The Abundance of God’s Mercy

‘Seek the Lord while he may be found, call upon him while he is near; let the wicked forsake their way, and the unrighteous their thoughts; let them return to the Lord, that he may have mercy on them, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.’

Some years ago I lived in Sheffield, just on the western side of the city, close to the University. In one direction, I could walk into the centre of one of England’s largest cities. In the other direction, I could walk into the Peak District. One of my regrets having left Sheffield over ten years ago is that I ventured so rarely into the Peak District. I went to Castleton a couple of times – there were various other places I visited. There was a regular walk through the parks and out to the edge of the Peak District. But I never really explored the terrain of this extraordinary countryside which was just there on my doorstep. I had a cursory awareness of its presence, but it remains largely unknown to me.

So it is with God’s mercy and forgiveness. We are aware of the idea of divine mercy. We think that it’s nice that such consolation is available for people who need that sort of thing – just like some people would like a nice day out in Bakewell some time. But we don’t necessarily think that it is for us.

And yet the season of Lent is a time of year when we are invited to explore the depths of God’s forgiveness, to discover the depths of God’s mercy. ‘Seek the Lord while he may be found, call upon him while he is near…’ for in returning to the Lord, we will discover that he will have mercy: ‘he will abundantly pardon’.

As human beings, we have this extraordinary propensity to screw things up. Of course, we can contemplate the challenging events which are taking place on the world stage. We can lament the mendacity of political leaders who can visit such horrors on the people of Ukraine or Syria or Afghanistan. We can express our horror at the failure of the churches to take safeguarding seriously. We can be indignant at the plight of those P&O employees sacked over Zoom just the other day. We can weep at the plight of refugees. We can grieve at the economic inequalities which exist in our city. We can identify the structural sin, which corrupts and diminishes our humanity, but we can also play a subtle game in which we make the reality of sin someone else’s problem, someone else’s fault. We can quite happily offer to others a few helpful directions into the Peak District. We may be more reluctant to go there ourselves.

There is a similar dynamic going on in our gospel reading today. At the beginning of this passage, Jesus is describing two burning issues of the day. A group of Galileans had been killed while on pilgrimage to Jerusalem. St. Luke describes this rather graphically as the Galileans whose blood had been mingled with their sacrifices. And this is followed by another story about the tower of Siloam which had collapsed on eighteen people.

Why does Jesus refer to these stories? Well, let’s look first at this story about the Galileans: people in Jerusalem tended to look down on the Galileans. They were a bit slack in their observance of the Jewish law. They tended to be artisans, farm-workers, rough and ready types from the country, and because they weren’t quite up to the mark, people in Jerusalem tended to cast aspersions about their morality. Galileans were other and therefore a ready target for projecting everything that was wrong with the world.

As for the tower of Siloam, well, that’s a bit more complicated. Siloam was down at the bottom of the city of Jerusalem. There was a large pool there. You may remember the healing of the man born blind in St. John’s Gospel, where Jesus tells the man to wash his eyes in the pool of Siloam. The pool of Siloam is still there, and in the ancient world it was the main water supply for Jerusalem. The water was brought into the city by a tunnel which Hezekiah had built, and if you go to Jerusalem, you can walk through this tunnel from the spring up in the Kidron Valley and down into the pool of Siloam.

I’ve done this. It’s very dark and very wet. All you can hear is the deafening roar of running water. The water comes right up to your chest at certain points. I don’t remember very much about it now other than my rather unsuccessful attempt to illuminate the way with a short candle stub. For most of the journey, I was walking in complete darkness.

But in the first century, Pontius Pilate decided that the city needed more water and he attempted to construct an aqueduct to carry more water to the pool of Siloam. And to do this, he decided to raid the temple treasury. He took the money from the temple to fund his new aqueduct. Now, you can imagine that this didn’t go down very well. So when in the middle of the building work, a tower collapsed, people went round saying that this was God’s judgement on those people who were co-operating with Pilate, because Pilate had stolen the Temple funds.

So that’s the background, and in both cases people were going around saying that misfortune had been visited on these Galileans, these eighteen builders, because they were a bad lot. They were sinners. And sinners get what they deserve. They had it coming.

We see a similar lack of generosity in the judgements we make about others. Indeed, social media abounds with less than generous comments about the motives and actions of others. We are quick to point the finger. We are quick to apportion blame. Of course, when it comes to our own propensity to screw things up, we tend to be a little more circumspect. It’s then that the rather punitive streak we will happily attribute to God in the context of the misdoings of others suddenly and mysteriously evaporates. Suddenly, we discover that God is far more merciful than we had at first imagined.

The gospel reading follows a similar trajectory. This is where the parable of the fig tree comes in. The owner of the vineyard comes looking for fruit on his fig tree and finds none. He tells the gardener to cut it down, but the gardener says, ‘Sir, let it alone one more year….’

It is tempting to describe the owner of the vineyard as God – and certainly that is a connection made elsewhere in scripture, but perhaps in this case, we are attributing our own harsh judgements to God.

I wonder if Jesus is telling us in this parable that God is more like the gardener. For the gardener suggests that however fruitless the tree may be, it deserves a second chance – and we begin to see the character of God’s mercy and forgiveness. When we are penitent, when we acknowledge our propensity to screw things up, God invites us to explore the depths of his mercy and his capacity for forgiveness. In the season of Lent, we are invited to rediscover the God who offers us a second chance, the God who will abundantly pardon.