What, my friends, would Jesus do with Fidel Castro? What does He do with such a miserable wretch seeking pardon, a wicked man drenched in the blood and pain of innocent people?
Between the Stirrup and the Ground:
The Appalling Strangeness of the Mercy of God
Betwixt the stirrup and the ground,
Mercy I asked, mercy I found.
--William Camden
You can’t conceive, my child, nor can I or anyone the…appalling…strangeness of the mercy of God.
--The elderly priest in the confessional to Rose at the end of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock
Mercy I asked, mercy I found.
--William Camden
You can’t conceive, my child, nor can I or anyone the…appalling…strangeness of the mercy of God.
--The elderly priest in the confessional to Rose at the end of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock
Right now in Cuba an old man is dying. For over fifty years he ordered thousands of his countrymen tortured and murdered, threw tens of thousands of them into prison, and made a stinking hellhole of the country.
In the last two years, we have some evidence that this same man is asking God to forgive him his many sins.
Some people like to ask: What would Jesus do? They even wear bracelets marked WWJD as a reminder to act as Christ might have acted.
So here’s my question: What, my friends, would Jesus do with Fidel Castro? What does He do with such a miserable wretch seeking pardon, a wicked man drenched in the blood and pain of innocent people?
Adolph Hitler spent his last hour on earth in solitude with his mistress and then wife Eva Braun. Suppose during this time he asked forgiveness from God for the sins he had committed. Yes, I know it is about as likely as an August blizzard in Key West, but just go with me. This Nazi bastard—sorry, I repeat myself— is betwixt stirrup and ground, and he sincerely begs for forgiveness and mercy. Is the murderer of millions of people entitled to the merits of heaven as understood by Christians?
Every day around the world men and women of all faiths, including atheism, worship false gods, kill their fellow creatures, steal, lie, and engage in every kind of depravity. The worst of these commit heinous crimes. They slaughter their fellow human beings with less ceremony and compassion than they might show a pig or a cow. They commit acts of terrorism. They rape women, molest children, steal from the elderly, lie for whatever grand cause they may embrace.
Yet what of the rest of us?
How many of us could stand in the presence of the Creator of the Universe, look him dead in the eye, and honestly tell him we deserve an eternity of happiness? Some of us have cheated on our income taxes. Some of us have committed the sins of the flesh. Many of us covet our neighbors’ goods. And most Americans, I suspect, worship false gods, ranging from gluttony to sloth, from our love of sports to our adoration of money, from spousal cruelty to our desire to be “self-fulfilled.”
Do we really believe we merit mercy because we are, after all, “good people?” Having divorced someone who loves us, stolen hours from our employer by fiddling around online, loved humanity while despising our elderly neighbor—do we really believe we deserve the mercy of God?
In Greene’s novel Brighton Rock, the priest listens as Rose wonders whether Pinky, the vicious young gangster who is her dead husband, is damned, whether his sins have removed him forever from God. If so, Rose says, “I want to be like him—damned.” The priest then tells Rose of a Frenchman who “…was a good man, a holy man, and he lived in sin all through his life, because he couldn’t bear the idea that any soul could suffer damnation…This man decided that if any soul was going to be damned, he would be damned too…I don’t know, my child, but some people think he was—well, a saint…You can’t conceive, my child, nor can I or anyone the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God.”
To most of us, locked in human flesh and bound to this earth, God’s mercy truly is both strange and appalling. Here in this world we make murderers pay for their crime. We shun adulterers. (In certain countries, we stone them to death). We incarcerate thieves. Without these legal and societal strictures, we would clearly descend to the level of animals. No, given our human propensities, we would sink lower than animals because we know the difference between good and evil. Justice must be served, must be meted out, if we are to maintain any sort of community at all.
But God—God’s mercy requires only a penitential act, a begging for forgiveness, repentance, conversion. He may still require us to atone for our sins, to perform penance here or, as we Catholics hold, in the afterlife, but if we believe in Him, He has given us his assurance that we will share with Him in the happiness of heaven. When Christ is dying on the cross, one of the criminals hanged with him says , “Jesus, remember me when you come in your kingly power.” Jesus then replies, “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”
Instances of such mercy abound in the New Testament. The parable of the Prodigal Son, the parable of the laborers in the garden, the woman caught in adultery, and many more examples and deeds: the one who claims to be the Son of God offers forgiveness to all who sin no more and walk in His ways. What especially staggers the imagination is that while some believers may follow this holy path their entire lives hoping for salvation, others, repenting with their last breath, receive the same salvation.
So simple, yes? And yet who can truly understand such wild compassion? We may claim to understand, but we deceive ourselves. On some occasions, such mercy surely lies beyond our ken. Here’s a hypothetical example: when my children were young and in my care, had someone molested them, viciously injured them, or murdered one of them, and had I a gun in hand, I am reasonably certain I would have blown the violator away without a second thought. I wouldn’t have paused to consider whether the criminal was contrite or repentant. I wouldn’t have asked whether he was a drug addict or had suffered some screwed-up childhood. I wouldn’t have cared at that moment whether he was mentally ill. The reaction would be visceral, and I might later repent of my rage, but there it is: Old Testament justice rather than New Testament mercy. I would pull the trigger.
Rarely, however, do I find myself in circumstances demanding that I forgive others. Unlike Shakespeare’s Lear, who declared himself “a man more sinn’d against than sinning,” I myself am the creature whose sins I have the most trouble forgiving. Offering pardon to others is much easier than offering the same comforts to myself. That self, that tangled battleground of good and evil, that prison from which none of us can escape, begs for charity and absolution, but I am too acutely aware of my failings to offer forgiveness for “what I have done and what I have failed to do.” I am my own worst enemy, my bitterest critic. All of us, when we are honest with ourselves, know these personal failures, these sins against others we ourselves commit.
This interior life, at times so dark and shabby, may of course receive light and a good scrubbing. As a Catholic, for example, I have recourse to the confessional, that tiny box where on the other side of the grill a priest, acting in persona Christi, hears my confession and offers Christ’s forgiveness. I believe in the efficacy of this sacrament, but must confess—pardon the pun—that sometimes I leave the confessional still feeling the burden of my sins. Being forgiven is one thing; forgetting is another proposition altogether.
God’s grace—a gift of salvation, freely given, to undeserving souls—is incomprehensible to me, and I suspect, to many Christians. I am thankful for it, and hope it is true, but cannot wrap my small brain around such munificence. Like God’s peace, this is a gift that “passeth all understanding.”
Still, there is the virtue of hope, and so each Sunday at Mass I recite the Confiteor: “I confess to almighty God and to you, my brothers and sisters, that I have greatly sinned in my thoughts and in my words, in what I have done and in what I have failed to do, through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault; therefore I ask blessed Mary ever-Virgin, all the Angels and Saints, and you, my brothers and sisters, to pray for me to the Lord our God.“
Addendum: I had planned on ending in the previous paragraph, but after reading through it several times, I realize I don’t need to comprehend God’s mercy. (I don’t comprehend much about him anyway). The point is not to understand his profound compassion, but to experience it, to enter into his kingdom. And with all these creatures—Mary, angels, saints, and you, my brothers and sisters—raising such a ruckus of prayers, maybe those golden gates will swing open for me after all.
In the last two years, we have some evidence that this same man is asking God to forgive him his many sins.
Some people like to ask: What would Jesus do? They even wear bracelets marked WWJD as a reminder to act as Christ might have acted.
So here’s my question: What, my friends, would Jesus do with Fidel Castro? What does He do with such a miserable wretch seeking pardon, a wicked man drenched in the blood and pain of innocent people?
Adolph Hitler spent his last hour on earth in solitude with his mistress and then wife Eva Braun. Suppose during this time he asked forgiveness from God for the sins he had committed. Yes, I know it is about as likely as an August blizzard in Key West, but just go with me. This Nazi bastard—sorry, I repeat myself— is betwixt stirrup and ground, and he sincerely begs for forgiveness and mercy. Is the murderer of millions of people entitled to the merits of heaven as understood by Christians?
Every day around the world men and women of all faiths, including atheism, worship false gods, kill their fellow creatures, steal, lie, and engage in every kind of depravity. The worst of these commit heinous crimes. They slaughter their fellow human beings with less ceremony and compassion than they might show a pig or a cow. They commit acts of terrorism. They rape women, molest children, steal from the elderly, lie for whatever grand cause they may embrace.
Yet what of the rest of us?
How many of us could stand in the presence of the Creator of the Universe, look him dead in the eye, and honestly tell him we deserve an eternity of happiness? Some of us have cheated on our income taxes. Some of us have committed the sins of the flesh. Many of us covet our neighbors’ goods. And most Americans, I suspect, worship false gods, ranging from gluttony to sloth, from our love of sports to our adoration of money, from spousal cruelty to our desire to be “self-fulfilled.”
Do we really believe we merit mercy because we are, after all, “good people?” Having divorced someone who loves us, stolen hours from our employer by fiddling around online, loved humanity while despising our elderly neighbor—do we really believe we deserve the mercy of God?
In Greene’s novel Brighton Rock, the priest listens as Rose wonders whether Pinky, the vicious young gangster who is her dead husband, is damned, whether his sins have removed him forever from God. If so, Rose says, “I want to be like him—damned.” The priest then tells Rose of a Frenchman who “…was a good man, a holy man, and he lived in sin all through his life, because he couldn’t bear the idea that any soul could suffer damnation…This man decided that if any soul was going to be damned, he would be damned too…I don’t know, my child, but some people think he was—well, a saint…You can’t conceive, my child, nor can I or anyone the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God.”
To most of us, locked in human flesh and bound to this earth, God’s mercy truly is both strange and appalling. Here in this world we make murderers pay for their crime. We shun adulterers. (In certain countries, we stone them to death). We incarcerate thieves. Without these legal and societal strictures, we would clearly descend to the level of animals. No, given our human propensities, we would sink lower than animals because we know the difference between good and evil. Justice must be served, must be meted out, if we are to maintain any sort of community at all.
But God—God’s mercy requires only a penitential act, a begging for forgiveness, repentance, conversion. He may still require us to atone for our sins, to perform penance here or, as we Catholics hold, in the afterlife, but if we believe in Him, He has given us his assurance that we will share with Him in the happiness of heaven. When Christ is dying on the cross, one of the criminals hanged with him says , “Jesus, remember me when you come in your kingly power.” Jesus then replies, “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”
Instances of such mercy abound in the New Testament. The parable of the Prodigal Son, the parable of the laborers in the garden, the woman caught in adultery, and many more examples and deeds: the one who claims to be the Son of God offers forgiveness to all who sin no more and walk in His ways. What especially staggers the imagination is that while some believers may follow this holy path their entire lives hoping for salvation, others, repenting with their last breath, receive the same salvation.
So simple, yes? And yet who can truly understand such wild compassion? We may claim to understand, but we deceive ourselves. On some occasions, such mercy surely lies beyond our ken. Here’s a hypothetical example: when my children were young and in my care, had someone molested them, viciously injured them, or murdered one of them, and had I a gun in hand, I am reasonably certain I would have blown the violator away without a second thought. I wouldn’t have paused to consider whether the criminal was contrite or repentant. I wouldn’t have asked whether he was a drug addict or had suffered some screwed-up childhood. I wouldn’t have cared at that moment whether he was mentally ill. The reaction would be visceral, and I might later repent of my rage, but there it is: Old Testament justice rather than New Testament mercy. I would pull the trigger.
Rarely, however, do I find myself in circumstances demanding that I forgive others. Unlike Shakespeare’s Lear, who declared himself “a man more sinn’d against than sinning,” I myself am the creature whose sins I have the most trouble forgiving. Offering pardon to others is much easier than offering the same comforts to myself. That self, that tangled battleground of good and evil, that prison from which none of us can escape, begs for charity and absolution, but I am too acutely aware of my failings to offer forgiveness for “what I have done and what I have failed to do.” I am my own worst enemy, my bitterest critic. All of us, when we are honest with ourselves, know these personal failures, these sins against others we ourselves commit.
This interior life, at times so dark and shabby, may of course receive light and a good scrubbing. As a Catholic, for example, I have recourse to the confessional, that tiny box where on the other side of the grill a priest, acting in persona Christi, hears my confession and offers Christ’s forgiveness. I believe in the efficacy of this sacrament, but must confess—pardon the pun—that sometimes I leave the confessional still feeling the burden of my sins. Being forgiven is one thing; forgetting is another proposition altogether.
God’s grace—a gift of salvation, freely given, to undeserving souls—is incomprehensible to me, and I suspect, to many Christians. I am thankful for it, and hope it is true, but cannot wrap my small brain around such munificence. Like God’s peace, this is a gift that “passeth all understanding.”
Still, there is the virtue of hope, and so each Sunday at Mass I recite the Confiteor: “I confess to almighty God and to you, my brothers and sisters, that I have greatly sinned in my thoughts and in my words, in what I have done and in what I have failed to do, through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault; therefore I ask blessed Mary ever-Virgin, all the Angels and Saints, and you, my brothers and sisters, to pray for me to the Lord our God.“
Addendum: I had planned on ending in the previous paragraph, but after reading through it several times, I realize I don’t need to comprehend God’s mercy. (I don’t comprehend much about him anyway). The point is not to understand his profound compassion, but to experience it, to enter into his kingdom. And with all these creatures—Mary, angels, saints, and you, my brothers and sisters—raising such a ruckus of prayers, maybe those golden gates will swing open for me after all.
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