Daily Manna · Day 238 · August 26
Blessed Are the Merciful
“Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.”
Think of a hand closing tight around a note that says what somebody owes you.
Jesus told a story about this later in Matthew. A servant is forgiven a debt of "ten thousand talents," an amount no one could ever pay, more than whole provinces paid in tax in a year. He walks out of the room and finds a fellow servant who owes him "an hundred pence." In Matthew a penny is a day's pay, so that is about a hundred days' wages, a real debt, and the story only works because it is real. The forgiven man "took him by the throat, saying, Pay me that thou owest."
"Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy." Jesus is not saying you buy pardon by being nice, because the Beatitudes describe the people who already belong to the kingdom. What the story adds is why the two halves belong in one sentence. Mercy flows like a current, and you are either standing in it or outside it. When the master heard what the man had done, he said, "Shouldest not thou also have had compassion on thy fellowservant, even as I had pity on thee?" The man's cruelty showed that he had never understood what he had been given, and the story ends with him handed over "till he should pay all that was due unto him."
That is uncomfortable in exactly the place you knew it would be. The hand you keep closed around what somebody owes you is the same hand you will hold out to God when you are the one who cannot pay. So open it now. The mercy you pass on is the same mercy God has already poured out on you first.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 238 is Waiting for News (Psalm 112:7).