The Pope gave the green light for parents to spank their children last week. How do mercy, discipline and punishment fit together? Here are some reflections on mercy:
Matthew 5: 7 “Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.”
In my entire lifetime, I can never remember a single political candidate campaigning on a platform of mercy. The American electorate has consistently supported leaders who promise to be tough on crime, who vow to be uncompromising in executing the war on drugs, who support zero tolerance policies for violence in public schools and mandatory sentencing guidelines for judges.
Mercy is not politically popular. The merciful get played, the merciful get taken advantage of, the merciful are enablers, the merciful coddle criminals.
The only time it is ever politically expedient to be merciful is during an elected leader’s final days in office when a president or governor executes their power to pardon. It is at the very end of their last elected terms, when the backlash of the voting public and their financial backers no longer constrains them that political leaders dare to be merciful. Doing so earlier in their term of office is political suicide. When President Ford pardoned former president Richard Nixon one month into his presidency, he forfeited his political future. After losing to Jimmy Carter in the 1976 presidential election, Ford quickly disappeared into political obscurity.
The truth is, mercy frightens us. We believe that punishment is a necessary deterrent to prevent people from doing bad things. It is a concept that we begin to internalize at an early age. Last week, Pope Frances authorized parents to spank their children when they misbehave, as long as they do it in a way that preserves their dignity. The objective is not to humiliate children but to correct their misbehavior. We seem convinced that the aversion to pain is the primary motivation for good behavior.
Mercy removes the threat of punishment. If people aren’t made to suffer the consequences of the decisions they make and the actions they take, there is no deterrence for misbehavior. If you commit the crime, you must do the time.
Hardheartedness, not mercy, is what gives us the greatest sense of security. We don’t want mercy, we want people to be held accountable, we want them to pay for the injuries they have caused, we want them to suffer in proportion to the suffering they have inflicted on others. Vengeance and the threat of retribution is what keeps us safe from harm, it is what prevents others from exploiting our weakness and our vulnerabilities. If people believe they can get away with it they will take advantage of us. Vengeance must be sure and swift.
But it turns out that hardheartedness isn’t a very effective deterrent. Homicide rates haven’t fallen in states that have re-instituted capital punishment. States without the death penalty have consistently lower murder rates. Children raised by controlling and punishing parents have higher rates of delinquency than children raised by supportive and affectionate parents. Zero tolerance policies in public schools haven’t lowered the incidences of violence. What they have done is create a school to prison pipeline. Criminalizing drug possession or distribution hasn’t lowered drug use or addiction rates (a lesson we should have learned from the failure prohibition in the 1920’s). What the War on Drugs has done is expand our penal population from about 300,000 inmates 30 years ago to more than 2 million inmates today.
The United States now has the highest rate of incarceration in the world and a disproportionate percentage of inmates are people of color. Today we imprison a larger percentage of our black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid. Yet annual surveys conducted by the U.S. Health and Human Services Department show that people of all colors use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates.
In her book, The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander points out that “once you’re labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination - employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunities, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service - are suddenly legal.”
We believe that mercy threatens to undermine the public safety, but our hardheartedness actually makes our lives less secure.
Even here in Christ’s church, many of us have developed a theology that reflects our mistrust of mercy. We proclaim the good news that, “While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us,” but we believe that our favor with God is maintained by our good works. For centuries the church has used threat of eternal damnation to frighten people into living obedient lives. If you divorce your spouse, if you marry outside of our religious tribe, if you fail to adhere to the fundamental principles of our creed, then we threaten you with ex-communication. You will be banished from the Lord’s Table, cast out of fellowship with the communion of saints and excluded from the saving grace of God.
We like to sing about God’s amazing grace, but the threat of eternal damnation lurks deep within our hearts even here in the church of Jesus Christ.
One of the fundament theological questions that each of us must come to grips with is whether or not we believe in redemption. If we don’t believe that God has the power and the will to redeem all people from aimlessness and sin, then by all means we are justified in withholding mercy. If God is without mercy, than we should be too. We are justified in throwing away people who disappoint us, who betray our trust, who fail to honor their obligations, who do things that hurt people, who get convicted of felony offenses.
But if we believe that God has both the power and the will to redeem all people from aimlessness and sin, if we believe that Jesus’ parable of the Good Shepherd who leaves the ninety nine sheep to find the one that is lost is more than just a clever story but a mandate for how we are to live our lives, then no one is ever disposable.
If we believe in redemption, then seventy seven must become a sacred number to us. “How often should I forgive? As often as seven times? I tell you, not seven times, but seventy seven times (Matthew 18: 21-22).”
Jesus said, “Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.” Since mercy is not a value embraced by our culture, how do we, as followers of Jesus, hold mercy at the center of our hearts?
One of the most familiar stories that Jesus shared about mercy is a parable known to us today as the Prodigal Son. It tells the story of a young man who demanded his share of his family’s inheritance and then went off and squandered it all on self-indulgent living. When his money dried up, a severe famine afflicted the region where he was living and he was in want. He could no longer feed himself and no one would help him. Eventually he decided to return to his father’s home hoping to be taken on as hired hand.
But Jesus said, “…while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him (Luke 15: 20).” The father wasn’t persuaded to show mercy because of the sincerity of his son’s remorse or his promise to make amends or his plea to be treated the same as a hired hand. Before any words had passed between them, the father was moved by compassion. Mercy always flows from compassion.
Compassion re-humanizes the people we encounter. Instead of seeing them as failures or felons or adulterers or embezzlers, instead of defining them by their misbehavior, compassion redeems their humanity. Compassion means literally to “suffer-with.” It moves us beyond sympathy and beyond empathy and inspires in us a desire to alleviate another’s suffering. Compassion allows us to imagine what another is experiencing, it gives us a glimpse of what life is like from their perspective, it enables us to consider the circumstances that have shaped the decisions they made and the actions they took.
Mercy begins with compassion. Unlike hardheartedness, it relinquishes our power over another, it sets aside our entitlement to retribution, it surrenders our claim to the moral high ground.
Instead of holding the threat of punishment over another, mercy invites us to stand with each other, to recover our shared humanity, to recognize that we are all redeemed from the sins of our past by the mercy of God. It is not politically popular, but it is one of the foundational tenants of the Christian faith. “Blessed are the merciful,” said Jesus, “for they will receive mercy.” Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment