Righteousness & Mercy

As a teenager I had a youth director that was new to the congregation and to us as youth. I grew to really admire him for everything he taught us and the ways that he challenged us to grow. But as I just said I grew to admire him. It didn’t happen right away, because I don’t think I was ever really challenged in my faith before him. I went to Sunday School and I learned about the stories of the Bible and our faith. I had gone through confirmation and learned even more, but I don’t know that I was ever really challenged in the ways that I was challenged by him.

One Sunday we sat in his office for Bible study and the conversation we had that day was all about fairness. I had three brothers and my parents had done a good job of trying to be fair to each of us by giving us the same amount of opportunities and coming to sporting events. They also instilled a sense of fairness in us in the ways that we treated each other and the people that we met in the world. And perhaps I had my own sense of fairness that I had developed myself through my growing up.

I feel like I took all those values of fairness and applied them to my faith which then I transferred that fairness to God. After all, God is merciful and kind, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love. So walking into that discussion that day with my youth director I had this idea that God was indeed fair. So after talking about fairness in general for a while he then asked, “So is God fair?” To which I immediately answered, “Yes, God is fair!” I was feeling pretty confident about my answer and I was not at all prepared for his response. We then got into a very deep and intense conversation about the fairness of God.

We talked about scriptures like the criminal on the cross whom Jesus says that he will be with him in paradise. The forgiveness he offers the woman who was going to be stoned for adultery and so many more. We looked at the ways that God showed mercy to those who least deserved it and declared them as righteous. He saw the ways that people were changing their hearts and lives toward God. Then we talked about real world examples like a person who truly repents who has done a lifetime of bad things, but then comes to know and believe in God. Is it fair that someone who has followed God their whole life is offered the same promise of forgiveness and salvation as the person who lived a lifetime of evil and only follows God for a few years or even days before they pass from this life to the the next?

This idea actually intersects with what we talked about last week with Lost and Found. God leaves the 99 to go and find the 1 and rejoices over the one that has returned. God offers the full blessing of the kingdom to the one that was lost despite how good and faithful and loyal the other 99 were. Is it fair the lost son gets the royal treatment when he returns home after wasting away his inheritance while the older son was at home tending to the family affairs and being faithful the whole time? No it’s not fair.

Man that idea of God being not fair really rocked me as a teenager, but now I’ve come to love that God isn’t fair. And I am telling you that when Jesus tells Zacchaeus that he is going to his house and verse 7 tells us that everyone was grumbling about the fact that Jesus would dare not only talk to, but go and be a guest at a person who was seen as someone who betrayed their own people by being a tax collector. He was a puppet of the Roman Empire, and the people could not get past that. There was no mercy for someone who betrayed their own people just so they could amass wealth for themselves. And there was definitely no way that anyone would consider him righteous. How could Jesus, such a righteous person, consider hanging out with and dining with someone that pretty much everybody hated and would have nothing to do with?

We do that today, too. “I just saw so-and-so talking with this person. Can you believe that?” “I went out to dinner last night and you’ll never believe who I saw having dinner with person X.” “I can’t believe they came back to church after they did what they did.” There are so many times in our lives that we are much quicker to judge and label than we are to offer mercy to people. We are quick to call people out for their sins and mistakes rather than to offer them forgiveness or seek reconciliation. We are ready to condemn them rather than remember it is God who has claimed them and declared them righteous. There is also the possibility that we only pay attention to mercy in which we treat everyone fairly because we don’t want to cause issues. We can also only pay attention to people’s ability to be righteous as I talked about with the examples above and when they don’t meet them we literally or metaphorically exile them from our communities.

We need to find the balance as Jesus did with Zacchaeus. Jesus met Zacchaeus where he was. He engaged with him in the midst of his sin and the ways that he had strayed from his right relationship with God. In that moment of recognition of Zacchaeus as one of the lost, Zacchaeus feels seen. In that moment of inviting himself over to his house, Jesus treats Zacchaeus as someone of worth. Can you imagine what it must have felt like for Zacchaeus to have been seen, not just for the poor choices he made but for the person that he was and the person he could be? Can you imagine what it must have felt like for Zacchaeus to be allowed to dine with a rabbi, when no one wanted anything to do with him? Can you imagine what it must have felt like for Zacchaeus to not be judged immediately for his lack of righteousness and to be offered mercy?

I can tell you it meant more to Zacchaeus to be seen than half of all of his wealth. I can tell you that paying back 4 times to anyone he cheated, was nothing compared to the offering of mercy Jesus showed to him when everyone considered him unrighteous. Our ability to love people even when they don’t live up to our expectations of righteousness can mean more to them than many things in this world. To be able to show mercy while helping people change their hearts and lives toward God can be a powerful way to show God’s love to them.

Jesus can see that this offering of Zacchaeus’ redistribution of wealth is not just a gesture of appreciation but a true change in his life. He can see that by looking beyond a strict adherence to righteousness, and offering mercy elicits a life-changing response from him. In that moment of this profound change Jesus not only offers salvation to Zacchaeus himself but to his entire household. Not only does he do that but he reminds Zacchaeus, and all those listenging, that even if he hadn’t been walking a righteous path he too is a son of Abraham. That label of child of Abraham had never been taken away. Zacchaeus may have walked away from it for a while but it never was taken from him. Likewise, no matter how far we stray, no matter how many times we may do things that are considered unrighteous, we never lose the label that we are a child of God.

So when it comes to righteousness and mercy and everything in between, as hard as it may be for us to live into it ourselves, the answer, joyfully is…no. No God is not fair. God is a good of all encompassing love. God is a God who sent Jesus to seek out the lost and find them again, so that we can all claim the title ‘child of God’. Live into the knowledge that both you and everyone you meet is a child of God and therefore never so far from the kingdom of God that they cannot be a part of t. Amen.