Matthew 18: 21-35
Rev. Nick Cheek
When I turned sixteen, I thought I had just won the lottery. I mean, I’m not sure there was ever a more glorious sound for a teenager than keys to the car jingling together. I had arrived, and my transportation was a 1995 white Ford Taurus. Oh yeah, it was something else. It had a sunroof. I called it White Lightning. Along with the keys came some guidelines. For one, I was only allowed to take the car out for certain occasions. Those occasions were school, baseball practice, and work. However, none of those destinations were on an open road where I could, you know, test the power of this mighty steed. Well, on one fateful day, I decided to take an alternate route home from work. There was this strip of highway that would still take me home but kind of went around town and took a little longer. So I thought, “Just this once. No one would know, right?” Famous last words.
Well, I rolled the windows down, cranked up Hootie and the Blowfish, stuck my hand out the window, and cruised. As the wind rushed through my fingers, I thought to myself, you know, life really is a highway. I seemed to be enjoying myself a little too much, and after the first mile or so, flashing blue and white lights showed up in my rearview mirror. The officer was kind, but I was terrified. After I shakily signed the ticket, I rolled up those windows, started the car, and proceeded to pretend I was driving Miss Daisy back home. I felt terrible. I rehearsed my speech all the way home. “I’m sorry, Mom and Dad. I can’t believe I did this. I’m grounding myself for a week. I don’t deserve to drive. Here are the keys.” When I pulled in the driveway, my parents were waiting for me because I was late. They were worried. I got out and began my speech. “Mom, I’m so sorry,” I said, and tears started to fall from my eyes. I tried to finish, but it was all jumbled up. My mom spoke up, “What’s wrong, hun?” I finally spit it out and handed the expensive ticket over. My dad read it and then proceeded to put his hand on my shoulder. “Son, we’re just glad you’re okay and that you’re home. We’ll talk about what we’re going to do about it later.”
Huuuu phewwww. That is what mercy feels like. Mercy is when you expect judgment but end up receiving forgiveness. It is when you expect anger and frustration but receive a loving embrace instead. Mercy catches you off guard. It covers your anxious and shameful heart in a blanket of grace. At its core, mercy is about reconciliation. The truth of this incident is that, sure, I was eventually grounded, but I didn’t really care about that. I wasn’t much concerned about the repercussions because I knew I was in the wrong. What I was more concerned about was my relationship with my parents. I desperately wanted to be received, accepted, and loved by them, even in the midst of my wandering.
Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.
This is our beatitude today. Its structure is unlike the others in this list. This one reads as an “if, then” statement, and traditionally, in light of the rest of the Bible, this is how it is understood: if we are merciful to others, then God will be merciful to us. Again, there is a prophetic tone to this beatitude. When the final trumpet sounds, God will show mercy to those who have extended mercy. And the word mercy here is not an idea. It’s not a feeling or attitude. In this verse and all throughout the scriptures, mercy is translated as a deliberate and active action of compassion. The psalmist says, “But You, O Lord, are a God full of compassion, and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in mercy and truth.” (Psalm 86:15) “Mercy and truth go before Your face.” (Psalm 89:14) “The Lord is good to all; God’s tender mercies are over all creation.” (Psalm 145:9) The prophet Micah asks, “What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:8) And in James 2:13 we find this powerful reminder: “Judgment will be without mercy to anyone who has shown no mercy; mercy triumphs over judgment.” From Genesis to Revelation, mercy runs like a thread through the heart of God’s story from the covering of Adam and Eve’s shame in the garden to the cross where Jesus prays, “Father, forgive them.”
Even still, since the garden, humanity has struggled to value what God values. In the ancient world, mercy wasn’t seen as a virtue. The Romans admired strength and discipline. Their moral code lifted four “cardinal virtues”: wisdom, justice, temperance, and courage. Mercy didn’t make the list. The Romans despised pity, seeing it as a sign of weakness. The Greeks felt much the same way. Aristotle even called pity a “troublesome emotion,” something that distracted from reason. The religious leaders of Jesus’ day weren’t much better. The Pharisees, focused on rule-keeping and moral superiority, often forgot compassion altogether. Jesus called them out plenty of times for neglecting the more important matters of the law: justice, faithfulness, and mercy.
Today, mercy still doesn’t come naturally to us. Just scroll through social media for five minutes. We live in a culture that loves to pour out judgment. People are canceled before the full story even comes out. We don’t ask questions; we don’t seek to understand; we just pile on the mockery. We take a single mistake or moment, something caught on camera, a poorly worded comment, or a private failure made public, and we turn it into a spectacle. Remember that story from a few months back about the man caught on the Jumbotron at a sporting event with a woman who wasn’t his wife? The internet erupted. Memes, jokes, judgment… people took joy in their humiliation. No one knew the full story. They didn’t care to know it. But his life, his family’s, and the woman’s were forever altered. Some might still say today, “Good riddance, they deserved the humiliation, they deserved to have their private lives out there for the world to see.”
And it’s not just that one story. It happens all the time. A teenager says something foolish online, and decades later it resurfaces and ruins their reputation. A public figure stumbles, and the crowd cheers for their downfall. We see it in politics, sports, entertainment, and social media. We’re quick to condemn, slow to forgive, and even slower to show mercy. And friends, the Church is not immune to that same spirit. We expect our behavior to be different, to be above the way of the world, but if we’re honest, we struggle with mercy too. We’re tempted to withhold it. We’re tempted to measure or label someone based on one decision, one failure, one moment in their past.
But the gospel calls us to something different, something better for us and the world…mercy. Mercy is the posture of people who remember that they have received it themselves. Mercy doesn’t excuse wrongdoing, but it refuses to take joy in someone else’s downfall. It looks at a broken person, their misfortunes, their suffering, and has pity and compassion. And mercy requires a soft heart, church. Mercy requires a soft heart, and those are in short supply these days. The reason we can extend mercy freely is because we can look back on our own lives and see all the times we’ve desperately needed it ourselves. And we all know how powerful and life-altering experiencing real mercy can be. It can give us a new start, a new beginning. Mercy is freeing. Mercy reminds us that we are not our mistakes, we are not defined by our weakest moments or seasons. Mercy allows us to pick up the pieces left behind from our failures and create something new. By God, if that isn’t the message of the gospel, church.
Let me tell you a story. In February of 1993, in North Minneapolis, a woman named Mary Johnson lost her only son, Laramium Byrd, in a moment of senseless violence. He was twenty years old. The young man who took his life was just sixteen, a kid named Oshea. At first, Mary’s heart burned with anger. She wanted justice. She wanted him to pay. And he did. Oshea was tried as an adult and sentenced to twenty-five and a half years in prison. But the story doesn’t end there. After about a decade behind bars, something started stirring in Mary’s spirit. As a woman of deep faith, she felt God nudging her—that still, quiet voice saying, “You need to forgive him.” At first, she fought it. She said, “Lord, I can’t.” But over time, the Spirit kept pressing. So a few years before Oshea’s parole hearing, Mary asked to meet him at Minnesota’s Stillwater State Prison. When they met, Oshea was speechless. He couldn’t believe this woman, the mother of the man he had killed, wanted to see him, let alone forgive him. They started talking. One meeting turned into another. Over time, something changed. The walls of hate began to crumble.
When Oshea was finally released after seventeen years, Mary did something unimaginable. She introduced him to her landlord, and with her blessing, Oshea moved into the apartment next door. The mother of the victim living beside the man who took her son’s life. That’s mercy. That’s the gospel in flesh and blood. Mary said, “Unforgiveness is like cancer; it will eat you from the inside out.” She decided she didn’t want to live that way anymore. So she started forgiving him a little more every day. And today, years later, Mary and Oshea spend their days traveling together, to prisons, churches, and juvenile centers sharing their story, helping others believe that mercy can change your life.
What if it was Mary’s mercy that allowed Oshea to change and move on from his past? Maybe when he heard her say, “I forgive you,” that’s when God’s love finally broke through the walls of his shame and guilt, washing away the anger, the self-hatred, the despair, and opening the door to healing and reconciliation. Isn’t that what happens to us too? When we receive mercy, God begins to wash away the parts of us that feel unworthy, unwanted, unforgivable, until all that’s left is love. Mercy can’t erase the past, but it does have the power to redeem it.
“Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.” This beatitude, like all the rest, presents us with a radical, countercultural way of living, a way that refuses to mirror the cruelty of the mob and instead mirrors the heart of God. As Saint John Chrysostom put it, “Mercy imitates God.” And so when we show mercy, we are participating in the larger story God is writing, trusting that all of us…frail, incomplete, and oftentimes a mess…are a work in progress, with chapters still unfolding.
Friends, hear the good news from the book of Lamentations: “God’s mercies are new every morning.” May it be so for us, for our neighbors, and for the other. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.