crying out for mercy

This is second in a series on mercy.

Tuesday, I wrote about praying the Jesus Prayer (Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner) and how the beginning acknowledges all that Jesus is. I ended with the question, “But what about the mercy part?” and that’s where I’ll pick up today.

I wondered how often mercy showed up in Scripture. It’s there a lot! What caught my attention as I looked at the gospels is that the most frequent occurrence of mercy is in requests:

• And as Jesus passed on from there, two blind men followed him, crying aloud, “Have mercy on us, Son of David.” (Matthew 9:27)
• And behold, a Canaanite woman from that region came out and was crying, “Have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David; my daughter is severely oppressed by a demon.” (Matthew 15:22)
• And when they came to the crowd, a man came up to him and, kneeling before him, said, “Lord, have mercy on my son, for he is an epileptic and he suffers terribly.” (Matthew 17:14–15)
• And behold, there were two blind men sitting by the roadside, and when they heard that Jesus was passing by, they cried out, “Lord, have mercy on us, Son of David!” The crowd rebuked them, telling them to be silent, but they cried out all the more, “Lord, have mercy on us, Son of David!” (Matthew 20:30–31)
• But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” (Luke 18:13)

It would appear that there’s good grounds for asking God for mercy. The Greek word in these verses is the verb form of the noun eleos, which means “mercy, kindness or good will toward the miserable or afflicted.” In the South, when speaking of someone with problems, we might say, “Bless her heart, she needs help.” Though it sounds good, this isn’t mercy, because there’s one more part to the definition: “joined with a desire to help them.”

In other words, mercy is an action word. Instead of “Bless her heart, she needs help,” mercy says, “Bless her heart, she needs help–and I’m going to do something about it!”

Back to the Jesus Prayer: have mercy on me, a sinner expresses our need for God’s help as well as our condition. Frederica Mathewes-Green (The Illumined Heart) says that modern believers often have a problem with this because we don’t understand mercy or our need for it. Asking for mercy is not asking for forgiveness, a need which was answered in the cross. Have mercy on me is a cry for loving help. She goes on to say,

The problem is not in God’s willingness to have mercy, but in our forgetting that we need it. We keep lapsing into ideas of self-sufficiency, or get impressed with our niceness, and so we lose our humility. Asking for mercy reminds us that we are poor and needy, and fall short of the glory of God. Those who do not ask do not receive, because they don’t know their own need.

I, for one, need all the reminders I can get that my self-sufficiency won’t–can’t!–get me very far.

And so I’ve been working on the Orthodox method of saying the Jesus Prayer. It’s repeated silently and slowly, while the body is kept still. Orthodox believers often use a prayer rope with knots that they move through their fingers to help them count the repetitions; I have prayer beads that I use in the same way. I’ve managed to do it for about ten minutes, and I find it peaceful and relaxing, My breathing slows to the rhythm of the phrases, and I find myself breathing deeply.

Catholics who regularly pray the rosary won’t find this practice strange, but for many Protestants, “vain repetition!” probably came to mind as you read this. I had the same thought myself. I’ve also heard this criticism made of those who pray the Lord’s Prayer regularly (but that’s a topic for another post.) Vain repetition is the King James translation of a phrase in Matthew 6:7, which is rendered in the ESV as “heap up empty phrases.” Mathewes-Green suggests that a prayer is “vain repetition” when it is said without thought; in other words, it’s not the repetition that’s at issue, but rather our attention to our words, and “empty phrases” would seem to support this interpretation. She writes, “In fact, you insult the Lord if you ask him for things, yet don’t even care enough to pay attention to your own requests.”

So how do you say the same prayer over and over and keep it meaningful? For me, it’s by giving attention to different parts of the prayer at different times. Thus far, my attention has been on Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, in a sense burning into my consciousness just Who it is I’m speaking to. It’s worth meditating on all that is contained in these six words.

This morning I focused instead on have mercy. I believe that as I repeat and meditate, I will get a deeper revelation of what God’s mercy is. Eventually, I’ll turn to the last part, on me, a sinner. I have been taught in recent years to see myself as a saint rather than a sinner, to remember that God is not looking at me as one condemned at every moment but rather as “the righteousness of God.” And I believe that is right and good: too many Christians live their lives seeing themselves as worthless before their loving God and Father. But, as is often the case, we can have too much of a good thing. I’m not bothered by saying over and over in prayer that I am a sinner. It’s a useful corrective to my often inflated sense of my own goodness.

Tagged as: Christ, Frederica Mathewes Green, Jesus, Jesus Prayer, Lord, mercy, Orthodox, prayer