Tag: mercy

Drowning in Mercy

Drowning in Mercy

Adapted from a sermon by Johnny Sharkawi

Would it be accurate to say that God’s mercy is available to us?

To anyone in the church, the answer would be, yes. The Bible presents us with a different answer. A more accurate answer is that God dumps His mercy on our heads.

A common prayer that Fr Elijah would pray was, “Thank You God for pouring Your mercy and blessings upon us.” I would hear this prayer time and time again. The attitude that God is pouring mercy without falter is the more accurate description.

What is strange is that in the Bible, God pours mercy even on those that do not ask for it. On the Cross, there were none that asked for His mercy. The reality was that they were opposing Him. The first time He opened His mouth on the Cross was to pour mercy upon them. He said, “Father forgive them, for they do not know what they do” (Luke 23:34). Even to those that did not ask nor want His mercy, the Lord still with the largest bucket possible, dumped His mercy upon them.

Till today, He continues to poor blessings on those that do not ask. In Matthew 5:45, we read, “for He makes His sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.” His mercy is poured on the evil, just as the sun rises on all people. There is no distinction made between His children, all receive mercy. It would be weak for us to say that His mercy is merely available to us. God does not reluctantly give mercy if we beg. He is not that kind of Lord.

“Come now, and let us reason together,” Says the Lord, “Though your sins are like scarlet, They shall be as white as snow; Though they are red like crimson, They shall be as wool.” – Isaiah 1:18.

He says, ‘come,’ as if the Lord is grabbing us by the arm and pulling us. He wants to reason with us that even though we are sinful, He wants to make us white like snow. This is not a Lord reluctantly giving away mercy but a Lord that is looking for every opportunity to give away His mercy.

Another example of His pleasure in mercy is in Micah 7:18-19; “Who is a God like You, Pardoning iniquity and passing over the transgression of the remnant of His heritage? He does not retain His anger forever, Because He delights in mercy. He will again have compassion on us, And will subdue our iniquities. You will cast all our sins Into the depths of the sea.”

The Lord’s delight is in mercy. If you think of the way you delight in your favourite meal, you do not leave in remnants behind. You lick the plate clean, and you get every last drop off your fingers, too. You do this in delight. This is the Lord’s approach to mercy. The Lord’s delight is in mercy so that His forgiveness is never short of 100%. He licks His fingers until there is no mercy left to give, this is His greatest delight.

More than this, “I, even I, am He who blots out your transgressions for My own sake; And I will not remember your sins.” – Isaiah 43:25.

He tells us that He forgives us not for our sake, but His. Even if we do not want our sins forgiven, He can’t help but forgive. This is the extent of His mercy, He wants it more than we do. He does not desire the death for a single sinner but that all should return and live (Ezekiel 18:23).

If we were to ask the Lord what he really wanted from us, I think He would respond in the same way He responded in Ezekiel 36: 25-26, “I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean; I will cleanse you from all your filthiness and from all your idols. 26 I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; I will take the heart of stone out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. 

Why does the Lord want us to be clean? Because it is a pre-requisite to seeing God. If we are to see God, we must first be clean. In Hebrews 12:14, it says, “Pursue peace with all people, and holiness, without which no one will see the Lord.”

We will not see the Lord without holiness. The objective is not to be clean in our own eyes, or to be clean in the eyes of other people, but am I clean in God’s eyes? Without true holiness that only the Lord sees, we will not be able to see Him.

The Lord pours His mercy, He dumps His mercy on us all now so that now is the time to pursue holiness so we may see the Lord. There will come a time that the door will be shut and it will not be opened again. We must pursue holiness now while His mercy is being poured upon us.

Many of us will ask is confession a struggle? The answer is yes. Even HH Pope Kyrillos VI would agree, he said, “do not keep your thoughts hidden but struggle to purify your thoughts through confession.” It is a struggle; It is not easy. If we take on the heart of Jesus who said, “I am gentle and lowly in heart,” (Matthew 11:29) then confession will be easier. A major reason why we find confession is a struggle is because we want to look good. I want Abouna to think well of me. The truth is, it is my pride that stops me from confessing my sins.

On Covenant Thursday, the Lord breaks Himself for us. He took His Body (that is the Eucharist), and He broke Himself for our sake. Confession is me breaking myself, for my own sake.

“Then two men will be in the field: one will be taken and the other left.” – Matthew 24:40. Confessions is the difference between the one taken and the one left behind. We do this for ourself. We do not have confession so that we can tell others that we have had confession and we are now clean, but we do it so that we may be clean in God’s eyes. We do it so that we are not the ones left behind of Judgement day. The door is open now while we have life in us.

“Seek the Lord while He may be found, Call upon Him while He is near. Let the wicked forsake his way, And the unrighteous man his thoughts; Let him return to the Lord, And He will have mercy on him; And to our God, For He will abundantly pardon” – Isaiah 55:6-7.

The Lord is ready to pour His mercy and He waits for us. The Lord is so simple, repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand (Matthew 3:2). Sometimes, we translate this wrongly, because we are complicated while the Lord is simple. We interpret this as dwell on your sin, for the Kingdom is at hand. Think a lot about your sin. Feel really bad about your sin. Let this manifest into depression about your sin. Hide your sin. This is complex and it is not the Bible. If we are weighed down by our sin then we have missed the whole point of the week.

The Lord shed His blood to make us clean. We do not need to carry our sin. He came that we may have life and live it more abundantly (John 10:10).

? Full Sermon ?

Repentance and Mercy

Repentance and Mercy

Adapted from a sermon by Aidan Mclachlan

“To fall in love with God is the greatest romance, to seek Him, the greatest adventure to find him. The greatest human achievement”.

St Augustine

The two main events of Thursday Eve are the betrayal by Judas and the anointing of the feet by the spikenard woman. Two remarkably different people who approached the Lord in very different ways.

Each time we read the gospels and come to the calling of the twelve disciples, we come to Judas. He is described as the one “who also betrayed Him”. All too quickly we assume that the sin of Judas was betrayal. But we ask ourselves, did any of the other disciples betray Christ? The answer would be a resounding, yes! St Peter, who denied Christ three times certainly betrayed Him and yet he remained the rock on which Christ builds His church. In fact, we have all sinned and sin is no less than spurning God’s trust and love for us. It is in short, a betrayal. Is there then no hope for us?

I think we find the true sin of Judas not in betrayal but in despair, and from this despair, his failure to repent. But was Judas not repentant? Didn’t he try to return the silver coins? Judas, so absorbed in the world, tried to overcome his crime on his own without seeking God, or His mercy. What he felt most guilty of, was his role in killing Christ and there was no way that he could reverse this and bring Christ from the dead.

But God could. By this time, Judas’ despair overwhelmed him, and his guilt had consumed him. He was nothing but a vessel of wretched misery and anguish. With no hope on Earth, he ended his life and with it, his hope in heaven as well. If only Judas had suffered a little longer. If only he had endured. If only he had waited a few more days for Christ’s glorious resurrection. He failed to see Christ as God, and that He could kill his despair, before it killed him.

Now if we turn to the second key character, the spikenard woman. We find in the Gospel of Matthew and Mark, a story of a woman who was a friend of Jesus. She anoints Christ’s head, not his feet, in the town of Bethany just before His passion. A different story is presented in Luke; a story of a sinner woman who anoints Christ’s feet and dries them with her hair, with no association with Christ’s passion. Most likely, these are two different events. One performed by a sinner woman, and the other by a friend. One clearly an act of repentance and one seemingly an act of affection.

In the Gospel of John, we find Christ at Bethany just before His passion, similar to Matthew and Mark’s gospels. Yet the woman washes Christ’s feet like the sinner woman in Luke’s Gospel. What is the point of seemingly fusing the two stories, and the two women? This is to show the transformative power of repentance. St John keeps the action of a sinner woman in washing His feet, but the timing in the Gospel narrative of the other woman, a friend of Christ. This Indicates that through her repentance, she went from being a sinner woman to being a friend of God.

The Greek word metanoia is commonly understood as repentance but it is so much more than that. It is a change – a transformation! The spikenard woman becomes an example to us for proper penitence, weeping at Christ’s feet, having both her sins and her Lord before her eyes. The spikenard woman is also a revelation of God’s love that though we fail, though we betray Him, though we put nails in His hand, and a spear in His side, He will overcome our weaknesses and transform us to something greater, a friend of His. Finally we can marvel at God’s love and mercy, just as she did. This is true repentance, born from true love, true faith, true hope, and given to the one that is the fulfilment of love, faith and hope.

If we compare the repentance of the spikenard woman to Judas, we find that she had trust in the salvation of the Lord that Judas did not. Unlike Judas’ attempt at repentance, this woman did not aim for a worldly goal. She was rightly criticised by the apostles for not selling that oil and giving the money to the poor, because it made little sense to the world. Yet out of love, she gave up what was likely her most expensive possession. She wept and begged and pleaded for mercy. This is true repentance.

How can we discover this heart felt repentance? With wonder! We can see that God in all this greatness can overcome any obstacle, even despair. With this wonder, we can behold all that God has made and done for us and so grow in love like the spikenard woman. With this wonder, we can honestly say like the apostle, “if God is for us, who can be against us” (Romans 8:31). How is it that God became Man? How is it that God could suffer? How is it that God could rise again from the dead? How is it that God could make the corruptible incorruptible?

We are blessed not to have logical explanations for many of these questions because if we had them, we may suddenly lose our sense of wonder in favour of something much less marvellous. We discover this wonder from the world around us when we discover that the world is transparent. Through it, we see the beauty and the light of God. The English word cosmetic meaning beauty, comes from the Greek word cosmos, meaning universe. The world becomes an icon of God and we see through it. We cannot be like Judas, who saw the world as an end in itself, because this road leads to despair. We must instead see the world, its beauty and the Lord Almighty in their height of greatness, and not reduced to it.

May we all seek and discover the wonder of the Lord this Holy Week, and for the rest of our days.

The Merciful

The Beatitudes Series Part 5

Blessed are the merciful for they shall obtain mercy

By Meray Shehata

Jesus tells us that if we are merciful to others, we can achieve mercy from the Creator. How is it that we can be merciful then? Having this ability to be merciful means that we are also in a position to do nothing or even worse to punish others. It means that we have power or a certain stature that’s higher but instead we choose compassion and forgiveness. It means
overlooking what’s easier and in our best interest at that moment to be more Christ-like.

In Leviticus (19:9) it is written “ When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not wholly reap the corners of your field, nor shall you gather the gleanings of your harvest.” Imagine this land is your source of food, your source of money, it’s how you survive. Yet, God has commanded you not to make use of it, He has asked you to be poor, to be hungry and yearn
for more. Instead your profits and all your hard work will go to someone else who may not deserve it, someone who didn’t spend those long nights nurturing the plants and fruits as you did. Someone who while you put in the time and effort for these rewards may have been wasting their time and money away irresponsibly. To aggravate you even more, this person may have laughed at you, spoken evil about you behind your back and tried to poison your fruit. However, your commandment is much the same. Leave some of your profit for others.


What a cruel situation to be in, how unfair could our God be?
Although in reality, how cruel and unfair can we be? Aren’t we the undeserving going to Christ’s field and collecting the fruit without the slightest effort. Haven’t we pierced his side and placed a crown of thorns on His head? Haven’t we crucified Him and watched as His mother cried? Or worse, haven’t we denied Him and claimed that we are the reason that we
are reaping these fruits. How merciless can we be?

Now that we have acknowledged our evil, how is it that we can condemn others as evil? Is it right for us to place ourselves higher than others. Have we really the authority to condemn others when we ourselves were condemned once before? “ Let all the bitterness, wrath, anger, clamour, and evil speaking be put away from you with all malice. And be kind hearted
to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another even as God in Christ forgave you” (Eph 4:31-32). Therefore as the sinless and pure lamb was sacrificed for your redemption must you show love and mercy for others.
Is it true though? Is showing love and mercy for the benefit others only? Or is it for us too?

Well for one God has promised us mercy if we show the same. Other than that, has it ever hurt being kind to someone? Maybe in the short term, you lose some time, you might be at a loss financially, or you may not enjoy it at the beginning. Give it time. Give it time to see the blessings pour in from your Saviour. Give it time to witness your life unfold in a way you couldn’t have imagined. Have a little faith, give a little goodness and God will give you unimaginable joy because He will be at your core.

Have mercy in your work as Jesus had mercy on the disciples when they slept rather than pray.
Have mercy in your house as Jesus took care of st. Mary unto His dying breath. Have mercy in your marriage as Jesus sacrificed Himself for His church.
Have mercy with your wealth as Jesus saved humanity without a cent in his pocket.
Have mercy with your children as God so loved us He gave his only begotten Son.
But most of all have mercy in your heart as Jesus has loved you.