Mercy Can Get You Killed
For some, mercy is soft. It’s the fluffy theological pillow you turn to when the mere thought of promoting justice renders you exhausted. “Promote justice? That’s hard! Let’s talk about mercy instead . . .” So the thought goes.
But the thought and accompanying image are flawed. Mercy is not soft or fluffy, a comfortable alternative to justice. In our cruel world, mercy is justice’s companion, its revolutionary cobelligerent. Put bluntly, being merciful can get you killed.
Mark 3 supports this audacious claim. Consider the text:
1Another time Jesus went into the synagogue, and a man with a shriveled hand was there. 2 Some of them were looking for a reason to accuse Jesus, so they watched him closely to see if he would heal him on the Sabbath. 3 Jesus said to the man with the shriveled hand, “Stand up in front of everyone.”
4 Then Jesus asked them, “Which is lawful on the Sabbath: to do good or to do evil, to save life or to kill?” But they remained silent.
5 He looked around at them in anger and, deeply distressed at their stubborn hearts, said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” He stretched it out, and his hand was completely restored. 6 Then the Pharisees went out and began to plot with the Herodians how they might kill Jesus.
The scene highlights two forms of deformity—physical and spiritual. Jesus, ever committed to life and liberation, confronts both, but the outcomes differ. As Jesus mercifully heals a marginalized man’s physical deformity, the spiritually deformed elites grow worse. The same merciful act that liberates one man from social death leads others to plot a course that culminates in Golgotha.
Notice that Mark subtly situates the contrast between Jesus’s life-giving, liberating mercy and the elite’s spiritually deformed drive for death within an echo from the Exodus. As Jon Sobrino observes, what the NIV renders stubborn hearts is “literally, ‘hardness of heart.’” Hence Mark portrays the Pharisees in the synagogue as hard-hearted Pharaohs who ignore suffering people’s cries but plot a prophet’s death with oppression-maintaining Herodians. This portrait contrasts with Exodus’s depiction of God as One who hears oppressed Israel’s cries, sees their suffering, and works their merciful liberation through Moses, Aaron, and Miriam.
Like the Exodus prophets, Jesus’s ministry reveals that mercy threatens unjust systems and people, and that people respond to this threat with violence. As Sobrino writes: “Tragically, Jesus is sentenced to death for practicing mercy consistently and to the last.” Similar lethal violence met Archbishop Oscar Romero and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. when they sided with the poor and championed visions of mercy that challenged the unjust status quo. Because mercy is justice’s cobelligerent, unjust people and systems can’t tolerate it.
But here we must go deeper. For Mark identifies the spiritually deformed as religious people—they’re Pharisees and Herodians. It is these religious people who directly challenge Jesus by perpetuating practices and structures of death rather than joining his liberating, life-sustaining mercy. Unlike Jesus, these religious people ignore justice, mercy, and faithfulness, and what these virtues demand for Sabbath keeping. The spiritually deformed could recite Deuteronomy 5’s linking of the Sabbath to Israel’s merciful liberation from Egypt while having a Pharaoh-like indifference to suffering and a craving to kill. This disturbing fact should remind us of the ecclesiastical resistance Archbishop Romero and Rev. King experienced for championing mercy in response to injustice. When mercy challenges oppression and the religious groups and practices upholding it, violence ensues. Being merciful can get you killed.
