Blessed Are The Merciful

"Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy." (Matthew 5:7). Jesus tells a parable of an unjust steward. In the Parable, the steward who knows he is about to be fired for poor job performance, but before he is thrown out, he calls up all of his master's debtors and works out a deal with each of them so that they will owe much less in exchange for helping him out when he is removed from his position. While this may seem like a pretty shady business move, this is actually how mercy and forgiveness works. All of us spend much of our lives racking up debts with our Savior and with each other through the stupid and ignorant and willfully rebellious and sometimes just plain wicked choices that we make. These debts are much higher than we could ever hope to repay, and we are incurring new ones every day. The very best we can do is to choose to be merciful. When we choose mercy over vengeance, we are like the steward in the Parable who tells the debtor, it says you owe fifty, but write down twenty. Choosing to be merciful is recognizing that a person who knew all of the facts, and was unburdened by the confusing maelstrom of conflicting emotions that so often cloud our minds and hearts, would not have done the stupid thing they did to us, just as we would never have done the stupid things to them if we had similarly been as clear headed and fully aware of the situation. If we make the often hard choice to be merciful and to forgive as fully and as quickly and as frequently as we possibly can, then those who were in our debt will remember our mercy and our kindness and they will be inspired by our example to show us mercy and forgive us. We are all debtors, but the more debts we can find in our hearts to forgive, the more of our own debts we will be able to have forgiven. The more merciful we are, the more mercy we will obtain.