A man was in the parking lot of a laundry mat, he was taking his clothes to wash them. Two young men walk up and demand his wallet.
But the man with the laundry also carried a gun, so he shot and killed his two robbers. He was in his rights, it was self defense, but that didn’t mean much with the memory of two lives collapsing onto the asphalt that he carried with him to his grave.
“Not a day goes by that I wish I had just given them my wallet, it was only $30.00.”
Two young men without mercy met a man without mercy, the equation works itself out to the inevitable conclusion: the death of two young men, and an old man with nightmares of regret.
What a waste.
Mercy.
“Blessed are the merciful for they will receive mercy.”
Mercy is an interesting word. We tend to think it is about passing on judgment, about not pulling the trigger, something passive, not doing something.
But it is more than that, mercy is an action, acts of mercy, mercy goes forth finding the lost, feeding the hungry, comforting the afflicted.
Mercy is proactive, it messes with other peoples lives, it plans and plots ways to interrupt the same old stories of blood with the surprise of assistance, of good company, lending a hand.
And God is merciful, relenting in judgment, but more than that, becoming flesh and becoming a servant, our servant, and suffering, and dieing to lift us up out of the nightmares we create with our absence of mercy.
Somehow for God, mercy and justice are the same thing. We can never really pull both off or even imagine it really. At best we try to balance them or hold them in tension over against each other, but to God they are the same thing, it is part of who God is and how God makes our fallen world whole.
The merciful will receive mercy.
In a sense we make our own prison or our own paradise.
But once again it is more than that, God gives the mercy someday, on the last day it is a gift. My guess is that the merciful are able to receive the gift. Those without mercy can’t recognize or see the gift and just pass it by.
Blessed are the pure in heart for they will see God.
We don’t talk very much about purity. Usually we think it means something about lust. But it is more than that.
And the word heart doesn’t really mean what it used to mean.
So it is hard for us to hear this beatitude.
When Jesus says heart, he doesn’t mean human emotions. We speak of heart and mind, meaning feelings and reason, things that are different and even opposed to each other.
When Jesus says heart he means the human will, the place from which we make acts of will, the place from which we make decisions and gut reactions. So it is more than feeling, and more than reason. The heart includes both of these along with our conscience, our God given sense of what ought to be.
So to speak of the heart is to really speak of all that we are, everything that makes us who we are.
And purity means much more than just clean or unsullied.
It means undivided, unconfused, unmixed.
A pure heart is a heart of singular devotion, unmixed motives, undivided loyalty.
It is a heart that is whole, when our motivations and decisions all come from one place rather than many, whole hearted.
A pure heart is devoted to God, which is the one thing that is needed, not one more thing, but the one thing.
All our hearts are broken and divided.
We want to honor the human image of God and protect our wallets from being taken, so we pull the trigger, thinking we are justified, and then we see that we are broken and our loyalties are all over the place, that we don’t know how to do the right thing, and nightmares swallow us up.
Competing loyalties are idolatrous. They demand of us what they have no right, and they kill us to get them.
A pure heart knows that only God is big enough to hold our whole heart, that all life flows from this one place.
If you are like me you often feel torn between conflicting demands, competing commitments, conflicting desires, trying keep so many people happy, kind of like opening the dryer during the spin cycle, everything is spinning around in a blur.
It is good to be reminded that God blesses a heart that is pure, that is in one place, and that all life flows from that place of thanksgiving.
The pure heart will see God, on that day, the day of days, to see the one who holds our undivided devotion.
Perhaps it only such undivided hearts that can see God because it takes all that we are just to see, we become all eyes. This is where all our desires are healed and set in proper order.
Disordered desire, disordered love, that is what we suffer from, so we pull the trigger. On that day, the days of all days, we will finally see clearly.
On that last day, an old man meets with two young men, and they do one another’s laundry, and go out for a burger and fries, the old mans treat.
What a mercy.