Matthew 5:7 - Blessed are the Merciful
“Blessed are the poor in spirit…” - Mt 5:3
“Blessed are those who mourn…” - Mt 5:4
“Blessed are the meek...” - Mt 5:5
“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness” - Mt 5:6
As we continue through the Beatitudes, this week we pick back up with the fifth:
"Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.” - Mt 5:7
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St. Thomas Aquinas noted that “justice without mercy is cruelty; mercy without justice is dissolution.”
It’s no coincidence that Jesus follows the fourth Beatitude (on righteousness, more accurately translated as justice) with the fifth on mercy.
The two must be seamlessly woven together.
Mercy is a component of the cardinal virtue of justice and the emotional faculty of compassion. Naturally, we are capable of sharing in the suffering of another person because we’re made in the image and likeness of God.
However, natural virtues are limited by human weakness, self-interest, and the effects of original sin.
So although on a human level, mercy is a natural virtue rooted in human psychology and rational nature, the saving mercy of God is explicitly supernatural.
It’s an unmerited, gratuitous gift that originates entirely from God’s nature.
Supernatural mercy does not just relieve earthly physical suffering, it targets the ultimate human misery: sin and eternal separation from God.
For a human being to practice supernatural mercy (i.e. forgiving an enemy unconditionally, loving the "unlovable," or performing a good deed with a salvific intention), it requires supernatural intervention.
The soul must be elevated by God’s grace to love others with the same selfless, sacrificial love that Christ showed on the Cross.
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Jesus’s emphasis on the reciprocal nature of mercy in this Beatitude is not transactional, as though our mercy earns God’s.
Divine mercy always precedes our own. We love because He first loved us; we forgive because we have been forgiven.
To be merciful, then, is to allow the mercy we have received to become the very disposition through which we encounter the world.
It’s to see another person’s misery without contempt or self-righteousness.
In this way, Divine Mercy orders justice toward the restoration of what sin has wounded.
And this is precisely what Christ accomplishes on the Cross. He enters into the misery of sin and bears its cost in order to reconcile us to the Father.
The supernatural character of Divine Mercy thus lies in the transformation of the heart by grace, so that we can begin to love as Christ loves.
We become merciful because the mercy of God is saving us.
“The quality of mercy is not strained;
it droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:
‘Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown:
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this sceptred sway;
It is enthroned in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God’s
When mercy seasons justice.”
-The Merchant of Venice, Act IV, Scene 1, Shakespeare
Onward and Upward,
Ted
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