Let Your Light Shine
Day 258 – 15 September
Mercy You Love to Show
He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God. (Micah 6:8, NIV)
Rowing Out for Strangers
On the fourth of March 1824, in a London tavern, a retired soldier from the Isle of Man persuaded a room of influential men to found something new. Sir William Hillary had stood on the Manx shore and watched sailors drown within sight of land; on one occasion he had rowed out himself with a handful of volunteers to pull the crew of a foundering naval ship from Douglas Bay. His pamphlet proposed a service unlike any before it, staffed, in his own words, by a large body of men in constant readiness to risk their own lives for the preservation of those whom they had never known or seen, perhaps of another nation. The Royal National Lifeboat Institution has kept that promise for two centuries. Its crews are still almost entirely unpaid volunteers, ordinary people who live within a few miles of the station and drop everything when the pager goes. It takes no money from government; it runs on gifts and legacies. And at its bicentenary in 2024 it announced that it had saved 146,277 lives, which works out at two people rescued from the sea every single day since 1824, nearly all of them strangers to the crews who went out for them. Hillary’s family motto is still painted on the walls: with courage, nothing is impossible. That is a very particular kind of goodness, and the Hebrew Bible has a very particular word for it.
What Is Good
The prophet Micah, eight centuries before Christ, boiled the whole of God’s requirement down to one sentence, and it begins with a word we met yesterday under its Greek name. “He has shown you, O mortal, what is good” (Micah 6:8). The Hebrew is מַה־טּוֹב (mah-tov, what is good), and טוֹב (tov, good) is the word God spoke over creation, very good, a word that in Hebrew carries beauty and pleasantness as well as rightness; the good and the lovely are one word in this language, just as they were in Peter’s καλός (kalos, beautiful, good). Then Micah names the good in three parts: to act justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with your God. It is the middle one that concerns us, and it is two words in Hebrew, אַהֲבַת חֶסֶד (ahavat chesed, the love of mercy). The second of them is among the hardest words in the Old Testament to bring into English. חֶסֶד (chesed) appears some two hundred and forty times, more than two hundred of them describing God Himself, and no single English word holds it. Translators have reached for mercy, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, steadfast love; one scholar has called it loving covenant obligation. It is the loyal, committed, long-term kindness that a covenant partner shows, love that keeps showing up, love that costs something and does the deed anyway. When Miles Coverdale sat down in 1535 to put the Psalms into English, he found the language had no word large enough for it, so he made one: loving-kindness, a word English had never possessed until he needed it for חֶסֶד (chesed, steadfast love). The lifeboat crews are chesed in oilskins: loyal, costly kindness to people who can never repay it and whom they will never see again.
The Mercy You Delight In
But Micah asks for more than chesed. He asks for the love of it, אַהֲבַת חֶסֶד (ahavat chesed, the love of mercy), and the verb he chooses is the passionate one, אַהֲבָה (ahavah, love), the word for a lover’s devotion and a parent’s ache and a covenant partner’s loyalty, nothing mild about it. God’s requirement, on Micah’s telling, is met by people who do more than practise mercy; they are in love with it. They delight in showing it. And this is exactly where a merciful deed becomes a beautiful one. Mercy done grudgingly is still mercy, and the person on the receiving end is still helped, but everyone in the room can feel the sigh behind it, the ledger being kept, the favour that will be mentioned later. That mercy is correct. It is seldom lovely. Mercy loved is another thing entirely: the debt forgiven with a lightness that makes the debtor feel honoured, the second chance given as if it were a pleasure to give, the help offered before the asking is finished and with no receipt kept. That is the mercy people watch and remember and, Peter would say, glorify God for. It is the lifeboat crew who, asked why they go, look puzzled, because to them there was never a question. And it is the mercy God shows. The Old Testament names chesed as His before it names it as ours, the God who is abundant in it, whose mercy endures for ever, who delights in it more than in sacrifice. We can love mercy because we have been loved with it first, extravagantly and at cost, by One who rowed out for strangers long before Hillary did.
Loving It on a Tuesday
The test this Tuesday sets is a delicate one, because it concerns the manner more than the deed. Most of us will show some mercy today; someone will be late, or wrong, or in need, and we will do the decent thing. The question is whether we will love doing it. When the colleague who let you down asks for another chance, will the yes come with a sigh, or with a warmth that leaves them feeling more valued than before? When the relative who owes you money cannot pay, will the forgiveness be granted or given, filed or forgotten? When the stranger needs help you could reasonably refuse, will you go, as the lifeboat volunteers go, as though there had never been a question? Loving mercy is a habit that grows by being practised gladly, and it grows fastest in people who keep remembering how much of it they have received. So before the day’s first act of mercy, take ten seconds to recall the mercy shown to you, undeserved and unrepayable, and let that memory set the tone. Then show it to someone else with the same open hand. Do it well, and point it away from yourself, and keep it gentle even when no one thanks you, and you will have done the most beautiful work there is.
Declaration
I want to do more than show mercy today; I want to love showing it. I know the difference between the two, because I have been on the receiving end of both: the help that came with a sigh and a ledger, and the help that came like a gift, warm and free and glad. The second is the one I was made for, and the second is the one I have been given, over and over, by a kindness that never once kept a receipt. So I will forgive gladly, as one who has been forgiven more. I will give the second chance with a lightness that leaves the other person standing taller. I will go to the stranger in trouble the way the lifeboat crews go, before I have finished weighing the cost. And I will do it all because I was rowed out for first, at a price I will never repay, by a mercy that loved me before I knew its name. Let me be in love with mercy today. Let my kindness be the kind that a hard heart cannot help but call beautiful.
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