Rev. Jared Buss
Pittsburgh New Church; February 9, 2025
Readings: 1 Samuel 24:1-12, 16, 17 (children’s talk); Matthew 23:13-17, 27-39;
Secrets of Heaven §7206.2
David could have killed Saul. Saul was treating Him like an enemy, and he certainly could have responded in kind. But he refused to do so. One word for that is mercy. David showed mercy to Saul. And today’s sermon is about mercy. The basic message is that the Lord answers evil with mercy. And this’s relevant because there’s a lot of evil in the world. If you read too many news articles, you can start to feel overwhelmed by the amount of evil that’s present in the world. We see wars, we see people in power apparently using their power to accomplish destructive things. The Lord meets that evil with mercy, and few things are more powerful than the example that He sets for us in so doing.
We need to understand His example, so that we can follow it. So we’re going to turn to the Gospel. What you’re about to hear might not sound like an example of a merciful response to evil, but it is—and that’s exactly why we’re considering this particular passage. These are words that the Lord Himself speaks in Matthew 23: [vv. 13-17, 27-39].
So how does this passage illustrate the Lord’s mercy? The words He speaks here are not gentle. They might even strike us as brutal, or ruthless—though they can’t be, because we can’t attach those qualities to the Lord. But where is the mercy in this passage? The Lord is God, and only speaks the truth, so the words that He says here must be true, and they must be justified—but where is the mercy?
We need to define mercy before we can go any further. When we hear the word “mercy,” we tend to think of the sort of thing that we saw in the story about David and Saul: David could have killed Saul, but he chose not to. He showed forbearance. The Lord doesn’t seem to be demonstrating much forbearance in the reading from Matthew. He seems to be “letting the Pharisees have it.”
Forbearance is related to mercy, but mercy itself is something different. Here’s a simple definition: to show mercy is to respond to evil, or to misery, with love. In the teachings of the New Church we read that “love, when it is shown towards those in a state of wretchedness, is called mercy” (SH §9219). So the fact that David chose not to kill Saul is an important part of that story… but that forbearance by itself isn’t what makes that story a story of mercy. It’s a story of mercy because David believed that Saul was valued by the Lord, and he insisted on acting accordingly. Saul was the Lord’s anointed, and he would not stretch out his hand against the Lord’s anointed (1 Sam. 24:6, 10). That’s how love behaves. Saul was in a deeply disturbed state of mind; he’d tried to kill David on multiple occasions. But David appears to have responded to that evil with love—and that is mercy.
There’s plenty of evil in evidence in the reading from Matthew. The hypocritical, power-hungry mentality of the scribes and Pharisees is awful. But where is the love, in this reading? Where do we hear the Lord’s love? The answer is that we hear it in His grief. It’s easy to hear the Lord’s words in this reading as a diatribe—as an angry, judgmental denunciation. If we assume that His words were spoken in that tone, it’s going to be hard to hear his mercy. But that changes if we assume that His words were spoken with a tone of grief. That’s the tone we’re meant to hear.
The first and biggest clue to this is the word “woe.” Over and over He says, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees” (vv. 13, 14, 15, 16, 23, 27, 29). We might be inclined to hear that word “woe” as a finger-wagging word—as if the Lord is repeatedly telling the scribes and Pharisees, “you guys are gonna get it!” But that’s not what “woe” means. It means sadness. In the teachings of the New Church we’re told that, “‘woe’ symbolizes a lamentation over the evil in someone, and so over his unhappy state” (AR §416).
The Lord grieves for the scribes and Pharisees. He grieves that they don’t see the damage they’re doing to the church and to their own souls. And if we make that assumption about His tone, instead of assuming that His words are just angry, the meaning of some of His statements shifts a little. For example, He says, “Serpents, brood of vipers! How can you escape the condemnation of hell?” (v. 33). We could assume that this question is rhetorical, and that the Lord’s point is simply that they cannot escape condemnation. Or we could hear it as a sincere question: How can the Pharisees escape? He sees that they’ve put themselves in hell, and He grieves for that, and He longs to see them escape.
This interpretation is supported by the next thing He says: “Therefore, indeed, I send you prophets, wise men and scribes” (v. 34). He sends them prophets to give them the warning that they need to hear, and to teach them the way out of hell. And of course, He Himself was one of those prophets: He is called the greatest Prophet (TCR §§126-131). He longs to show them the way out of hell, but He also knows that they will not choose to follow. He says, “I send you prophets, wise men and scribes: some of them you will kill and crucify, and some of them you will scourge in your synagogues and persecute from city to city” (v. 34). So He grieves.
It's at the end of this reading that His grief becomes most apparent. He says:
O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the one who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her! How often I wanted to gather your children together as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing! (v. 37)
This lamentation is for Jerusalem, not for the scribes and Pharisees. But Jerusalem symbolizes the church, and the scribes and Pharisees were the leaders of that church. Here He says, in so many words, that He longs to gather the children of that church under His wings. He loves them and He longs to protect them, but they are not willing. This lamentation runs beneath everything that He says to the scribes and the Pharisees, prior to this point.
You don’t feel grief unless you love something. The Lord’s love is revealed in His grief. And love that meets evil not with anger, but with sorrow, is mercy—that is the definition of mercy! In the teachings of the New Church we’re told that “mercy is love that is grieving” (SH §5480).
The idea that the Lord is merciful is one we hear all the time. We hear it so often that it can seem like a platitude. The power of mercy is only evident when we see and understand both mercy and the evil that that mercy responds to. So it’s important to understand that what the Pharisees did was destructive. They corrupted the truths of the church to make themselves powerful. They turned truth into falsity and good into evil. We see in the Gospel that they were willing to commit murder in the name of their religion. And the truths of the church are given to us for the sake of our salvation. The Pharisees were hurting the souls of the people who followed them. So the Lord says, “you shut up the kingdom of heaven against men; for you neither go in yourselves, nor do you allow those who are entering to go in” (v. 13). That was an evil that the Lord had to address: He had to challenge it, He had to break the power of that evil. But He did so with grief—with mercy—and not with anger. He loved even the scribes and the Pharisees. If they were willing, He would have gathered them under His wings. In the teachings of the New Church we read:
… even when someone lives like a wild animal, loving nothing whatsoever but himself and things regarding himself, still the Lord’s mercy, being Divine and Infinite, is so great that He does not abandon him, but by means of angels continually breathes His life into him. (SH §714)
No matter how great the evils of this world or the evils in our hearts may be, the Lord regards us with mercy.
Of course, grief isn’t the only affection we hear in His words to the scribes and Pharisees. We also hear zeal. He loves them, but He still speaks hard words to them. He still calls them serpents and a brood of vipers (v. 33). One truth we can take away from this is that mercy isn’t always soft-spoken. Love has a backbone. Another way to put it is that the Lord needed to get through to the scribes and the Pharisees because He wanted to save them—and that was far more important to Him than whether or not He offended them. Mercy is not the same thing as an inability to confront evil, and love is not the same thing as telling people what they want to hear. When the Lord speaks to people who are in a state of evil, the leading edge of His message is the truth. And when truth leads, or appears to lead, it feels hard. It’s important to understand that there are hard things that the Lord needs to say, because this world is not altogether as it should be. And it’s important to understand that His truth is never separated from His mercy. We turn now to our final reading, which is from the teachings of the New Church, from the book Secrets of Heaven [§7206.2].
One of the functions of truth is to reveal evil for what it is. So the reading says, “By [judgements from Divine truth] people steeped in … evil are shown to be damned.” That’s what the Lord does in the reading from Matthew. He reveals an evil, and the consequences of that evil. But the truth He speaks does not damn anyone—the reading says that His truths are “nothing other than expressions of mercy.” His mercy runs through everything He says. And mercy is love; mercy is a yearning to save. Instead, it’s people who damn themselves when they refuse to accept His mercy. The reading then goes on to explain that everyone needs mercy. Knowing the truths of faith is not enough: we need help from the Lord, and we need to understand that He helps us solely because He has compassion on us. Left to ourselves, we’re full of evils—but by the Lord’s mercy we are withheld from evil and maintained in good, and with great force.
So what are we to do with these teachings? It’s good to know that the Lord is merciful—good to be able to hear His love, even when He speaks hard words to the Pharisees. But what are we to do with these teachings? There’s a pretty obvious answer: we’re meant to follow His example. In Luke He says, “Therefore be merciful, just as your Father also is merciful” (6:36).
In this world, we will encounter evil. Sometimes we go looking for it, sometimes it runs up and smacks us on the nose. Sometimes the evil that we see, or read about, is frustrating—and sometimes it’s overwhelming. Sometimes it’s appalling. When we’re appalled, it’s easy to feel a kind of heat. Sometimes that’s the heat of zeal, sometimes it’s just anger. Sometimes it wavers in between. We’re allowed to oppose evil—we’re meant to oppose it. Love is not spineless. But the Lord meets evil with love. If His love is moved to grief, it grieves. But He does not rage. He does not despise. He does not hate. No matter who He’s looking at.
And of course, there’s the old saying “there but for the grace of God go I.” Sometimes we do the very things that we’re tempted to despise when other people do them. When we’ve done wrong, and we know it, the Lord’s truth feels hard and it can make us want to hide in holes in the ground. But His mercy runs through His truth. In Isaiah He says:
With a little wrath I hid My face from you for a moment; but with everlasting mercy I will have compassion on you…. For this is like the waters of Noah to Me; for as I have sworn that the waters of Noah would no longer cover the earth, so have I sworn that I would not be angry with you, nor rebuke you. For the mountains shall depart and the hills be removed, but My mercy shall not depart from you, nor shall My covenant of peace be removed …. (54:8-10)
Amen.