Mtr Mary Trainor

The quality of mercy is not strain’d, it droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven

upon the place beneath…*

Dear friend,

Turn the other cheek. Give the cloak, too. Go the second mile. These words from Jesus are so familiar that the unchurched know and use them, too. Seeming metaphors of grace and hospitality that communicate across time and contexts.

However…looking a bit more closely at Matthew’s Gospel for today, it is immediately evident that these words are not about how to be a good hostess, or how to treat those we love. Rather, they are an admonishment against resisting those we believe oppose us or our efforts. That's right. Resist evildoers. We don’t fight back. We don’t trade blow for blow.

[Mercy] is twice blest; It blesseth him that gives and him that takes…*

Just when we might like to write someone off, or tell them off, or deny them a kind response—because justice seems to warrant such—we are to do the opposite. Give more, be kinder, extend grace to the other.

My mother had a fiery temperament. She was known to “tell someone off”‘rather than take a higher road.

And earthly power doth then show likest God’s when mercy seasons justice.

Because she also was a kind and loving person, she eventually had to “walk it back,” as we say today, and she would approach her target later with an apology. I can recall her more than once psyching herself up to contact the offended, who had likely offended first. On her way there, and in what the Bard might have called a stage whisper, she would mutter to any of us nearby: “I don’t want justice, Lord. I want mercy.”

And mostly it was mercy she received.

Mtr Mary

*Spoken by Portia, Act 4, Scene 1, Merchant of Venice, William Shakespeare