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The Quality of Mercy
Sermon by Leah Grace Goodwin
for Sunday, July 6, 2003
Scripture: (Old Testament) 1 Kings 19:1-15, (New Testament) Mark 6:1-13, (Swedenborg) Arcana Coelestia 714, De Miraculis 4
For the past month, I have had a new man in my life.
All right. Entertaining though it is to see the looks on all your faces, I
should point out that this new love of mine is three months old and wears
diapers with Big Bird on them. His name is Luke, and I am his nanny. We have
a date five days a week.
Now, Luke is a sweet baby, but he gets fairly testy come midafternoon—by which
I mean bloodcurdling wails. So, most days, in an effort to divert him and
retain my own sanity, I pop him in the baby knapsack, and, together, we tour
Cambridge. Or at least, I do. Luke never stays awake for longer than half a
block. Very quickly, his bobbly little head droops, his arms slacken, and his
pudgy feet dangle as he snoozes.
And boy, he sleeps. That baby can sleep through anything – jackhammers,
sirens, car horns, you name it, he baby-snores through it. Sometimes it seems
as though his peace grows more profound in direct proportion to an increase in
the surrounding volume.
But what does wake him, and quite efficiently, is quiet. His eyes pop open, as
if to ensure that the proper people are still around, that his little world is
still safe. Noise, action, motion: these stimuli are Luke’s existential
placeholders. As long as there is motion, someone is holding him. As long as
there is noise, there is a world to which he can awaken. Stillness, on the
other hand, guarantees none of that. For Luke, sound reassures – and quiet
bodes ill.
I submit that, weird though his sleeping habits may seem, the kid has a point:
we, in the 21st century, have a tense relationship with silence.
It’s not that we don’t like it; it’s just that we never get it. We experience
real stillness so rarely that we don’t know what to DO with it, after the
novelty wears off. The gadgetry and modern conveniences we live with all
create their own whooshes, buzzes, hums, or low roars of their own – making
enough ambient noise that, I would wager, the average child born in an
industrial culture today never experiences utter silence.
And I suspect that Luke’s well-honed instincts make a more fundamental point.
Luke is a much-cuddled baby, whose tiny realm admits very little cause for
fear. If he is unnerved by the potential absence suggested by silence, how
much more reason have we grown-ups to be afraid? All of us have lived in this
world long enough to know that life is never stable, that presence inevitably
yields to absence: the most fundamental certainties prove fragile; the deepest
friendships sometimes founder; the heartiest, most beloved people wax old and
die.
I hope that little Luke fears none of these things yet. But I know that I do,
with a gut-clenching dread. And I know that that fear of absence, that horror
of an emptiness too often heralded by silence, is what so unnerves me about
today’s gospel reading, about Jesus’ encounter in his own hometown. It’s
disheartening enough, though not entirely surprising, that he is rejected by
the people with whom he grew up. It makes a certain sense – any performer will
tell you that a hometown crowd can be as harsh as they are sympathetic.
Familiarity does, after all, tarnish the celebrity luster. And I imagine that
Jesus, with his exorcisms, his all-too familiar, yet subtly different,
prophetic message, and the whole “Son of God” claim, faced a more dubious crowd
than most.
But what makes no sense, and what is thoroughly upsetting, is the
story’s next pronouncement. “He could do no deed of power there,” says
Mark, “and he was amazed at their unbelief.”
He could do no deed of power there.
If God is omnipotent, how on earth is it possible for the Christ, for
God’s own incarnated self, to attempt a miracle -- and come up empty?
Of all times for Jesus’ powers to desert him, standing in front of the
Nazarene crowd -- in front of childhood friends, tongue-clicking neighbors, and
the like – seems a profoundly inconvenient, even heartless, time for God to
abandon Jesus – for God to abandon himself, in fact.
And Christ’s rejection at Nazareth is only one episode in a string of
encounters in which Jesus’ spiritual authority is muzzled. Sometimes it is
Jesus himself who silences the attempts to announce his divinity; he forbids
innumerable demons to speak his true name, and he spends the book of Mark
warning the people he heals, and even his own disciples, not to tell anyone of
his peculiar holiness. And, in the end, all these denials, failures, and
hushings-up turn out merely to foreshadow Jesus’ last, and most disgraceful,
earthly defeat – his death on the cross.
This train of events is hardly reassuring. But, let us assume that
Jesus was unable to perform those powerful deeds in Nazareth not because he had
to fail, but because God permitted him to fail.
Why? Why does God refuse to let Jesus manifest his divinity? Why would God
deny himself the opportunity to prove his authority? Why is the Christ left
powerless in front of his own neighbors, and eventually left to die? Why God’s
silence? How can a loving Lord refuse to speak?
I wonder if God’s silence, somehow, is – sometimes – the quality of his
mercy.
This idea is, at first glance, frankly offensive. It does not make sense: How
can allowing someone to fail be an act of mercy?
Swedenborg suggests that the silence of a miracle left unperformed might be a
demonstration of God’s love toward the human race. Here is what he says:
The inward things of faith… cannot be sown or implanted under compulsion, but
only in freedom, thus not amid the terror and amazement induced by miracles.
The things that flow in under compulsion…as when we are influenced by miracles,
are of such a nature that they persuade us in ways that do not fit with our own
state…Consequently, in the case of those who have not faith from any other
source than miracles, the goods and truths which flow in are joined with
falsities and defiled by evils … In a short time, they are either turned upside
down or denied.
Miracles, according to Swedenborg, cannot make real faith; they can only
strengthen faith that is already present, faith rooted in an individual’s free
acceptance of the Divine. Faith jumpstarted by a miracle has no spiritual
ground in which to grow – because love and life for God can only grow in
freedom, and miracles are so convincing that they compel.
Jesus “can do no deed of power” before this unbelieving crowd, then, not
because he needs their belief to make his own power real, but rather because
the time, for them, simply wasn’t right. What if Jesus had produced a miracle?
Some people would most likely have been convinced of his message and his
divinity – but what then?
Well, they would have lost their freedom – they would have been ensnared by the
miracle they had witnessed, made slaves to the God who brought forth such a
wonder, compelled to a faith that was a lie because it was not freely chosen.
And slavery, as Swedenborg frequently points out, is of hell, and not of
heaven.
Jesus, powerful rhetoric notwithstanding, did not engage in spiritual arm-
twisting. He did not make it his divine business to exercise his infinite
power toward convincing the people who, perhaps, needed it the most. And, in
the end, he is crucified for allowing humanity that soul freedom.
God loves us so much, wants so much for us to know him, that he permits
us not to love him. In Christ’s failure at Nazareth, in the denial of his
divinity that follows him to the cross, we witness the Lord’s commitment to our
spiritual freedom, to the wholeness of every soul. God’s silence reveals
itself for what it truly can be: his most profound expression of love.
We spend so much of our time begging God to let us see Him, to make himself
known to us, presumably by transcendent means, and what we often get in reply
is… silence. Sometimes it seems a flat, anticlimactic silence, a silence that
makes us wonder why we were naïve enough to bother asking in the first place.
Or maybe, if we happen to be still enough, or in desperate enough straits, that
stillness is the “sheer silence” of God’s presence – it is a silence
substantive enough, loud enough, abiding enough after the nattering of our own
panicked minds, that we can hear it from deep within the bowels of whatever
spiritual cave we may currently call home. It is a presence that embraces
rather than invades, that broods more than it infiltrates. God’s silence – not
his absence, not at all, but rather an abiding presence so familiar, so gentle,
so entwined in our souls that we forget it is there – that silence is the
quality of God’s mercy.
Carl Jung said once that, “Bidden or not bidden, God is present.” We
can summon God or dismiss Him, demand his presence or refuse to receive him,
but really, we summon or forbid ourselves to encounter the One who is already
there. We may doubt because the Lord moves mysteriously over the domain of our
souls, but he is inscribed on every part of us. We may turn our faces from
God’s brightness, but the heavenly sun is still there, waiting, into
eternity. “Even if a person loves nothing whatever but himself,” says
Swedenborg, “yet so great is the Lord’s mercy – for it is Divine and Infinite –
that the Lord does not leave a person, but continually breathes into that
person His own life.”
God created us. God dwells in us. Look, he says. I have written you on the
palm of my hand. Abide in me, for I abide in you. You are mine.
And if I am silent, it is only because I know you so well that our love needs
no words.
Amen.
Copyright 2003 by Leah Grace Goodwin
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