Mercy and Forgiveness

"Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy. "

This line repeats the formula from the Lord's Prayer, "Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us." Those who show merciful will receive mercy. Again, this is both a description of what happens when we are judged by God and a description of how we treat one another as we become enlightened. Forgiveness doesn't mean forgetting wrongs. It means to limit the punishment that we deserve for our wrongs.

I often think of these ideas on a personal level. We have to remember our own shortcomings to forgive other's their shortcomings. We can only learn to forgive ourselves for our mistakes after we learn to forgive others for their mistakes. Like most of the Beatitudes and most of Christ's teaching, the lines between cause and effect are blended togehter, like Christ words blend the divine and human. Must we forgive before we are forgiven? Or do we forgive because we have been forgiven? From timeless perspective, both ideas are the same thing, two sides of the same coin.

Much of what we see as the mystery of Christ's words is our inability to see things form this timeless point of view when all of time is part of a whole we cannot perceive. The Last Judgment, the judgment on our deaths, and the punishments and rewards we get in life are all joined together into a whole.


Imagine if our courts and prisons worked by this rule of mercy. To get a reduced sentence, convicts had to demostrate that they can show mercy and caring to others. This is a higher and more productive standard for mercy that the "victimization" rule that we use today. Today, convicts try to demonstrate how they have been victimized by others in order to get mercy. This plays to the worst in criminals, their ability to see themselves as victims no matter what they do to others. Justice requires that we do not immunize people against the consequences of their bad behavior. That same idea of justice requires that we do not forget the good that people have done when we are punishing them. This plays to the best in all of us, recognizing what we do that is good and productive is what weight against what we have done that is bad and destructive. This takes us out of the criminal mindset of seeing ourselves as victims and instead forces us to think about how we treat others.