A Depth of Mercy...

It's a fair question, I think, to ask "What have we not done that Sodom and Gomorrah were guilty of and with a vigor and pervasiveness that those two towns on the edge of the Dead Sea couldn't have imagined?"

And why are we still here?

I've pondered that for my culture and for myself and the answer seems to point to something deep and profound beyond words. It starts with the understanding that if God were a God of justice alone my society, myself included, would for the sake of justice have been destroyed long ago. The evidence is stark and compelling. Immorality? Check. Injustice? Check. Callousness of soul? Check. Idolatry? Check. Human sacrifice? Check. Name any sin of biblical proportion and we have done it and more than any Philistine or Amorite or Amalekite could ever have imagined. And in one way or another I have participated in it all.

So why are we, why am I, still here?

Why have we not gone the way of those long ago peoples whose crimes were less than ours and who did not have the benefit of the knowledge of holy things?

I suppose there's an argument for the fact that it simply hasn't been our time yet. After all there is no guarantee that any culture or country is a permanent thing. It is possible that a thousand years from now whoever is on the face of the Earth will see us in the same way as we look at Romans or Hittites. We could be destined to be merely a curiosity in the larger scope of things or worse yet an example of a social order gone dark at the apex of its power. It wouldn't be the first time.

Yet I also believe there is something more in play, something more about God that explains why despite my, and my culture's pervasive sins, we remain. Simply put, God is also a God of mercy of a depth and kind that defies our notions of fairness and justice and is capable of swallowing not simply the sins of one person or another but that of a whole society, even the whole universe, in its abyss.

Every provocation of defiant humanity, every insult flung to the skies, every instance when humans alone or in total have spit at the heavens and even that moment when in our insane rage we sought to kill God Himself, all in an instant can be absorbed and annihilated in the unending sea of mercy that is in the character of God.

I have no capability to explain this. Every adjective crumbles in its presence. Somewhere in the character of God there is the hope that even as we bear in ourselves, and in our cultures, the pain and death of our deeds there will be a moment when we come to our senses, realize the reality of our situation, and cry out for help. And when we do mercy will be there.

The texts and the tradition tell me that one day it will end, that the justice of God also must come into the equation in a way that only God himself can comprehend and with a truth to it that can only be from the one in whom there are no shadows. Outside of my own last breath I do not know when that moment will be. But until then there is time and opportunity and the means to seize mercy, and while that time remains hope does as well.