Pints With Aquinas - What is REAL mercy? | Fr. Gregory Pine O.P.

Episode Date: September 23, 2023

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Oh hello, my name is Fr. Gregory Pine and I'm a Dominican friar of the province of St. Joseph and this is Pines with Aquinas. In this episode I would like to talk about mercy. So you'll often hear mercy used in Christian conversations, so it's a virtue that we want to cultivate. It's also a devotion that we want to practice, you know, the divine mercy made popular by St. Faustina Kowalska. But then sometimes you'll hear it used or like lumped together with a kind of vague sentiment

or with the removal of negative emotional experience or with the kind of magical resolution of very difficult pastoral problems. And I don't think those are true and as a result of which, I don't think they're helpful. So we're gonna go ahead and distinguish what real mercy is in fact, so that way we can cultivate the genuine virtue and welcome the divine gift. So here we go.

All right, so let's talk about a more basic expression than a more exalted expression and then a divine expression, and then how that kind of registers in our life. So the most basic expression would be the kind of emotional expression of mercy. So the word mercy, you know, we take it from the Latin misericordia, which just means to be made miserable of heart. So there's the sense that when you're exhibiting mercy, you're struck with pity for another person. Like the other person finds him or herself in a difficult situation, right, some kind of loss or devastation or illness or whatever, okay? And you witness that, you see that, and it cuts you to the quick, right? So it makes you

experience something of their trial, temptation, sorrow, whatever else. So that would just be like the emotional experience as it were. And we would call that pity, typically. Now when we get to the higher registers, and here we're talking about something that we might call like affection, or something that we can just call simply a virtue. So this would be a more like stable and permanent disposition of the human heart that allows us to act easily Promptly joyfully under the influence of reason for what is genuinely good and in the case of mercy We're talking about a virtue which is associated with charity. So it's a virtue which flows from love

So when st. Thomas will talk about charity, he says that we witness at the heart of charity, one, benevolence, and two, beneficence. So benevolence, like when you will the good of another, and beneficence when you do the good of another. So with respect to benevolence, he identifies these three interior kind of movements of charity, which are joy, peace, and mercy. And he says in the case of mercy we're talking about a genuine virtue. So in addition to witnessing the distress of another and feeling cut to the quick by that distress, mercy goes beyond that and it seeks to alleviate it. So it seeks to remove whatever hindrance or obstacle or whatever kind of like menace or threat is making that person to be miserable. So it's it displays something of the strength of love.

So yeah, when we talk about this in an even more exalted sense, you know, when we really get into the nitty-gritty of how charity is at work, basically we're motivated by the love of God. All right, and so you can think about the works of mercy, both corporal and spiritual works of mercy, and then you think about Matthew 25 and the separation of the sheep and the goats and the criteria according to which the just and the unjust are divided at the end, is on the basis of whether they did it to the least one of these, right, whether they did it to Christ. And so there's this recognition in mercy that insofar as we share the same human nature, insofar as we are called to partake of the same grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, to pertain to the

same mystical body, right, that that's Christ, you know, like that's a member of his body, it's a member of my body insofar as I too am called to the same solidarity, the same incorporation or membership. So there's a profound sense of mercy like there's not the alterity or like the kind of difference of justice. It's not so much that it passes away but that it becomes of secondary importance in light of the fact that you recognize a kind of union or oneness. So it's not like I will visit you with my mercy, you know, it's like it's not an act of condescension, so as so much as an act of genuine solidarity and recognition of the common humanity, the common call to the life of grace, the common pertaining to the mystical body, whether potentially

or actually. So yeah, that's like kind of what we're talking about when we talk about the virtue of mercy. Now, you'll hear divine mercy used as an attribute of the Most High God. Now, various attributes are appropriate, you know, like are appropriately said of God. So we would say of God, for instance, that he is loving and that he is just and that he is merciful and all these things besides. And it's not like we're adding different attributes to God, like he learned how to be just when he was 15 and he learned how to be merciful when he was 17, because there's no division in God. So when we say of God that he is loving or that he is just or that he is merciful, we mean like God just is love,

God just is justice, God just is mercy, like God is his attributes. So when we talk about the divine mercy, we're talking about God, alright? And we especially attribute mercy to God, not because he's, you know, cut to the quick, not because he's moved at his core in the way that we are, because God doesn't have emotions, okay? But because he exhibits the second dimension of mercy, of love, you know, charity and the benevolence that comes from it to the utmost because we said that you know what is the second dimension it's to go out to the other

and to alleviate the source of his sorrow now when you think about our own lives what's the deepest source of our sorrow well sin vice which merits for us death and alienation from the most high God so that's the biggest thing and God goes out and alleviates the source of our sorrow, or alleviates us from our distress, or alleviates our distress, whatever you're supposed to say about alleviates there, I'm getting myself all tripped up. And he does so in sovereign fashion. So we make this distinction, and that definition there of like the two dimensions of mercy is taken from St. Augustine. So we would leave the first part behind and

hold fast to the second part behind and hold fast to the second part. And so we say of God that he is most merciful or that he is most to be identified with his mercy because this mercy is a fruit of his goodness. We would say of the good that, one, good wants to kind of communicate itself to others or diffuse itself to others. There's a kind of generosity or ebullience at the heart of goodness. And in the case of those most marked or those most evident signs of goodness, we can often see them by comparison to or in contrast with signs of evilness, right? That's not a word. Signs of evil. So when you alleviate the source of some evil or when you alleviate evil, of some evil, or when you alleviate

evil, whatever you're supposed to say of alleviate, when you address an evil and call forth from it some kind of goodness, that testifies most manifestly to the goodness of God, you know, in the case of His acting vis-a-vis His creatures. And so St. Thomas will say that mercy is in fact the foundation of all of God's interaction with creation. Interaction probably isn't the best word, but you'll think of words which are better suited. So it's the foundation of all of God's operation in creation because it's an expression of

goodness and specifically of a gratuitous goodness, like a good that's not necessarily called for because when we're talking about mercy, obviously we're thinking about it, you know, kind of held in tension with justice, and when you talk about justice, you're talking about what's owed, and when you're talking about mercy, you're talking about something beyond what's owed, something more than what's owed, something that not so much steps outside of considerations of what is owed, but supplies an abundance, okay? So the very fact that we exist, right, this could not have been, or this could have been very much otherwise, is a sign of God's goodness, right, the gratuitousness or the gratuity of God's goodness.

And so there's a mercy that kind of underwrites our experience of all of creation, because it need not have been, or it could have been holy otherwise, and yet God saw fit to make it good, good, good, good, very good. So then, in light of this mercy, then we can talk about justice insofar as God furnishes every rank of creation with all that it needs in order to live both in nature, or in our case, in angels' cases, supernature, which is to say the life of grace. So God is kind of just with respect to himself, right? So he's done this thing and he honors his word by equipping us with everything that is necessary for the

task and then some. Because though we sinned and are justly left to our own devices, right? Yet he proffers a new invitation to divine intimacy, to partaking in his life, which you know obviously is the sending of his Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, who suffers, dies, and rises so as to reconcile us to the Most High God and to loose us from the dead of sin, vice, and the devil's bondage. So then, when we talk about Christ, we're talking about a kind of peculiar coming together of divine and human mercy. So Christ was kind of cut to the quick. He did experience this pity. And in the Gospels we see him appealed to in just such a fashion. You can think

here of the healing of blind Bartimaeus in the Gospel of Mark and the way that it's recounted like in the Gospel of Matthew with the healing of two blind men. They call out to him as son of David and they ask him to have pity on them. The word there is just the word that we use in the liturgy for mercy, right? And it's the root of the word for almsgiving or almsdeeds in Latin, ale massuna, so like kire aleis, have mercy on us, alright? So they appeal to him as the son of David, they appeal to him in a certain sense in his humanity but with the recognition of his messiahship, I don't know if they would have known that that meant that he was God But the gospel of Mark begins, you know chapter 1 verse 1 with the announcement of Jesus Christ the Son of God

So they appeal to him and they ask for his mercy and what they get is a divino human mercy So they see the divine exercise of power which underwrites his interaction with all of creation But they see it in human form They see it in a human face by virtue of a human interaction, because that's just what Christ's sacred humanity does, is that it's the instrument of His divinity, and as a result of which, it bears to us a divino human efficacy, a divino human mercy. So it's interesting that, like God, strangely enough, in insisting upon a certain justice,

in purchasing us back from the debt of sin and vice, and we can speak of a certain servitude to the devil, though that's more metaphorical than it is strictly metaphysical, by insisting upon justice, by calling for the offering of sacrifice or the making of satisfaction in our Lord Jesus Christ, He manages to reveal a yet more copious mercy. Because what we see is not just the price paid, we see super abundant satisfaction, we see the price overpaid a million fold. Because our Lord sheds, you know, one drop of His blood is more than sufficient for our salvation, He sheds every drop of His blood, right? One moment in time is sufficient for our salvation, but he lives a whole series of moments

in time so that he can show us this divino human mercy, so that he can show us a yet deeper solidarity, a yet deeper pity wed to a yet deeper strength, which gives us a sure sign, manifest and communicable testimony of God's love for us so as to implicate us in that love, so as to reach out a hand and seize ours and take us into the life eternal by means of this mercy. So, you know, there's no sense in double paying, triple paying, quadruple paying for a particular good, you know, if you're like just going to the supermarket and grabbing whatever it is that you need. There's no sense in paying extra for it. But there is a sense in paying extra as a sign of love, as a token of, you know, divino human mercy so that we, in witnessing this awesome event, might be led further up and further in to the divine plan for us. Because ultimately,

the way by which to beget love in us is to show us his love. When we see that we are lovable, we find ourselves capable of loving in return, the one who has loved us with so great and ponderous a mercy." So I think that, like, what then does that mean for us in the exercise of mercy? Our mercy is to be a genuinely human mercy, patterned on the divine mercy and made manifest and communicable, and our Lord Jesus Christ, we lay hold of his. So we don't set aside punishment, in a certain sense, right? But we ask that it be communicated in terms of love, which is at its heart. So let's just be very concrete, very practical.

When somebody offends you, you're responsible for forgiving them, alright? And you're responsible for visiting upon them a kind of mercy in their need, in their destitution, in their devastation, right? And so that'll mean, one, you know, insisting on a certain justice that they apologize or trying to call forth their apology, but still you're responsible for forgiving them regardless of whether or not they do. And maybe they do ask for your apology and you might be tempted to say, oh, it doesn't

matter because the conflict of it or the tension of it is somewhat uncomfortable, but maybe I would challenge you in that circumstance to say I forgive you because it did hurt right but you're capable of overcoming the hurt by love because effectively when you when you forgive you're choosing to love whereas formerly was there was hurt and in doing so you deal with the fault and you provide a path to to then resolve the punishment because when you wed your heart to a punishment and say, I will undertake whatever it is that it's required of, that's necessary to heal this, to grow this, then you show the person whom you have offended how deep is the affection which now is present in the relationship and

that has a way of making satisfaction and thereby affecting a reconciliation. So like mercy doesn't mean to look beyond or look past, it means to look at, decidedly at, not, you know, like over, under, or around, but in and through, and to say, yes, I acknowledge this hurt, but yes, I affirm a deeper love, because I believe that it can heal and can grow, and I believe that we can be reconciled, and I believe that that is for the glory of God and the salvation of souls not just like some You know physical homeostasis or emotional equilibrium or psychological adjustment. It's something more. Okay now mind you that doesn't mean that we necessarily Expose ourselves to future trauma or abuse right? It doesn't mean being silly or stupid or imprudent

All right, so sometimes you have to distance yourself from an individual or distance yourself from a situation But often enough, you know, we're going to be let down, we are going to be disappointed, we're going to be offended, we're potentially going to be wounded and weakened by these offenses and it's often enough the case that we need to reconstitute that relationship and to do so in love by the visiting of mercy, to see another in his sin, in his vice, in his offense, which is very personal, and to compassionate that, right? And then to act with strength so as to bring them back, which is wild. So, yes, that is what I wanted to say about mercy as an emotion and as a

virtue, as a divine attribute, as something visited on us or in us by our Lord Jesus Christ and something that we are meant to practice in turn. You can think here of the parable of the good Samaritan. Who was the neighbor? It's the one who showed mercy. That's what it means to be in solidarity, to visit genuine mercy in our Lord Jesus Christ for His glory and our salvation.

That is what I hope to share with you. A couple of things. This is Pons of the Aquinas for whatever reason. if you don't know that by this point. Cheers. Go ahead and subscribe to the channel, push the bell, and get email updates when other videos come out. Also, if you haven't yet checked out God Splitting, do so. We've got some sweet episodes on sweet things. We had an episode maybe five months ago about mercy, specifically about St. Faustina, because Father Bonaventure is a big devotee. So if you want to learn more, do it, it'll be great.

And then we got this Dominican Rosary pilgrimage coming up, which I think you might like. So September 30th in Washington, D.C. at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. It's gonna be like a day of recollection. I'm gonna give two talks about the Blessed Virgin Mary and about the Most Holy Rosary,

and then we're gonna have time for adoration, book signing, confessions, like a kind of fervorina, which is a pump-up homily about the rosary, a beautiful rosary procession where we're going to say the 15 decades of the rosary, and then a vigil mass preached by Father James Brent and celebrated by Paul Marich. So it's going to be awesome. It's going to be quite the rodeo. So I hope to see you there. And yeah, yeah, let's go as the youth of America say.

So know my prayers for you, please pray for me, and I'll look forward to chatting with you next time on Pines for the Aquinas.