Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.

Craig

Two words jump straight out at you: merciful and mercy. You’ve got the repetition of the same idea in a different form. And mercy is a very concrete word because it is  something you do. You make a choice to be merciful. So it’s a promise that when the way we choose to live aligns with the character of God we are blessed. I suppose  a parallel to this is what John’s gospel records Jesus as saying that the yardstick we use to judge other people will be used to judge us. I see mercy as compassion in practice: doing all those things which people don’t deserve.

Julie

Yes, and we see Jesus being compassionate to individuals and crowds don’t we, on so many occasions. In all the gospels, I think, it mentions Jesus seeing crowds or individuals and having compassion on them.

And many people call out to him, ‘have mercy on me’, as they approach him for healing. We see Jesus being merciful – again his words and his actions match.

As we experience God’s mercy which we can only do, I would say, by following the first four Beatitudes and having the right attitude towards God – acknowledging our need of God and acting humbly before God – we are then in a position to receive mercy from God. In fact, even accepting that we need mercy from God says something about how we view ourselves in relation to God.

Craig

I can’t help but think of my Old Testament lecturer in the first theological college I studied at. He would say, time and again, as we went through the Old Testament. that there’s one word that we must never forget, and that is the Hebrew word hesed, which is very often translated as ‘steadfast mercy’.

So Jesus was steeped in the idea that God is steadfast in his mercy. Mercy is his very nature, and the word steadfast double-underlines mercy. God is merciful, and is  determined to be merciful.

This is important because it underpins the covenants he has made with creation, with his covenant people and all humanity. He has an absolute determination to be merciful and to remain merciful and so that’s setting us a very high standard.

Julie

Which is so challenging to us, and I’m not claiming to be someone who gets this right, but it is also a major critique to leaders of certain nations who claim to be Christian: how are they showing mercy?

Craig

I can still remember really vividly during the Iraq war, when we were waking up morning after morning and hearing that this building or that building had been destroyed overnight just in case Saddam may have been hiding there.

And every morning I was thinking of all those families who’d been wiped out just because some American person safe in some situation room somewhere, had decided to bomb residential buildings in the off-chance. I think that was the war when the phrase ‘collateral damage’ was first spoken aloud.

And I was imagining the utter terror the people of Iraq must have been feeling. And I began asking myself whether there was an alternative strategy.

When those twin towers came down in New York, the United States had the sympathy of the world. I remember seeing that scared look on George Bush’s face and recognising that he was not a leader who was strong enough to think outside the box. He claimed to be a Christian but I knew he would not be taking the Beatitudes seriously. 

I know this is going to sound incredibly naive, but I am convinced that there must have been an alternative, and more humane, strategy. For example, we knew that Saddam was oppressing various tribes and people groups within his own country. And supposing the Americans had decided to shame the Iraqi leadership by flying Hercules transport planes over these poor regions of Iraq and dropping medical aid, and food – being kind to the people that Saddam was oppressing. Yes, it would have meant destructive action before this could be done, taking out missile batteries and gun emplacements so they could fly safely. I am not naive enough to think that violence is sometimes inevitable.

But the signal this would have sent would have been completely different to what everybody expected. The strongest military in the world would have sent a signal that the world’s problems can’t be solved by violence alone. It could have resulted in an internal destabilisation of a completely different kind.

Being merciful when our enemies were not showing mercy to their own people. Shaming another leader and sending a different signal. However, fanciful that sounds, something like that was an option. And I think that would have been a Christ-like option.

So these people who say, ‘you’re all being so naive in thinking the Beatitudes might work today’, I’m admitting to myself that there may be an element of naivety in my thinking. But don’t we still hear Einstein quoted today when he said that a problem can rarely be solved using the same thinking that created it? I think we’ve just assumed that, because Jesus wasn’t speaking into our modern day world, that he’d say something entirely different today because everything has changed.

I think he may use different words, but the message would be the same. He would want us to know that we do have a choice. Because humans don’t change just because we are much more technologically advanced.

Julie

I don’t know whether he’d say the same words or different words, but I think these are eternal truths. And if I apply it to kind of the Christian nationalism message here in the UK, if our attitude towards refugees and asylum seekers was more merciful, what would that look like in our streets, and in our towns, rather than the hostile environment we have created for people who are seeking refuge?

Craig

Absolutely. And, as somebody who has hosted asylum seekers in the past, when I had a house that was able to do it, the stories that I heard from those we were hosting were shocking. 

I think of one person we hosted for over a year. He’d been in the U.K. for many, many years. He’d worked legally in this country for many years, paying taxes and doing a job that no one else wanted to do. And then Theresa May’s government changed the rules and his status changed. He was given five pounds a week and a bus pass. Every day he took the bus into Sheffield city centre and did voluntary work. He trained as a CAB volunteer. He worked in the Salvation Army night shelter for no pay.

These are human beings we have used and benefited from, and then spat out. Human beings who are caused to suffer just because leaders in a rich nation like ours don’t have the courage to begin a proper and balanced national debate. We’ve got people who could be an asset, and there is a strong economic argument that says we still need them.

Helen

You’ve given me loads to think about while you’ve been speaking and I’ve been sitting here trying to work out what the common theme I’m hearing is in what you’re saying. I think what I’m noticing is that powerful people in the scenarios you’ve just outlined have taken the humanity out of the way they behave.

They are not thinking about the people they’re dropping bombs on, or the people who are statistics who won’t be allowed to work anymore. Whatever the circumstances are, as soon as you take out the word ‘people’, which is what those in power can do, you don’t have to be merciful anymore.

To be merciful requires that we see the value of,  and humanity of the individual people we’re talking about. So whether it’s the people in Iraq, or the people who are being bombed today, or people who are unable to work as asylum seekers, if those who have the authority stop looking on them as individual people, they no longer need to be merciful.

Craig

I think you’re right. And there’s a second-half to that asylum seeker story. We briefly hosted a woman who was from Iraq. And we didn’t see very much of her because we  were looking after somebody else’s dog at that point. In Iraqi culture dogs live outside, and she was terrified of this dog so she very rarely came downstairs.

But I remember one time when she did come down, and we shut the dog out of the kitchen, and she taught my wife to cook some Iraqi food. She had bought the ingredients from a specialist shop with her meagre allowance, and I was listening through the serving hatch as I was working on the table in the dining room.

I could hear snatches of the story that she was telling my wife whilst they were cooking together. She was recounting how many of her wider family were academics at a university in Baghdad. And she was currently a refugee because her parents, her brother and his complete family had been wiped out on one of those bombing raids. Those nightly raids destroying whole housing blocks in case Saddam was hiding there.

She told of the chaos that the bombs caused, and we could see the terror still residing in her body. And I could still remember years before, turning on the radio every morning and hearing about another raid. It had been one of these that destroyed her family.