“O God, whose glory it is always to have mercy: Be gracious to all who have gone astray from your ways, and bring them again with penitent hearts and steadfast faith to embrace and hold fast the unchangeable truth of your Word, Jesus Christ your Son; who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.”
-The Collect for the Second Sunday in Lent
“True power is when we have every justification to kill and we don’t. A man steals something, he’s brought in before the emperor, he throws himself down on the ground, he begs for his life, he knows that he is going to die, and the emperor pardons him. This worthless man, the emperor lets him go.”
-Oskar Schindler to an SS Officer in Steven Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List”
When I think of glory I think of the splendor and majesty of the royal family in the Netflix show “The Crown.” I imagine Beyoncé being honored for her record-breaking thirtieth Grammy award. I picture the thunder and lightning that accompanied the giving of the Law at Mount Sinai.
What I don’t think about when I think of glory is mercy. Yet this is exactly what the collect proclaims. God’s character is defined by the compassionate treatment of the undeserving. His magnificence is identified with forgiveness. His power is made manifest in grace.
Do you equate glory with mercy? Much like the older brother in the Parable of the Prodigal Son, the SS Officer in “Schindler’s List” saw pardon as weakness. What, then, is the power of grace?
We catch a glimpse of mercy’s might in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables. Released from prison after nineteen years for theft, Jean Valjean steals silver from a church. Having been caught and brought back to the parish by the police, the Bishop not only doesn’t press charges, but gives him more of what he’d stolen. Valjean is free. What’s more, he’s undone. What twenty years of punishment couldn’t do, one act of grace did. As a result of this display of mercy, he becomes a new man.
Much like the younger brother in the Parable of the Prodigal Son, Valjean is healed by forgiveness. The police in Les Miserables, and the parable’s older brother, don’t like this arrangement. For them, the Christian life is one of lectures, criticism, and tit for tat, but for Valjean and the younger brother, grace trumps karma.
Both brothers in the Parable of the Prodigal Son are invited to the party celebrating forgiveness. One sees only weakness, while the other experiences power. My friends, the Christian life isn’t dutiful drudgery. The life of “steadfast faith” is a feast where the well of God’s transformative mercy never runs dry.
Mercy is quite powerful. My father had dementia the last couple of years of his life and when he died, I've thought of his passing in 2014 as a mercy from God, not only to my sister and I, but to my dad especially as he was no longer himself due to the ravages of dementia. I pray he's now himself again. I'm going to have to give the parable of the prodigal son another reading. And I also now need to re-read Henri Nouwen's "The Return of the prodigal son", his analysis of Rembrandt's painting as he devoted a whole section of the book to the older son.