Scripture
John 12: 47-50
(15-20 min)
“If anyone hears my words but does not keep them, I do not judge that person. For I did not come to judge the world, but to save the world. There is a judge for the one who rejects me and does not accept my words; the very words I have spoken will condemn them at the last day. For I did not speak on my own, but the Father who sent me commanded me to say all that I have spoken. I know that his command leads to eternal life. So whatever I say is just what the Father has told me to say.”
Hebrews 4:15-16
Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has ascended into heaven, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold firmly to the faith we profess. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are— yet he did not sin. Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.
Right or left-handed
We are all familiar with being either right- or left-handed. It’s a choice our body makes as we start to move. A baby will choose a hand for holding a spoon when she eats. She will likely choose the same hand when it comes time to write or draw. Just about everyone will use one hand over the other to swing a hammer. Then there was my father.
Dad would swing a hammer with his right hand but hold a pool cue with his left hand. When I asked him why do you shoot pool left-handed, he would say it just feels right. Dad was ambidextrous in several things but would decide on a hand for each task and use it consistently for that task. It appears that one hand is dominant either all of the time or designated so on a task-by-task basis.
I wondered why one hand is always dominant and a presentation at a scientific conference provided an unanticipated answer. Apparently, our societal designation of people as left or right-handed is a misnomer. It artificially prioritizes movement over stability when both are required. Each hand is better at one of these two tasks. In a right-handed person, swinging a hammer is best performed by the right hand but holding the nail is best performed by the left-hand. It just feels right to do it this way. You can force the two hands to switch roles, but it won’t be comfortable and the motion of driving or stabilizing the nail will not be done as well. If my father is representative, even the few people who are ambidextrous have this kind of functional dichotomy except it is determined by the task.
Why we are made this way was wonderfully demonstrated by a student I taught years ago who lost her left hand early in life. This forced her right hand to be the mobile hand. The problem was if her right hand was moving, it couldn’t be stabilizing. In impressive displays of creativity, she would conscript anything to provide stability so that her right hand could do the desired motion. Knees, chin, thighs, feet, and objects in the environment were all used as stabilizers. It makes sense that our hands specialize in mobility or stability because a single extremity can’t do both at the same time.
Justice and mercy are like mobility and stability
I wonder if movement is not the only thing within God’s creation where two exclusive activities must occur simultaneously. Can we at once execute justice and extend mercy? In the prequel fictional story to this sermon, Rebecca Masterson, the daughter of the fictional character Juliann Masterson, chooses justice over mercy. Juliann leaves her family to succeed in business and returns years later remorseful. Rebecca delivers only justice to her mother rebuffing Juliann’s pleas for forgiveness. In this way Rebecca held her mother accountable for leaving the family by making Juliann endure her scorn. For Rebecca, this was just. It was appropriate for her to penalize her mother with scorn forever because she had been forever scarred by her mother’s actions.
But what if Rebecca had mercy on her mother? What if Rebecca was willing to start anew? To deliver such forgiveness requires mercy from Rebecca for she would have to withhold some of the penalty she believed her mother was due. If you are swinging the justice hammer, you must put it down to extend mercy.
Perhaps like mobility and stability, mercy and justice are both required in relationships while being mutually exclusive. If that’s so, we have a problem because we don’t have two minds like we have two hands. We only have one mind and soul. Therefore, one mind can’t do the justice while the other mind takes care of the mercy. Instead, justice must be sacrificed for mercy to occur. A visual depiction of this point might look like this:
Rebecca is on the left side of this bar. There is no mercy for her mother, and she believes life for life is just. If Rebecca is going to forgive her mother at all, some of the salmon-colored justice is going to have to be converted to green mercy.
When mercy dies?
Alas, Rebecca, and many real-life characters for a variety of reasons can’t do this. The scars are too deep to extend mercy, and the relationship dies or is crippled. The Bible speaks strongly about forgiveness and mercy pointing the way to a different path than Rebecca chose. However, today’s Scripture verse is about the mercy seekers. People who know they did something wrong, warrant a penalty, and appeal for mercy. What happens to these people when mercy is denied?
Juliann carried her grief with her and poured it out into a stone. She then tried to poison emerging relationships so that her disgust with herself is shared by all. In the absence of mercy, she craves penalty. But even when mercy is given it can be revoked. A wife (or husband) does something wrong. The husband forgives her ending the ongoing penalty. Then a new disagreement occurs, and the husband immediately reinstitutes the old penalty by dragging up the previous wrongdoing of his wife. He constantly flips between mercy and justice unpredictably sliding up and down the justice/mercy bar. They make it through, but the wife loses trust that his mercy is real and lasting.
At the refusing or capricious hands of another is not the only place where mercy dies. Several years ago a father sat his young son on top of a railing surrounding the big cats at a zoo. The son fell and was killed by the animals. While I’m sure the other people who loved this child responded with justice or stayed justice to extend mercy, I suspect there is no peace for the father who is likely unable to forgive himself.
Longing for mercy
Where do we turn when justice is unremitting and mercy is refused, revoked or self-denied? The poignancy of this question is illustrated in an experience from my past. When I was 16 my parents divorced, and my father moved out of the house. Mom was struggling to deal with the end of her 17-year marriage and was very sad. In the midst of this struggle, her mother died of a heart attack. The heart attack came after I was supposed to go help my grandmother with an afternoon of yardwork. I put her off consumed with my own teenage indulgences. Rather than wait for help from another, my grandmother did the work herself. She died within the week. In my 16-year-old self-absorption, any possible correlation between my refusal to help and her death escaped me. But it doesn’t escape me now.
My mother became even more sad at the loss of her best friend and confidant. Night after night she would see to my needs and retreat to her bedroom to sob. In the brutality a teenage boy can muster, I told her I was going to move out of the house and go live with my father if she didn’t get a hold of herself. It didn’t occur to me that with my brother away at college and her mom in the grave, I was all she had left. The sobbing ended and my mother suffered alone sharing none of it with me.
Years later I apologized, and she accepted it graciously. But I don’t feel sufficient penalty was paid. As maturity and faith took me to a place of guilt it seems an apology was inadequate justice for perhaps causing her mother’s death and willfully contributing to her sadness. Even though we had a wonderful relationship as adults and Mom never revoked her mercy, I can’t get over the guilt of my actions. Moreover, my grandmother was gone long before it occurred to me that I likely contributed to her death.
Do you have something like this in your past or ongoing today? Something that disturbs you even though it was long ago forgiven or the people affected have passed away. An action that makes you feel ashamed when remembered. I pray you do not and that perhaps my experience is shared by a minority. But news stories of people losing a child like the father above suggest otherwise. Where do we go to find mercy and a sense of peace?
Sin requires absolute justice
The answer to this question starts with a realization. Although my sins were delivered to my grandmother and mother, they were ultimately against God. This is why the Hebrews Scripture verse for today presents Christ in terms of a priest who serves as an intermediary between a righteous God and sinful people. While the ramifications of our actions play out in the lives of human beings, any wrong we do is foremost against God.
Asking for God’s mercy, however, can seem counterintuitive and unnerving. After all, God’s justice is absolute. There is no trading justice for mercy with God. There is only absolute justice and absolute mercy. Leviticus 4-6 is devoted to absolute justice. The chapters describe what must be done when individual Israelites or groups of them sin. Leviticus 5:17 captures the essence of these chapters: “If anyone sins and does what is forbidden in any of the LORD’s commands, even though they do not know it, they are guilty and will be held responsible.”
Lest you think Jesus was any less an advocate of absolute justice, he speaks of it in today’s Scripture verse from John: There is a judge for the one who rejects me and does not accept my words; the very words I have spoken will condemn them at the last day.
Sobering, isn’t it? In God’s kingdom, there is absolute justice. For the sins that haunt the guilty there is no human swapping penalty for mercy. Indeed, Leviticus describes the myriad of ways the penalty can be paid but the Israeli people knew, as do we, that the sins just keep coming. There are insufficient resources to pay the penalties described in Leviticus for the myriad of sins we continue to commit including ignoring a grandmother’s plea for help, the callous treatment of a suffering mother, causing a child’s death by carelessness, or whatever sin runs through your head during a sleepless period of the night.
How in the world can we approach the uncompromising judge of the entire created order and beg for mercy knowing that the very next day or maybe the very next minute we will beg again. Moreover, how can mercy possibly be granted if God’s absolute justice is to be maintained?
The high priest of manifest love
The answer to both questions can be found in a third attribute of God embodied in Jesus. Absolute love. Our sins against God, volitional or accidental, must be answered by justice. God does not turn from this course. Jesus endures this penalty and justice is served, but we are spared. Christ does what the human right or left hands cannot, what one human mind and soul cannot; simultaneously perform two mutually exclusive actions. He pays the penalty to satisfy absolute justice and stays the penalty from humanity delivering absolute mercy.
But God’s gift to us is not through. The one who satisfied absolute justice and provides absolute mercy did so because he loves us absolutely. When we love someone, we want to be with that person. We want to know how the person feels, and we especially want to be there when a person we love is suffering. So does Jesus. He wants this so much that although divine, he lived as we do. Think for a moment: who can help you more when you are struggling? Someone who understands what it’s like to walk your path or someone who knows nothing about it? Life teaches us that someone who understands our struggles is far better at helping us with our struggles.
Because he walked our path, Jesus understands everything about sin save committing it. I don’t know about you, but this is the perfect person to approach in the middle of the night when memories of my grandmother and mother come to mind. In fact, the Scriptures instruct us to approach the throne of grace in these times:
“For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are— yet he did not sin. Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.”
These words assure me, and I hope you, that no matter the guilt we feel, Jesus understands how we got there. I believe he understood temptation far better than we who have yielded to it. When I indulged my youthful desires, the temptation was satisfied while I indulged it. For Jesus, the temptation was never satisfied because he never indulged. There was no interruption in the temptation he endured. Moreover, to experience the temptation at all was his divine choice. For these reasons and his omniscient wisdom, his understanding of temptation is well beyond our own. In Jesus, we find someone who expresses the absolute love of God for us in such magnitude that he took our penalty to give us mercy and took on our human condition solely to understand and support us through our fallen state.
What a friend we have in Jesus indeed
When mercy is withheld by another or is given but seems inadequate for the magnitude of our sins, turn to Jesus. When mercy cannot be granted because the offended are no longer with us or we have simply sinned egregiously against God, turn to Jesus. In Jesus’s arms we will never experience judgment no matter how grievous the sin: “For I did not come to judge the world, but to save the world. There is a judge for the one who rejects me and does not accept my words…”.
Rather than a stone, our fictional Juliann could’ve eased her pain by accepting the mercy and compassion of Jesus. The Lord walked a life where he too was tempted by success. With him she would find mercy and empathy. The father who several years ago lost his child at the zoo can fall into the arms of Jesus and weep openly. There he will find only understanding, acceptance and love in return. All who turn to Jesus will find a promise fulfilled: “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” (Matthew 11:28-29)
I still have guilt about my mother and grandmother. Even if you are a faithful Christian, whatever troubles you likely is not completely ameliorated no matter how many times you hand it over to Jesus in prayer. It is impossible for us living here to escape these feelings because absolute justice, mercy and love only exist with the divine. But the feelings do not cripple me nor should yours cripple you for we know that ultimately our sins were against God and justice was served on the cross. Our high priest understands our plight and extends absolute, un-revocable mercy and love.
Therefore, take your guilt to God and the Savior of the world as often as it assails you knowing that when we are called home and stand before the judgment seat, we will be welcomed with mercy beyond measure. Welcomed to a place where justice and mercy are absolute, and God’s absolute love presides over all.
As always, I pray my words are a help for you and not a hindrance. May God be with you this day and every day of your Christian journey giving you his healing mercy for whatever troubles your soul.
Dave
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