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In the Name of the Father, the Son and the Holy
Ghost.
Today’s gospel is about mercy, and it seems to us so
often from the experience we have of our earthly relationships that the
gap between justice and mercy is almost unbridgeable. It seems that the
two are in contradiction. Don't we always fall into the trap of being
unjust when we try to be merciful and so hard when we try to observe
mercy. Did not one of the great writers of the past say that a judge is
at the same time below the level of man and above the level of man:
above – because he has a power which is superhuman to judge and to
condemn, below – because it is not given him to have mercy.
And yet Holy Scripture teaches us that in God justice
and mercy have met. But the justice which we find in God is so different
from the kind of justice which we try to apply. For us to observe
justice is to pass a right judgement and then either to revoke it or to
pardon but without being able within ourselves to reconcile compassion
and severity. So often when we want to be just, severe, we must force
our heart to be silent. Such is not the way of God. Christ says in the
Gospel that our justice must be beyond the justice of Scribes and
Pharisees, beyond the people who try to be righteous before God, who try
to be spotless before Him.
What is God’s justice? We can see it in the Old
Testament and the New Testament in a way which at times may frighten us,
that the justice of God consists first of all – and this is perhaps the
most frightening example Christ gives us – in recognizing for everybody
the right to be himself even if he is in the wrong, even if he follows
evil ways. Oh, it does not mean that we can come to terms with evil,
accept the ways of it, but we must learn to distinguish, as God does,
between an evil deed and a person, between the sickness unto death of a
person wounded by sin and possessed of evil, and a person whom God has
willed and loved into the world and for whom He proved ready to live and
to die. God knows how to distinguish. One of the most frightening and
striking examples of it can be found in the very beginning of human
history when Cain murders his brother Abel and then feels that not only
God’s rejection but man's hatred will hunt him down. And the Lord says
to him, ‘I will put My seal on thy forehead and no one will kill you.’
And by doing this God recognises that He has given freedom, a
frightening freedom to man and that He is to guarantee the freedom and
even its misuse – but not only that.
If that was the case, then God would be responsible
for all the evil of the world and we could condemn Him for all the
suffering that is ours, for all the horror that has been in human
history. But there is one more thing God does. He takes upon Himself all
the consequences of deliberate or foolish human choices. He takes them
upon Himself and carries the consequences upon His shoulders. Christ's
incarnation, the incarnation of the Son of God, the life, the suffering,
the death, the dereliction upon the Cross, the descent into hell of
Christ, the Son of the Living God become the Son of Man, are different
manners in which God covers, takes upon Himself the consequences of
human evil and evil in the world. His justice consists in accepting the
other one on his own terms but also in paying the cost of human folly
and human evil.
And here love, sacrificial love and justice as we do
not either understand or exercise it meet in a way which can frighten.
To recognize in another person even when this person is endangering our
integrity, our life, a human being whom we are called to take upon
ourselves and carry and save, is something which few achieve. I have
mentioned to a certain number of you the story of a woman of this parish
who is now coming step by step to her death. When she was young she was
taken to prison in the course of the Russian Revolution. She underwent
interrogations, and one night when she had been interrogated for hours
and hours and felt that she could no longer endure it, she felt that she
must break the spell even if she must suffer for it, even if it meant
punishment... and she turned to her interrogator ready to challenge, to
insult him, but make an end to this endless torment. And suddenly she
saw on the other side of the interrogation table a man pale, grey with
tiredness, with anguish on his face because he was exhausted. And she
suddenly saw him as a human being, not an enemy but one whom the cruel
circumstances of human history had put on one side of the table while
she was on the other. And having seen him a human being, she smiled at
him. The interrogation did not come to an end. He smiled back, but he
continued to interrogate her. But she was now beyond the power of being
destroyed. She had seen a man; she would answer now with patience to a
man and be gradually drawn to her tomb without hatred, without
bitterness in an act of surrender.
This is a great example, but it is not taken from the
Scriptures, which seems so often remote, nor from the lives of saints,
which seem to be beyond us, but from the life of a woman who is one of
us. Can't we understand that the first act of justice which may lead us
to stern action unto salvation of the evildoer, is first of all to
recognize in him the right, to hate in him the evil that possesses him,
to hate in him all that is destruction in him, but to serve him, indeed
to worship him, to serve him as we would serve our God, to serve him
unto salvation. The distance between justice and mercy seems to be
infinitely great in our lives. We must learn to discover what it means
to love unto salvation and to be just with the crucified love of the
living God, which He has left with us as our most precious and holy gift,
the Church. Amen. |
