prayed, “Abba, forgive them for they know not what they do.” We can do the same, pray God’s forgiveness for them. Forgiveness is God’s mercy to all. The merciful are those who have every right to demand revenge, but who decide not to do it. Forgiving others allows us to see how God has forgiven us.
Two brothers decide to go into business together. They get a loan from the bank. The younger brother picks up the check without his brother’s knowledge and uses the money to retire the mortgage on his own house, leaving the brother with a massive debt to repay. The older brother is a Christian who has been forgiven much but finds it impossible to forgive his brother. He didn’t see his brother for two years.
One day they ran into each other on a busy street. The older brother describes the scene: “I saw him, but he didn’t see me. I felt my fists clench and my face get hot. My initial impulse was to grab him around the throat and choke the life out of him. But as I looked into his face, my anger began to melt. For as I saw him, I saw the image of our father: his eyes, his wrinkles, the curve of his chin. And as I saw my father in his face, my enemy once again became my brother.”
Seeing the father’s image in the face of the enemy. Perhaps we should all try that the next
time we see or think of the one who broke our hearts. Look into his face. Look into her face. And look for the face of the One who forgave you. See the face of your Father in heaven who gave you grace when no one else gave you a chance. And then, because God has forgiven you, set your enemy and yourself free, find the cleansing waters of mercy, and let them heal your wounded lives.2 Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.
Because we live by God’s mercy, we cannot withhold it from others. Mercy dares us to believe that the truest thing about us is not that we are broken or flawed, but that we are beloved.3 No matter what we’ve learned about the rules of life, even the rules of how to be God’s people, above all else, mercy is what matters. We live from mercy to mercy.
I hope you have had those moments when mercy has flooded in, unexpected, overwhelming you, changing you forever. I hope you have received it into the deepest of places, from God, from others. A lifetime of received forgiveness allows us to become mercy. The ripples of mercy: God starts them, then we join in and they ripple out forever. Shakespeare wrote:
The quality of mercy is not strained,
It droppeth like gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath: it is twice blessed;
it blesseth him that gives and him that takes.4
The mercy of God is not strained, as through a stingy water dropper. It flows like the rivers, falls as the rain. And there are those of us here this morning whose lives would be made more merciful, more beautiful if you would open ourselves to the kindness and mercy of God. Rather than carrying around the burden of our sins and the resentment of our wounds, how much better we would be to remember the words of the great gospel hymn:
Oh, the love that drew salvation’s plan!
Oh, the grace that brought it down to man!
Oh, the mighty gulf that God did span at Calvary.
Mercy there was great and grace was free.
Pardon there was multiplied to me.
There by burdened soul found liberty at Calvary.
Thank you, God.
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1. Jason Alan Miller, When the World Breaks, Faith Words, 2023, 109-110, 123-125
2. Max Lucado, The Applause of Heaven, Word Publishing, 1996, 114-116
3. Mark Scandrette, The Ninefold Path of Jesus, InterVarsity Press, 2021, 72
4. William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, IV, I, 184