The Quality of Mercy

His mercy is from age to age on those who fear him. Luke 1: 50

Does God, from age to age, have mercy on those who fear him? 

I’m looking back over history.  Way back over the murky history of the ancient past.  Not exactly prehistoric times.  Not exactly cave man times and evolution times when tribes roamed or settled.  But maybe before much use of writing.  When we hadn’t figured out how to preserve writing very well.  Back when literacy rates were very low.  Less than 10%.  Maybe less than one percent.  Back when writing was being invented.  When it was experimental.  When it was the hot area of research and development.  We know a little bit about those times.  We glean bits of information from potsherds and other artifacts.  We speculate what life was like. 

What did the people know about God?  What was their theology?  Who were their theologians?  There’s a question.  There are no universities.  There are no countries.  Just tribes.  Just extended families and friends who banded together for survival.  Subsistence farmers.  Hunter gatherers.  That’s where we came from.  That’s what life was like for untold ages.  Probably far more than the present age, the age of history, extending back, what, six thousand years?  Ten thousand? 

Theology was not a profession.  Theology was part of ordinary living.  Fearing God was easy, since there was so much to fear.  So much that was unknown.  So many things beyond control, even for a smart animal.  There were the wild animals for instance.  And lightening and thunder.  Angry seas.  Fierce winds.  Fire.  Mysterious things.  Things we did not understand.  But on another level, we knew quite a bit.  In those days, more so than today, we had animal cunning.  We knew things intuitively.  Our senses were sharp.  We learned what was important.  To what things we needed to pay attention.  Sounds, for instance.  The tracks of animals.  The weather.  We knew to notice things in our environment.  We knew to be wary.

And we had a spiritual sense.  Our world had times and places of enchantment.  We had a sense that we were not alone.  That someone was watching out for us.  We imagined that we had souls and so did the animals.  And we made up stories to explain these feelings.  We invented spiritual persons, both good and evil.  We invented rituals to befriend the good ones and avoid the evil ones.  We looked to the good ones for protection from the evil ones. 

When civilization happened, this theology got regularized and recorded.  We know, for instance of the Greek and Roman pantheon.  I understand many of the people of India still have a pantheon.  Many gods.

In time, one tribe, or many, one person or many, conceived monotheism.  Developed a theology of one God.  Not balanced by an evil God.  The evil God was said to be less powerful.  Satan.  Quite powerful, but less powerful than the good God. 

Flash to the present.  My personal theology is monotheistic.  One God.  One God with two jobs, creation and salvation.  One God pushing creation forward.  From age to age.  Pushing creation forward when theology was so primitive and we still had animal cunning and survived by our wits and only vaguely sensed that we were not alone, that something was afoot in the universe, that some good spirit was out there taking care of us. 

His mercy is from age to age on those who fear him.  Those who experienced the enchantment, god honors.  Those who had a sense that someone, some invisible person, was on their side, was looking out for them, was protecting them, sending warning of danger, sending beauty and charm to delight them.   Those who, in the stillness of the dark forest, in a starry night in the desert, in the quiet of a cave or closet, had a vague sense that something better was in store.  Those who reach out to God, those who sense God, those sensing a presence, sensing enchantment.  These God honors.  God blesses.  God has mercy.  From age to age. 

These are the chosen people.  It is not a whole nation.  These people do not belong to just one nation.  They are everywhere.  In all tribes.  And now in all societies.  These are the prophets.  These, the people who do God’s work.  These are the godly people.  These people are the happy people. 

Are we talking a minority of the population?  Do we want our God to discriminate – only have mercy on those who fear him?  Or do we want a God whose love extends to all creation?  Who has mercy even on those who do not fear him.  It is a dilemma of sorts.  We are pulled two directions.  We want to think there are benefits to being godly, to acknowledging our divinity, to working in God’s vineyard, creating and redeeming.  Yet we want to be democratic.  We want to think that in some sense all persons were created equal.  Equal at least in this sense, that God loves them, that they are invited into the family of God. 

Those engaged in creation and redemption, who are doing God’s work, those attuned, may well be both the workers and the product, the inventor and the inventee.  The bleeding edge of innovation.  The new species that is emerging in the evolutionary creation process.  Those who from age to age receive God’s mercy.

And in this use of the term, mercy has strained (strange) qualities.  Mostly I hear the term used in judgement.  The mercy of the court.  The mercy of the judge.  Something like favor to a miscreant.   A light sentence to a convict.  So mercy is a strange term to associate with creation.  To mean selecting an individual to be set apart from the legacy species and put into some kind of transition phase toward a new species.  In one sense, it’s a privilege and an honor.  In another, it is a sentence to a dismal life, where a person doesn’t fit in.  And has to find a way through the existing culture and peer pressures to a new way of being.  The path of wholeness and holiness.  It’s a mixed blessing.  You get the persistent joy.  But you are alone and outcast.  As all the prophets have been.