Loving Mercy
Hosea 6:6, Matthew 9:9-13[1]
I can’t say that I see much mercy in the way
our society works these days. It hasn’t always been this way. There was a time
when mercy was a common, everyday practice. Especially in the hardest of times,
people regularly gave food to those who came to their door. There are different
ways we do that now, especially through the food pantry. But I think there’s
something that happens when we look a person in the eyes and extend mercy to
them. Something happens to us and something happens to them. But it seems
that’s something we’re less comfortable with. As we insulate ourselves behind
the relative comfort and safety of some kind of “screen” or other in our homes,
we distance ourselves from people who genuinely need our help. And I wonder
whether the quality of mercy becomes strained in us. I wonder whether mercy no
longer “drops as the gentle rain from heaven,” blessing both the giver and the
receiver, as William Shakespeare put it so long ago.[2]
And I would say we’re the poorer for it. Mercy
has a way of enriching life. As I mentioned last week, “mercy” has always been
a core aspect of who God is. The heart of what the Bible teaches about God is
consistent with the revelation to Moses: “The Lord! The Lord! The God of
compassion and mercy! I am slow to anger and filled with unfailing love and
faithfulness” (Ex 34:6, NLT). And as I mentioned last week, I like the
way the Contemporary English Version puts it: “I am the Lord God. I am
merciful and very patient with my people. I show great love, and I can be
trusted” (Exodus 34:6, CEV). It’s no
wonder that, at the end of Luke’s version of the sermon on the Mount, instead
of saying “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect,” as
Matthew’s Gospel puts it (Mt 5:48), Jesus says, “Be merciful, just as your
Father is merciful” (Lk 6:38).
More than that, the Bible makes it clear that
mercy is what God wants from his people. God wants us to show the same generous
and unfailing mercy to others that he has shown to us. I’ve mentioned before
that one of my favorite Bible verses is Micah 6:8: “O people,
the Lord has told you what is good, and this is what he requires of
you: to do what is right, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God” (Mic
6:8, NLT). Again, I like the way the Contemporary English Version
renders it: “The Lord God has told us what is right and what he demands: ‘See
that justice is done, let mercy be your first concern, and humbly obey your
God’” (Mic. 6:8, CEV). Mercy is not only the heart of who God is, mercy
is also the heart of what God wants from us. That’s the point of our lesson
from the prophet Hosea for today. If we truly want to “repent” of our wayward
lives and return to loving God with all our hearts, the way to do that is by
practicing mercy! According to the prophet Hosea, showing mercy to others
demonstrates our love for God above anything else we might do.
Ironically, mercy seems to flourish among
those who are living on the margins, even among those who sometimes may be barely
getting by. On the other hand, prosperity and wealth are like poison to mercy.
It seems the more we have to lose, the less we’re willing to give. We may give
“token” gifts to “support” the ministry of the church or to “serve” the needs
of the community, but our prosperity breeds in us a way of living that is
primarily focused on our own comfort and wellbeing. So we withdraw from being
personally involved in extending mercy to those who are genuinely in need. In
fact, I daresay that many of us may actually be afraid of putting ourselves in
that situation because it feels risky. I can understand that.
The other irony about mercy is that religion
has a way of stifling it. We become so involved in “doing good things” around
the church that we cut ourselves off from the people who are in genuine need. As
a person who’s spent my career working in and around the church, I’ve often felt
that. That’s the point of our lesson from the Gospel of Matthew for today.
Jesus caused a scandal among the “religious people” by extending mercy to all
who came to him without checking their “religious credentials” first. In our
lesson for today, Jesus called “Matthew,” a tax collector, to be one of his
hand-picked apprentices. Tax collectors in Jewish society were hated and
despised as traitors. In fact, the phrase, “tax collectors and sinners” pretty
much included everyone who was viewed as immoral, dishonest, tainted, or in any
way “undesirable.” That’s who Jesus called to help him carry out the ministry
of the kingdom of God: Matthew, a “tax collector.” I’m not sure he could have
made a more dramatic demonstration of the kind of mercy he believed is at the
heart of what it means to love God.
The “religious people” of the day were deeply
offended by this. That’s the backdrop for Jesus’ shocking statement, “Go and
learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice’” (Mt 9:13)! Jesus didn’t
just pull that out of thin air. He was quoting Scripture. Specifically, Hosea
6:6. But Jesus told them that despite their efforts to study Scripture they had
missed the point: putting the mercy they had received from God into practice in
the way they treated everyone. Unfortunately, they had convinced
themselves that they only “had” to put that mercy into practice with their Jewish
neighbors. And in fact, they only “had” to put that mercy into practice with some
of their Jewish neighbors. But in the Bible, “mercy” is a fundamental life
orientation toward treating all people with kindness, compassion, and
dignity.
All of this makes me wonder what it says about
the church in this day and time that a growing number of young people are
leaving, and one of the main reasons is because they look at different churches
and ask themselves, “I wonder whom they exclude.” They see the different
churches in our society as defined by whom they exclude. The sad truth is that
when we demonstrate our religion by excluding people, we’ve fallen into same
trap as the people of Jesus’ day. Our “religion” has stifled our ability to practice
mercy. If we want to renew this church, if we want to renew our faith, if we
want to reinvigorate the Christian faith in this society, if we want younger
people to come back to church, it seems to me the way to do that is to get back
to what Moses, the Prophets, and Jesus taught is the heart of what it means to
truly love God. That means learning to “make mercy our first concern,” and
sharing it with everyone.
[1] © 2026 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Alan Brehm PhD on 6/7/2026 for
Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE.
[2] I’m alluding to the famous line in William Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of
Venice,” Act IV, Scene 1: “The quality of mercy is not strained; It droppeth as
the gentle rain from heaven Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest; It
blesseth him that gives and him that takes.”
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