The Name of God Is Mercy

by Pope Francis

In this connection, Francis related a dialogue he had had with a man who, on being given this explanation of mercy, had answered: “Oh, Father, if you knew my life you wouldn’t talk to me like that! I have done some terrible things!” This was Francis’s reply: “Even better! Go to Jesus: he likes to hear about these things. He forgets, he has a special knack for forgetting. He forgets, he kisses you, he embraces you, and he says: ‘Neither do I condemn you. Go, [and] from now on do not sin any more.’ That is the only advice he gives. If things haven’t changed in a month…we go back to the Lord. The Lord never tires of forgiving: never! It is we who tire of asking him for forgiveness. We need to ask for the grace not to get tired of asking for forgiveness, because he never gets tired of forgiving.”

To “show mercy,” Jesus goes beyond “the law that demanded stoning.” And so he tells the woman to go in peace. “Mercy,” the Bishop of Rome said during that morning sermon, “is something difficult to understand: it does not erase sins.” What erases sins “is God’s forgiveness.” But mercy is the way in which God forgives. Because “Jesus could have said: I forgive you, now go! As he said to the paralyzed man: ‘Your sins are forgiven!’ ” Here, in this situation, “Jesus goes further and advises the woman not to sin again. And here we see the merciful attitude of Jesus: he defends sinners from their enemies, he defends the sinner from a just condemnation.”

This, Francis added, “also applies to us….How many of us would deserve to be condemned! And it would be just! But he forgives.” How? “With mercy, which does not erase the sin: only God’s forgiveness erases it, while mercy goes further.” It is “like the sky: we look at the sky when it is full of stars, but when the sun comes out in the morning, with all its light, we don’t see the stars anymore. That is what God’s mercy is like: a great light of love and tenderness because God forgives not with a decree, but with a caress.” He does it “by caressing the wounds of our sin because he is involved in forgiving, he is involved in our salvation.”

casuistry,

God awaits us with open arms; we need only take a step toward him like the Prodigal Son. But if, weak as we are, we don’t have the strength to take that step, just the desire to take it is enough.

To Every Man a Penny.

I am inclined never to trust my first reaction to an idea or to a proposal that is made to me. I never trust myself in part because my first reaction is usually wrong. I have learned to wait, to trust in the Lord, to ask for his help, so I can discern better and receive guidance.

thinking of the Church as a field hospital, where treatment is given above all to those who are most wounded. A Church that warms people’s hearts with its closeness and nearness.

on why jesus message is mercy

Etymologically, “mercy” derives from misericordis, which means opening one’s heart to wretchedness. And immediately we go to the Lord: mercy is the divine attitude which embraces, it is God’s giving himself to us, accepting us, and bowing to forgive. Jesus said he came not for those who were good but for the sinners. He did not come for the healthy, who do not need the doctor, but for the sick. For this reason, we can say that mercy is God’s identity card. God of Mercy, merciful God.

I was always impressed by the story of Jerusalem as it is told in chapter 16 of the Book of Ezekiel. The story compares Jerusalem to a little girl whose umbilical cord wasn’t cut, who was left in her blood and was cast out. God saw her wallowing in blood, he washed the blood from her, he anointed her, he dressed her, and when she grew up he adorned her with silk and jewels. But she, infatuated with her own beauty, became a harlot, not for money but paying her lovers herself. God, however, will never forget his covenant and he will place her above her sisters so that Jerusalem will remember and be ashamed (Ezekiel 16:63), when she is forgiven for what she has done. For me this is one of the most important revelations: you will continue to be the chosen people and all your sins will be forgiven. So mercy is deeply connected to God’s faithfulness. The Lord is faithful because he cannot deny himself. This is explained well by Saint Paul in the Second Letter to Timothy: “If we are unfaithful, he remains faithful, for he cannot deny himself.” You can deny God, you can sin against him, but God cannot deny himself. He remains faithful.

The prophet speaks of shame, and shame is a grace: when one feels the mercy of God, he feels a great shame for himself and for his sin.

I like to translate miserando with a gerund that doesn’t exist: mercifying. So, “mercifying and choosing” describes the vision of Jesus, who gives the gift of mercy and chooses, and takes unto himself.

There you have another example of a merciful priest, someone who knew how to be close to people and treat their wounds by giving them mercy.

humanity is wounded, deeply wounded. Either it does not know how to cure its wounds or it believes that it’s not possible to cure them. And it’s not just a question of social ills or people wounded by poverty, social exclusion, or one of the many slaveries of the third millennium.

Humanity needs mercy and compassion. Pius XII, more than half a century ago, said that the tragedy of our age was that it had lost its sense of sin, the awareness of sin. Today we add further to the tragedy by considering our illness, our sins, to be incurable, things that cannot be healed or forgiven. We lack the actual concrete experience of mercy. The fragility of our era is this, too: we don’t believe that there is a chance for redemption; for a hand to raise you up; for an embrace to save you, forgive you, pick you up, flood you with infinite, patient, indulgent love; to put you back on your feet. We need mercy.

The love of God exists even for those who are not disposed to receive it: that man, that woman, that boy, or that girl—they are all loved by God, they are sought out by God, they are in need of blessing. Be tender with these people. Do not push them away. People are suffering.

If you are not capable of talking to your brother about your mistakes, you can be sure that you can’t talk about them with God, either, and therefore you end up confessing into the mirror, to yourself.

why should it matter that i tlk about my mistkes with mnkind if i can tak bout witg God who is the fatger and king of my life?

We are social beings, and forgiveness has a social implication; my sin wounds mankind, my brothers and sisters, and society as a whole. Confessing to a priest is a way of putting my life into the hands and heart of someone else, someone who in that moment acts in the name of Jesus. It’s a way to be real and authentic: we face the facts by looking at another person and not in the mirror.

understand but i disagree

It is a beautiful lesson. It is true that I can talk to the Lord and ask him for forgiveness, implore him. And the Lord will forgive me immediately. But it is important that I go to confession, that I sit in front of a priest who embodies Jesus, that I kneel before Mother Church, called to dispense the mercy of Christ. There is objectivity in this gesture of genuflection before the priest; it becomes the vehicle through which grace reaches and heals me.

okay, got it.

when I heard confessions, I always thought about myself, about my own sins, and about my need for mercy, and so I tried to forgive a great deal.

Thinking back on my life and my experiences, to September 21, 1953, when God came to me and filled me with wonder, I have always said that the Lord precedes us, he anticipates us. I believe the same can be said for his divine mercy, which heals our wounds; he anticipates our need for it. God waits; he waits for us to concede him only the smallest glimmer of space so that he can enact his forgiveness and his charity within us. Only he who has been touched and caressed by the tenderness of his mercy really knows the Lord. For this reason I have often said that the place where my encounter with the mercy of Jesus takes place is my sin. When you feel his merciful embrace, when you let yourself be embraced, when you are moved—that’s when life can change, because that’s when we try to respond to the immense and unexpected gift of grace, a gift that is so overabundant it may even seem “unfair” in our eyes. We stand before a God who knows our sins, our betrayals, our denials, our wretchedness. And yet he is there waiting for us, ready to give himself completely to us, to lift us up.

“For me it has always been a great mystery of God to be in wretchedness and to be in the presence of the mercy of God. I am nothing, I am wretched. God the Father loves me, he wants to save me, he wants to remove me from the wretchedness in which I find myself, but I am incapable of doing it myself. And so he sends his Son, a Son who brings the mercy of God translated into an act of love toward me….But you need a special grace for this, the grace of a conversion. Once I recognize this, God works in me through his Son.”

I reminded them that even Saint Peter and Saint Paul had been prisoners. I have a special relationship with people in prisons, deprived of their freedom. I have always been very attached to them, precisely because of my awareness of being a sinner. Every time I go through the gates into a prison to celebrate Mass or for a visit, I always think: Why them and not me? I should be here. I deserve to be here. Their fall could have been mine. I do not feel superior to the people who stand before me. And so I repeat and pray: Why him and not me? It might seem shocking, but I derive consolation from Peter: he betrayed Jesus, and even so he was chosen.

He ought to be able to look earnestly at himself and his sin. He ought to feel like a sinner, so that he can be amazed by God.

In order to be filled with his gift of infinite mercy, we need to recognize our need, our emptiness, our wretchedness. We cannot be arrogant.

It is important that we not think of ourselves as self-sufficient.

None of us should speak of injustice without thinking of all the injustice we have committed before God. We must never forget our origins, the mud of which we were made, and this counts above all for those who are ordained.

I am glad that we are talking about “homosexual people” because before all else comes the individual person, in his wholeness and dignity. And people should not be defined only by their sexual tendencies: let us not forget that God loves all his creatures and we are destined to receive his infinite love. I prefer that homosexuals come to confession, that they stay close to the Lord, and that we pray all together. You can advise them to pray, show goodwill, show them the way, and accompany them along it.

Jesus moves according to a different kind of logic.

On the one hand, there is the fear of losing the just and saved, the sheep that are already safely inside the pen. On the other hand, there is the desire to save the sinners, the lost, those on the other side of the fence. The first is the logic of the scholars of the law. The second is the logic of God, who welcomes, embraces, and transfigures evil into good, transforming and redeeming my sin, transmuting condemnation into salvation. Jesus enters into contact with the leper. He touches him. In so doing, he teaches us what to do, which logic to follow, when faced with people who suffer physically and spiritually. This is the example we need to follow, and in so doing we overcome prejudice and rigidity, much in the same way that the apostles did in the earliest days of the Church when they had to overcome, for example, resistance from those who insisted on unconditionally following the Law of Moses even for converted pagans.

we must avoid the attitude of someone who judges and condemns from the lofty heights of his own certainty, looking for the splinter in his brother’s eye while remaining unaware of the beam in his own. Let us always remember that God rejoices more when one sinner returns to the fold than when ninety-nine righteous people have no need of repentance. When a person begins to recognize the sickness in their soul, when the Holy Spirit—the Grace of God—acts within them and moves their heart toward an initial recognition of their own sins, he needs to find an open door, not a closed one. He needs to find acceptance, not judgment, prejudice, or condemnation.

God forgives everyone, he offers new possibilities to everyone, he showers his mercy on everyone who asks for it. We are the ones who do not know how to forgive.

Sin, especially if repeated, can lead to corruption, not quantitatively—in the sense that a certain number of sins makes a person corrupt—but rather qualitatively: habits are formed that limit one’s capacity for love and create a false sense of self-sufficiency.

WHAT are some similarities and differences between mercy and compassion? Mercy is divine and has to do with the judgment of sin. Compassion has a more human face. It means to suffer with, to suffer together, to not remain indifferent to the pain and the suffering of others.