Mercy Is Not Always Comfortable

“Blessed are the merciful, for they shall be shown mercy” (Matthew 5:7).

In my previous column, I discussed justice and noted that it is not necessarily comforting. Taken in isolation, it could be further argued that justice is necessarily not comforting in the end. Scripture certainly conveys this point, for example, through the various “wrathful” Psalms, in which justice may look comforting to the unjustly afflicted, but certainly not to the afflictor. Yet to some extent we are all afflictors as well as afflicted, that is, we are all to some extent unjust people “Do not call your servant to judgment for no one is just in your sight” (Psalm 143:2).

God will be our just Judge, but He does not look to justice alone when rendering judgement and sentence. The Lord is kind and merciful (Psalm 103:8, 110:4), and that mercy moderates a severe justice which would allow us to end in sorrow. Mercy is compassion for the sufferings and sorrows of others, and the attempt to alleviate these things, but it comes with some cost. Justice is not comforting, nor is mercy comfortable.

We see the cost of mercy most clearly in its greatest instance, which was the mercy of God. It was mercy born of love, for which God the Son became incarnate as a man, lived among us for a time, then suffered the passion and at last died. Death is the lot of all men, both a physical death and (more sorrowfully) a spiritual one. Justice alone would allow us to suffer the one and then the other, in that sin is the rejection of God and thus of life.

Here I must pause, lest there be confusion. Mercy is not opposed to justice, but in fact complements it. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, for example, tells us that “Giving alms to the poor is a witness to fraternal charity: it is also a work of justice pleasing to God” (CCC 2462). Here is an act of both mercy and justice. It is merciful, because it seeks to alleviate suffering by giving something which is our by right to somebody who cannot claim it by right; yet at the same time, it is justice, in the sense that (for example) even the poor man has the right to life, and thus to life-sustaining food.

In the greater sense still it is just in that it is the recognition of his dignity as a man—easily and unjustly neglected in his lowly state as a poor man. He may not have claim to my money, or to my food and drink and clothing, and I owe him nothing, yet at the same time he has the right to eat and drink and be dressed [1]. Or, to look at this through the light of another Catechism passage,

The duty of Christians to take part in the life of the Church impels them to act as witnesses of the Gospel and of the obligations that flow from it. This witness is a transmission of the faith in words and deeds. Witness is an act of justice that establishes the truth or makes it known. “All Christians by the example of their lives and the witness of their word, wherever they live, have an obligation to manifest the new man which they have put on in Baptism and to reveal the power of the Holy Spirit by whom they were strengthened at Confirmation. ” (CCC 2472)

In other words, what is rendered as an act of mercy towards our fellow man is at the same time an act of justice towards God, our Creator. This is true whether we are talking about corporal works of mercy (e.g. giving alms to the poor in the form of food, drink, clothes, shelter, or money to purchase those things) or of spiritual works of mercy (e.g. “witness,” which might be said to include counseling the doubtful, instructing the ignorant, comforting the afflicted, or admonishing sinners).

There can in any case be justice without mercy [2], but it would at times be a harsh, severe justice. It is the eye-for-an-eye, tooth-for-a-tooth justice of the Old Testament, the justice which incurs God’s wrath and our our righteous anger when it is flaunted. But whereas love stands on justice, builds on it even, it cannot be merely just. God’s love for us is just, but it is not merely just, because God is not merely just; thus, love is not merely just.

Mercy then is what complements justice. Mercy recognizes that sometimes merely giving to another what is his by right—and only what is his by right—may also be to leave him to suffer, or (in some cases) to cause him to suffer or to suffer further. Or to look at it another way: sometimes to demand what is ours by right—that is, to demand justice from another to us—might cause that other to suffer. If I loan a man money (regardless of interest), and then demand repayment at the agreed upon time, I may be acting justly in the strictest sense; yet if repaying that loan means that he and his family will starve, then he is suffering to satisfy justice, even if he should in principle have planned and saved for this day.

Mercy might mean in this case forgiving the debt, or (at the very least) delaying it until he can repay it. But notice that this mercy comes with some cost. Perhaps I am not myself very well-off financially. Then by forgiving the debt, or even delaying it, I may have to miss a few meals myself; or perhaps I simply go without something else: a luxury of some sort, whether it’s a new (to me) car to replace my old beater, or air conditioning in the summer and heat in the winter, or I must make do with a smaller apartment, or with fewer books. Perhaps I have to work a few years longer, because this debt covered (or helped to cover) my retirement fund.

It is, of course, equally possible that someone else might step in and offer to pay the debt himself. It no longer costs me anything, but now that third-party is out the cost of the debt. The cost of mercy is transferred to him instead.

In the end, justice may cost us something at times, but it is something which belongs to another by right. Mercy costs us something else, whether it is something which is our by right (as when we give money to feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, or clothe the naked) or something less tangible (as when we risk ridicule or worse by admonishing a sinner, even privately). But for men, mercy requires first that cost which is sorrow and pity, and only then whatever the cost may be to alleviate the cause of the sorrow or pity. This is because mercy is born of pity for the sufferings of another; it “is heartfelt sympathy for another’s distress, impelling us to succor him if we can” (ST.II-II.Q30.A1).

Sympathy for another means identifying the other’s sorrow as one’s own and thus sharing in that suffering. Mercy in turn see the other’s misery as one’s own [3], and thus seeks to alleviate that misery, in particular at its source. This, then, is the first cost of mercy, over and above whatever other costs it may incur; it was the cost to Christ, before the other costs of passion and death, which (in addition to being obedient to the Father’s Will) would move Him (in His human will) to embrace his cross. For if Christ as God did not feel sorrow, Christ as true man certainly did.

Mercy therefore begins with sorrow and ends with sacrifice in the hopes of alleviating suffering. If it be true mercy, it also satisfies the claims of justice in some way: and just as justice is not always comforting, neither is mercy always comfortable. Nevertheless, mercy is the first (and arguably, the least) requirement of love (charity), and our showing mercy in this life is the condition for receiving mercy in the next. This divine mercy came at great cost to Christ—whether we receive or reject it—and so we should be little surprised when our own attempts at mercy come with some cost in this life as well.

—-Footnotes—-

[1] I would add that in a society in which public nudity is illegal, each member of society would logically require clothing. Similarly, in a society in which (as in Chesterton’s time) anti-vagrancy laws exist, some shelter would logically need to be supplied to the homeless. It is not just to fine or imprison a homeless man for not being at home.

[2] On the other hand, Saint Thomas Aquinas notes that

“the work of divine justice always presupposes the work of mercy; and is founded thereupon. For nothing is due to creatures, except for something pre-existing in them, or foreknown. Again, if this is due to a creature, it must be due on account of something that precedes. And since we cannot go on to infinity, we must come to something that depends only on the goodness of the divine will–which is the ultimate end. We may say, for instance, that to possess hands is due to man on account of his rational soul; and his rational soul is due to him that he may be man; and his being man is on account of the divine goodness.” (ST.I.Q21.A4)

So an exception is made for divine justice, since everything we have is already a gift from God, a sort of mercy which supplies our lack of that thing. My will is free because God supplies me a free will, which He does as an act of justice on account of my being human, but of mercy on account of that He did not need to make human beings have wills to begin with. Freedom of the will was something which nature lacked, something lacking in the physical world, which God supplied in creating man.

[3] To again quote St Thomas Aquinas,

“Since pity is grief for another’s distress, as stated above (Article 1), from the very fact that a person takes pity on anyone, it follows that another’s distress grieves him. And since sorrow or grief is about one’s own ills, one grieves or sorrows for another’s distress, in so far as one looks upon another’s distress as one’s own” (ST.II-II.Q30.A2)

As such, St. Thomas calls this pity—indeed, mercy itself—a sort of defect in us (as pertaining to feeling sorrow), though not in God. Mercy itself is a virtue, of course, and in God it comes not through the passion of pity, but rather through His goodness.