When does mercy outweigh justice? Should the unforgivable be forgiven?

Last week’s column apparently struck a nerve. It was about the hidden wounds so many of us carry as a result of our losses—the deaths of loved ones, divorces, children gone awry, business failures.

I concluded that since we never know what unseen burdens another person is bearing, we should try to show grace to folks who act unbecomingly.

The column drew three times the number of responses I typically receive, nearly all of them favorable.

But the first comment I saw is the one that has stuck with me all week. I’ve been mulling it over. I’d posted a link to the column on social media, under this Herald-Leader headline: “The deepest wounds may be the least visible, so offer mercy to everyone.”

That first reply addressed the headline directly: “Sorry. Can’t offer it to racists, white nationalists, or neo-fascists. God will just have to do that for me. I am indifferent to those people and don’t care what happens to them.”

I don’t know the fellow who posted that, so my observations here have nothing to do with him personally. He may be a peach. But what he said raised questions that always arise when we talk about showing mercy to, for want of a better word, sinners.

I’m not talking here about namby-pamby sinners of the “oops-I-said-a-naughty-word” variety. I’m talking about real-life, ugly, even despicable sinners—killers, rapists, parents who abandon their kids, con artists, white supremacists and the like. People who’ve done intentional damage to others.

Can we—or should we even try to—show mercy to them, or should we write them off as irredeemable rejects? Should we cease to care about their well-being?

Here are my random thoughts on the matter:

▪ Showing mercy is hard. It doesn’t imply softness on the part of the merciful, but a steely determination to act like a child of God, who the scriptures tell us looks far and wide for ways to redeem those who’ve fallen. Vengeance and bitterness are the easy route. Mercy takes work. Lots and lots of work. Mercy is counterintuitive.

▪ Showing mercy isn’t the same as issuing a blanket pardon. If you’re attacked by a rapist, God forbid, you might come to feel mercy toward him—you might learn afterward, say, about the gosh-awful sexual abuse he suffered growing up, which formed him into a predator—yet you might still want him imprisoned, in part to keep him from inflicting further mayhem on some other innocent victim.

▪ Mercy can be less a feeling than a set of choices. In the New Testament, Jesus sets it up like this: if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he’s thirsty, give him something to eat; if he’s troubled, pray for him. Jesus doesn’t say much about how we’re to feel about this enemy. He might remain our enemy. But we’re to behave as a merciful person should, regardless of how we feel. Ignoring a person in need is never an option.

▪ It’s important to remember that hardly anybody is just one thing. Are there bad actors out there who are entirely evil? Maybe. But they’re few and far between. Most people are more complicated than that. The woman who ripped you off in a phone scam may also be a single mother desperate to keep her child clothed. Or she might be an addict trying to get straight but as yet unable to control her habit, which is why she steals. She may be praying all day every day for deliverance.

This has always seemed to me the balance the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., found. He was able to simultaneously decry the injustice of racism and yet recognize the shared humanity of racists.

▪ It’s even more important to remember that you, too, are a sinner, right down to your toenails. You’re subject to all manner of weaknesses and temptations and addictions and self-delusions. The fact you haven’t started a phone scam or joined some violent militia might owe more to the luck of the draw than to your innate superiority. If you’d been through in your life what that other guy’s been through, you might have turned out worse than he has.

Assuming ourselves morally superior to racists, white nationalists or fascists — or to phone scammers, deadbeat dads or, for that matter, anybody — could suggest we might be self-righteous or possibly lack self-awareness. Sad to say, we’re all inclined to self-righteousness. We humans want nothing so much as to have somebody to look down on.

But we should be careful not to indulge this flaw.

It’s those who are merciful who will receive mercy, Jesus warned. And Lord knows we all will need mercy sometime, somewhere.

Paul Prather is pastor of Bethesda Church near Mount Sterling, Ky. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.

This story was originally published February 3, 2022 at 8:29 AM.