Monday in the second Week of Lent, March 14, 2022

Luke 6:36-38

Jesus said to his disciples: “Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.
Stop judging and you will not be judged. Stop condemning and you will not be condemned. Forgive and you will be forgiven. Give and gifts will be given to you; a good measure, packed together, shaken down, and overflowing, will be poured into your lap. For the measure with which you measure will in return be measured out to you.”

“Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.”  When we read of people asking for mercy from other people in the Sacred Scriptures, it is because they are in a desperate state.  They are pleading for their lives or for the lives of their loved ones, as for instance in the parable of the steward in the parable: “Be patient with me and I will repay you everything!” (Matthew 8, 26); or, in the case of the Syro-Phoenician woman: “Have mercy on me, Lord, son of David: my daughter is grievously troubled by a devil” (Matthew 15, 22).  Mercy is bestowed upon the spendthrift steward in the parable by canceling his enormous debt, and upon the Gentile woman by the Lord expulsion of the demon.  In neither case could they help themselves.  Similarly, we pray to God for mercy when we realize that we are threatened with disaster and death, knowing that only he can save us.  And we trust that God will look beyond our unworthiness to see our need and humility.

Almighty God did not content himself, as it were, with granting mercy from on high, but sent his Son into our world.  As St. John Paul II wrote in his encyclical Dives in Misericordia, “In Christ and through Christ, God . . . becomes especially visible in His mercy.”  The Lord Jesus is in this way mercy incarnate.  To remind ourselves of this mercy, we need only look upon a crucifix.  As members of the Lord’s  Body, we are also to show mercy and to be merciful persons.

We can consider the next verse in the context of mercy: “Stop judging and you will not be judged. Stop condemning and you will not be condemned.”  While we are well-advised as to why we should not judge, we should not judge or condemn because it goes against mercy to do so.  Likewise, “Forgive and you will be forgiven.”  We desire forgiveness and so we forgive, but we ought also to forgive because it is the merciful action.

“Give and gifts will be given to you; a good measure, packed together, shaken down, and overflowing, will be poured into your lap.”  Here is the reward for mercy. Gifts, that is, goods that are freely given to us by Almighty God, will be given to us in great abundance.  The image of the apron which the Lord Jesus is of a woman going to market to buy grain.  She makes her payment and holds out her apron by its edges.  The seller then overfills her apron so that the grain runs over.  This is a most generous  seller.  He keeps pouring long after the woman expects him to stop.  The love of God is a torrent that never stops.