There are so many angry, frustrated people on Facebook spewing their volatile rage these days that I try to avoid using it. But earlier this week I happened upon a particularly disturbing article that someone had re-posted.
The article is about something that happened four years ago. A woman set her husband on fire after she allegedly caught him molesting her 7-year-old daughter. (Her daughter was the husband’s stepchild.) While the event itself was disgusting and shocking, the comments that people made on the story were also horrifying. Many people responded by praising the mother’s actions, with phrases like “Good job” and “Great woman I applaud you.” But others were downright heartless and cruel, responding with “I would have given her the match” and “I hope he rots and all his burned skin falls off and leaves him a grisly mess.”
Out of the two hundred comments, both on Facebook and from the original article, only two people questioned the mother’s motives and actions. They opined that the woman shouldn’t have taken matters into her own hands. They said it should have been a matter for the justice system to handle.
Good Christians?
What I found most heartbreaking was that a good many of the commentators also claimed to be Christians. And they were openly arguing with other commenters saying that the Bible talks about retribution and God’s wrath.
But none of the commenters mentioned that the Bible also talk’s about God’s infinite mercy. And no one noted that Jesus died for the sins of everyone, including the alleged pedophile. The man, guilty or not, was still a human being with God-given dignity. Even if no-one else recognized it, he still deserved justice, mercy, and forgiveness. But instead, the ‘good Christians’ devalued and depersonalized him. They used the article as an opportunity to spread anger, frustration, hatred, and wrath.
I am not defending this man for what he’s allegedly done. Child molestation and rape are wrong. People who do such things are committing grave sins that often times scar the victims for the rest of their lives. No person should ever have to endure such violations of their person or their dignity. Everyone needs to be treated with compassion and understanding.
At the same time, however, are we willing to extend compassion and understanding to the assailants as well? Are we willing to see them as maybe deeply troubled people with mental illnesses or disordered passions? Have we forgotten that Jesus has called us to forgive every person, regardless of their sins?
Mercy Instead of Rage
Let’s not forget what Jesus told the Pharisees in Matthew 9:13: “Go and learn the meaning of the words, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ I did not come to call the righteous but sinners.”
Clearly, what Jesus tells us in this passage is that we should be showing mercy to one another, regardless of our sins or the stigmas associated with those sins. But, there is still one last thing to question on this matter: How can we, as Catholic Christians, support and show justice that reflects God’s law and doesn’t devalue the person who has committed the crimes?
The Catechism is clear about this:
2266 “The efforts of the state to curb the spread of behavior harmful to people’s rights and to the basic rules of civil society correspond to the requirement of safeguarding the common good. Legitimate public authority has the right and duty to inflict punishment proportionate to the gravity of the offense. Punishment has the primary aim of redressing the disorder introduced by the offense. When it is willingly accepted by the guilty party, it assumes the value of expiation. Punishment then, in addition to defending public order and protecting people’s safety, has a medicinal purpose: as far as possible, it must contribute to the correction of the guilty party.”
Many Catholics who oppose the death penalty think the Church has already condemned capital punishment. This is not true. However, Pope St. John Paul II has said that the use of the death penalty is too often motivated by the victim’s (and a society’s) desire for revenge. The death penalty should only be used in extreme circumstances because it removes or limits the offender’s chance for conversion and penitence.
Stop Judging
If we as Catholics truly want justice, we need to first examine the conditions of our hearts. We should be asking ourselves, why do we seek and want justice? Is it to preserve peace and safety? Or is it because we are hurting because we have been wronged and we want revenge? As difficult as it is to do sometimes, we should trust the officials of our judicial system to make sound judgments regarding the sins and actions of the criminal.
In Matthew 7:1-3, Jesus instructs us:
“Stop judging, that you may not be judged. For as you judge, so will you be judged, and the measure with which you measure will be measured out to you. Why do you notice the splinter in your brother’s eye, but do not perceive the wooden beam in your own eye?”
How often do we hear or read this passage and cringe because we know we’ve unfairly judged someone? Do we remember Jesus’ words about not judging, but then ignore them as we make some careless remark about “so-and-so”? How many of us like to pride ourselves on being open-minded and accepting of others, until we see that one person we simply can’t stand at church, at work, or at an event?
Sure, we may not consciously say or do anything to them. But in our minds, maybe we’re already formulating what we would like to say or do if given the chance to be completely honest.
We need to remember that we’re called to love our neighbor as ourselves and be merciful, just as Jesus showed mercy towards all of us by taking on our sins and dying for each and every one of us.
5 thoughts on “‘I Desire Mercy, Not Sacrifice’”
Reverend Oakes: Thank you for your considered thoughts re the scriptures of Hosea 6:6, Matt 9:13; 12:7 (& Mark 12:33, where the wise scribe accords primacy to loving God and neighbor, versus ritual sacrifice). I too am amazed at the demeaning spirit of retribution, malice that has seemingly engulfed the evangelical community in particular. It is as though the command to forgive as the Lord forgave you (Eph 4:32) only applies when the person’s sins are trivial, or they inhabit our own political silo. The psalms do often express the desire of the psalmist for God to avenge them; nevertheless, the fate of the poet’s enemies is left to the justice of God and not to the determination of the victim (or his friends and family). The responsibility of believers, this side of the Cross is made even clearer by our Lord, when he commands us to love, pray for and do good to our enemies (5:43-48 – which Paul also tells us to do in Romans 12:17-21). When we have suffered at the hands of someone who acted from his/her enslavement to the power of sin, relinquishing our desire for vengeance to God is not a facile endeavor. It requires effort and an implicit trust that God can and will heal us and save the soul of the perpetrator. It is also difficult to see ourselves as potential “committers” of crimes against God and our neighbor(s). But under certain pressures, we too could fall prey to such sins that might inflict harm on others. Therefore, we can only pray for those who have done us harm, ask our Lord to continually give us his Spirit of forgiveness, and pray that we delivered from temptations to sin against others that would be too great for us to resist. “Mercy has converted more souls than zeal or eloquence or learning – or all of them together.” – Soren Kierkegaard. Thanks again for what you shared.
I can’t agree more with the truths that you have stated. However, I have to say that perhaps we need to hear from a woman theologian on a subject that is so profoundly female. Yes, the male is the perpetrator of this heinous of all crimes, but the female is damaged goods forever, not only physically but mentally and emotionally. There is no excuse for a man to commit rape, EVER. Yes, there is forgiveness but God also gave us earthly judges and prisons! That is where a rapist belongs, be he priest or king or president or an ordinary citizen. If he is mentally ill, that needs to be addressed but he is ALWAYS responsible. Please do not even appear to be making things less horrendous than they are when such an act is committed. Desire for one’s wife is one thing, lust for female body parts is totally another. The individual is corrupt who commits such a crime and it is very unlikely that such an individual will ever be able to change. I want to hear from the women. Men are, generally speaking, taking this heinous crime way too lightly!! I pray that any woman who has experienced this act of aggression will one day be able to forgive, for her own sake. She has to come to a point where she can put the individual who perpetrated this crime against her in God’s hands and leave him there. Only God will make the final judgement and he will go free only if he repents and turns from his wicked and corrupt ways. And he needs to make reparations. We can’t say, “Oh, I forgive you.”, end of story. He has to make it right somehow. If he is a person of means ( I don’t say ‘man’ because he is not a man in my eyes!), he could get involved in seeing to it that this terrible ill never happens again to any man, woman or child. He needs to apologize and help the woman financially if she has become pregnant, etc. He simply must take responsibility for his crimes. I have not even touched on the topic of priests who rape children. There are no words for this abomination!! May God have mercy on all of us. Amen.
Thank you for your article on God’s statement that he “desires mercy, not sacrifice”. Indeed the world teaches us to be competitive, to want to do better than the next person and to “rejoice at the other person’s misfortune”. So when God comes along and dishes out the same rewards to people who have put in massively different effort into a task, we struggle with such grace, seeing it as being unfair to the one who has worked harder. That is why the workers in the parable of the vineyard could not understand why they all received the same reward, when others worked longer hours. What they failed to understand is that salvation is an act of God’s grace, and because all of us have sinned and fall short of God’s grace, we all get an equal “measure or dosage” of salvation, meaning that we all escape God’s wrath by the same measure irrespective of the gravity of our sin, as long as we confess and repent. If we all loved each other as we love ourselves, then we would never struggle over this show of God’s mercy to all humanity. This has always been the way God dealt with his creation. When the Israelites were in the wilderness with Moses, and when they went out to collect the free manna, the Bible tells us that even though there were some among them with larger appetites than others, and thus gathered more manna, when they got back into the tent, and they measured what each had collected, the result was that even though some thought they had gathered more than others, by God’s measure of an omer, “the one who gathered much did not have too much, and the one who gathered little did not have too little” (Exodus 16:18). Such are the ways of our God.
Thank you for this article.
I think the meaning of “I desire mercy, not sacrifice” is often overlooked.
It is not something we want to think about. Though few would admit it, I think many people do not want to see other people, people who have committed major or even minor offences, receive forgiveness for their sins. It reminds me if Jonah 4:1-5 where Jonah tells God he tried to avoid going to Nineveh because “I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity.” Jonah wanted Nineveh destroyed for its sins. Jonah wanted his sacrifice of time and all the things he had to give up to live as God instructed to be the key to Gods favor, not mercy, but God replied “Is it right for you to be angry?” and sent him the olive tree to live and die and demonstrate God’s point.
We can also see “mercy, not sacrifice” in the parable of the the laborers in the field, where the laborers who worked all day question the landlord about paying the same wage to everyone when some worked only a few hours, and the landlord replied “Don’t I have the right to do what I want with my own money? Or are you envious because I am generous?’”.
The feeling that people should get what they deserve bears a strong resemblance to the tattling child at school seeking positive recognition by pointing out to the teacher the things that other children are doing wrong. The teacher’s response is still “take care of yourself and let me worry about them”, not because the teacher is an authoritarian dictator who demands that he be the sole dispenser of judgement, but because the teacher has the education of the class as a larger goal before him to which even discipline is subject.
I think God’s preference for mercy over sacrifice is in pursuit of a similar goal.
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