Good Merciful Shepherd Happy is the one who extends mercy (Matthew 5:7)In a chapter entitled “The Movements of Grace,” Deforia Lane writes of the questions surrounding the issue of suffering. After working at a developmental center where there were more than two hundred mentally handicapped children with IQs of 50 and below she describes her typical day.
Seizure. Doctors describe it as an electrical storm: unorganized, uncontrolled, and unimaginably violent. It starts mysteriously in deep recesses of the brain, breeding on some unknown cue, spreading impulses like fire through neurons. Muscles contract, bowels move, energy is devoured. For a few seconds, sometimes up to a minute, the body is usually locked in the fetal position. Afterward the victim has temporary memory loss and lies in a dreamlike state.
When one of the students at the center suffered a seizure, the teacher would dutifully write it down on a chart of click a counter on the belt, timing its duration, or, on a good day, joke about the pee on the carpet. No big deal.
All, somehow, for God’s glory.
Lane ponders John 9, where the disciples ask whose sin was responsible for the blindness of a man. The theologians of their day taught that personal sin was always responsible for personal suffering. So the disciples ask Jesus, “Whose sin was it? The man’s own sin, or the sin of his parents?” Jesus replies in His typical fashion—part easy to understand and part not so easy. He said that no one’s sin was responsible. Good answer. But He concludes by explaining that the man’s blindness happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his life. “What could this mean?” Lane asks.
That God allows suffering for his glory? That God will heal everyone who suffers? And what about the children, like Eric, autistic and agitated, who in the few years that I knew him never let anyone or anything break through, except the constant fingering of his own mouth? Eric would grow from young and broken to old and broken, and along the way express only sadness or violence. What about Eric?
And what about the parents of children like Eric, once filled with hope and energy and drive? What about the parents who grow old too, quicker than most, and in their weariness, their bone fatigue, gloss over, break up, shut down?
For what? God’s glory?
Lane ultimately chooses not to wrestle with the “why” question. Rather, she focuses on answers, or what she calls “openings.”
With almost all the children I worked with at the Center, no matter how profoundly retarded or alone, I usually found some opening, some rip in the curtain that separates them from the rest of the world, that traps them in a broken body. I kept looking for it, praying for grace, finally spotting the tear through which we could give to each other something beautiful: a song, a few notes, a laugh. The break may be tiny, open only for a flash, and then gone, sometimes forever. But the opportunity, nonetheless, was there, for connection, for touch, for God’s grace in an otherwise graceless life—a transforming and transformed moment.
Part of what Christ’s response to his disciples in John 9 means, I believe, is that God wants us to be lovers. For it is through us, his people, that God displays his work, which is his transforming love. Suffering, in all its strangeness, allows us special opportunities to demonstrate God’s love to those who feel unloved and broken.
Something else strikes me. The most profoundly retarded children taught me the most. Sometimes their behavior was almost subhuman, life at its most base: drooling, eating, gagging, spitting up, peeing, fighting, clenching, sleeping. Yet at times they would arrest me with something distinctly human, a dim sparkle of a soul that made me stop and take inventory. Looking for the smallest responses makes a person realize what is large in life: a touch, a smile, a gift. It is, I know, a big price for these children to pay, but is nonetheless a measure of value.
And just like the rest of us, they wanted to express themselves, to be understood and heard, to make connections with another person.
Mercy. What is like to be merciful? Jesus extended help to the unlovely. When the blind pestered him so much that the disciples told him to send the pest away, Jesus healed him. When the children came to him and the disciples were bothered by these kids, Jesus said, “let the children come to me.” When he was eating with known sinners and tax collectors and the religious leaders questioned him about his associations, he explained “It is not those who are healthy who have need of a physician, but the sick. Learn what it means when it says in the Old Testament, ‘I desire compassion, not sacrifice.’ I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners.” (Matt 9:12-13). Mercy is a characteristic of God. The 136 Psalm tells us over and over, that God’s love endures forever. Yet Jesus didn’t find mercy, even though innocent. He was put to death by two tyrannical powers, that of Rome and political tyranny, and that of Judaism, or religious tyranny.
People need mercy. Sinners need mercy. Some people who have ruined their lives and live in a world that has turned its back on them. They are rejected. What they don’t need is to meet another hypocritical condemning Christian. What they do need is to be met with mercy, and to be given a prescription of mercy—the Lord Jesus Christ. It may not be much to make the connection, but it is the only way the connection can be made. If you extend mercy to someone who you would rather avoid, but reach out to them with the love of God, you will have a greater appreciation for what the God of all mercy has done for you. You will remember that when you stand before God, rather than judgment, rather than condemnation for all the things you have done, you will find mercy through the sacrifice of the Son. Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.
