beatitude #5: how do you create social change?
“To err is human, to forgive divine.” — Alexander Pope
There’s one question that dominates our cultural conversation right now: how do you create social change? As we look around and see all of our society’s problems, whether it’s poverty, homelessness, racism, corruption, injustice, or emotional distress, we yearn for change, but yet no one knows how to create it.
Because of this, politicians promise every election cycle that major social change is right around the corner. But yet our social problems continue, year after year, generation after generation, as we grasp around for any solution.
There are two ways that we can try to create social change; either by following the secular approach of Jesus’ approach. While our secular society tells us that social change comes through social judgment, Jesus, in his fifth Beatitude, gives us a unique and puzzling way to create social change: through social mercy.
If we ever want to experience the flourishing life of God’s kingdom we have to understand how Jesus’ approach to social change differs so greatly from the secular approach to social change.
part 1: the secular approach to social change
The secular approach to flourishing believes that the best way to create social change is through social judgment. Our society believes that by pursuing social judgment, they’ll change our culture and create a society that flourishes. So they follow this path for social change:
Define a social ideal —> Pursue social judgment —> Create social flourishing.
Our society believes that if we can do these things, it will lead to the most flourishing society the world has ever seen! So how does this work in real life?
the first step towards social change: choose a social ideal
The first step towards secular social change is choosing your social ideal, an imagined idea of what the perfect society would look like. Social ideals are abstract targets that give us a destination that we can work towards as a society.
Since God no longer has a voice in our secular culture, it's now up to us to define the ideal conditions that’ll cause society to flourish. There are currently two secular ideals that have captured our cultural imagination. They are:
The conservative ideal of social liberty: Most conservatives are drawn to a social ideal of liberty, which promises that if we can keep taxes low, reduce the size of the government, cut regulations, and create equal opportunities for everyone, then society will flourish.
The progressive ideal of social justice: Most progressives are drawn to the social ideal of justice, which promises that if we can raise taxes, enlarge our government, increase regulations, redistribute wealth from the rich to the marginalized, and create equal outcomes for everyone, then society will flourish.
Each group tells itself that if it can reach its social ideal, then society will thrive. But social ideals never stay abstract for long. They all eventually develop into an ideology, a framework of social rules that allow us to make sense of the world. Think of it like this: if an ideal is your group's goal for society, then an ideology is your group's social rules that you believe will help you reach that goal.
Ideologies always spring up around social ideals because groups have to apply their ideals to everyday life. They need a moral framework by which to evaluate things as good or bad, whether it's where you shop, what brands you buy, how you post on social media, or most importantly, where you vote. Ideologies allow us to subconsciously separate the world into two groups, labeling some thoughts, beliefs, and actions as good, while labeling others as bad.
Why is this function of ideologies so important? Because they give us an ability to identify the “enemy,” the people who are keeping us from flourishing. The other side is not just bad, but evil, and is "trying to destroy our country" by secretly working to support communism, fascism, or some other -ism of the day. "If we could only get rid of them," each side thinks, "Then we will usher in a golden age of social flourishing."
We then blame the other side for our societal problems, telling anyone who will listen, “The reason we’re not flourishing is because of them!" Most people are not even aware that they're following an ideology, but these subconscious rule systems become our self-created standard for what will create a flourishing society.
the second step towards social change: social judgment
Once you've chosen a social ideal and adopted its ideology, the next step towards secular social change comes through social judgment: you need to tell others where they're wrong and how they need to change. If you’re ever going to get people to change, society says, you need to confront their evil actions and tell them how much they’re messing things up!
To do this, you have to first believe that you're qualified to be society's judge. So, we start by using our ideologies to declare our lives and choices morally superior. How? By:
Emphasizing rules we find easy to obey.
Comparing our perfect, abstract intentions against their messy, real-life actions.
Creating ways to publicly perform our “goodness.”
Obsessing over our side’s ideals while ignoring our side’s flaws.
Surround ourselves with like-minded people who assure us of our goodness.
This self-judgment is a sham, but nobody cares because it gives us the self-righteousness we need to judge others and tell them where they have to change.
Now, armed with our sense of moral superiority and the belief that we're good people, we judge everyone around us and tell them whenever they break our social rules. Each side fixates on judging the other, constantly pointing out the enemy’s mistakes, flaws, and sins. Our judgments are bolstered through our use of stereotypes, straw man arguments, misrepresentations, and dehumanizing terms that paint the other side as filled with evil intent.
Why is our society so judgmental? Because it makes us feel like we are working to change society for the better. Eugene Peterson said:
Being critical and condemnatory feels moral. You see an evil and you take a stand. There's something adrenaline-releasing. You're on the right side and you're doing something about the problems.
We naively believe that if we can judge everyone and let them know that they’re evil, then they’ll see their faults, admit that they're wrong, and quickly change their thinking, beliefs, and behaviors to what we want.
But when we use social judgment to try to create social change, we soon find out that this approach only causes other people to become even more entrenched in their positions. They see your judgment of them as proof of how evil you are…after all, only evil people would ever disagree and attack good people like them!
the third step towards social change: social punishment
Since judging others doesn’t lead to social change, we then turn to the last step of the secular approach towards social change: we punish the other side for their sins. We punish others for two main reasons:
To express our anger and make them pay for all of the hurt they've caused.
To bully others into adopting our beliefs and view of the world.
While social punishment can take all kinds of forms, we usually use shame, ridicule, exclusion, canceling, de-platforming, discrimination, slander, black lists, and silent treatment to make them feel the full weight of our social judgment against them. We withhold social belonging, acceptance, and approval, believing that we can hurt them so badly that they will have no choice but to change.
So we rain down condemnation on other people, hoping that we can pressure them into changing their opinion. We punish them over and over, in every way possible, whether it’s through social media, personal interactions, or grumbling to our friends. And if they don’t change, we try to punish them to extinction, feeling completely justified in trying to destroy their lives, whether metaphorically or in reality. These social punishments send a chilling message to society: either you fall in line with my rules, or you’ll be next.
Each side believes that the stakes are too high to back down, much less forgive. As the good people of society, it's our moral obligation to punish evil whenever we see it. Sure, our forms of punishment make us pretty nasty, too, but the ends justify the means: if we don't destroy them, they are going to continue to destroy our society! Sure, we’d rather not, but they are so evil the only way to ensure a flourishing future is to destroy them socially, financially, and politically.
Even if we don't explicitly punish others ourselves, we support our cultural leaders as they do our dirty work for us. Whether it’s a politician, media figure, or social media star, people who punish the other side for their social sins gain incredible amounts of power, popularity, and income. We root for their destruction and gloat in the other side’s mistakes, using their faults and flaws to prove how evil they are.
Why do we refuse to forgive? Because we’re perfect, unlike the evil other side. As Miroslav Volf wrote:
Forgiveness flounders because I exclude the enemy from the community of humans even as I exclude myself from the community of sinners.
And so each side in our secular society punishes the other, believing that this will create the social change needed to bring about a flourishing society.
what are the results of the secular approach to change?
Despite our secular society's confidence in its ability to create social change, its approach never creates a flourishing society. Why? Because social judgment doesn't create social flourishing, but rather social destruction, which ends up creating social breakdown.
While our society believes that:
Social ideal —> Social judg./punishment —> Social change —> Social flourishing
In reality, what happens is:
Social ideology —> Social judg./punishment —> Social destruction —> Social breakdown.
The secular approach to flourishing doesn't change people, but rather destroys them, causing society to break down even more. This happens through:
Destroyed relationships: when we judge and punish others, we inflict all kinds of damage on each other, destroying the bonds that society needs to flourish. We become angry, bitter, and frustrated with our parents, neighbors, and peers, often choosing to end relationships rather than work through differences. This creates a world filled with pain, distrust, and loneliness.
Even more entrenched ideological positions: Being criticized, attacked, or punished doesn’t cause people to rethink their positions, but rather fuels them to become even more entrenched against the attacks of the other side.
Less forgiveness: Once the other side has been found guilty, punishment is the only acceptable response. And since we assume the worst about the person’s motives and intent, you have to pursue the maximum punishment possible for every social crime.
Escalating cycles of social violence: social judgment and punishment create cycles of violence: when each side feels attacked, they respond back from their pain and try to repay the other side for the hurt they've received. This causes society to fall into an escalating cycle of social violence and destruction.
Increased apathy: because all of our problems are caused by the other side, we grow to believe that we can't do anything to help fix the situation. This creates a cultural apathy where everyone waits for the "bad" people to change, while refusing to help with the hard and messy task of tackling our society's problems.
The secular approach might be able to use social pressure to change short term social norms, but it never leads to social flourishing. It creates too much anger, resentment, and bitterness, causing society to swing back and forth like a pendulum based on the whims of each new generation.
But since our secular culture has no alternative, we double-down on this approach, believing that the reason we aren't flourishing yet is because we haven't punished the other side enough!
This, however, only leads to more social breakdown, and eventually, as people collect more and more wounds, they lose hope that the world will ever change. John Mayer's song, Waiting on the World to Change, sums up this attitude perfectly:
Now we see everything that's going wrong with the world and those who lead it. We just feel like we don't have the means to rise above and beat it. So we keep waiting, waiting on the world to change.
After rage, anger, and punishment, society reaches its last emotion: despair…when is anything ever going to change? And since nothing we do seems to help, we give up on trying to help our society and go back to building our own personal kingdoms.
why doesn’t the secular approach to social change work?
So why doesn’t the secular approach to social change lead to the kind of social flourishing that everyone hopes it will? There are three main reasons that it doesn’t work.
The first reason is because every ideology is off. Since all of our ideologies are created by broken people and not a perfect God, they don't tell an accurate story of the world. Because we are blind to our own problems and errors, we adjust our ideologies to ignore or misinterpret any evidence we don't like, while overemphasizing all of the evidence that supports our interpretation of the world (we're good, they're bad). This causes every ideology to be a half truth, which is the most dangerous kind of life. Some of it is true, but due to its distortion of reality it should never be used as the standard by which we judge others.
The second reason is because none of us are competent to judge others. Because every person is corrupted by bias, favoritism, and self-deception, we're all unjust in our judgments. We over-punish the people we blame and under-punish the people we like. None of us can live up to our social ideals, causing our social change projects to collapse as each side points out the moral failings of the other. And since we don't know the hearts, motives, and circumstances of others, we misjudge others, which only creates more injustice, not less. This means that we're all hypocritical judges: we hold people around us up to standards that we can't keep ourselves.
The third reason is because no one is actually trying to change society: Despite what we tell ourselves, the purpose of the secular approach isn't to change society, but rather to help us feel morally superior to others. We don't use social judgment because it's effective at creating social change, but rather because it helps to convince ourselves that we are good people. Deep down, we're all anxious about our moral goodness, so we use ideologies to prove to ourselves that we're okay. That’s why we love to complain about the world from a distance: it allows us to feel like we are doing something without ever having to get involved in the moral messiness of life.
so what's the root problem?
The root problem of the secular approach to social change is that none of us can admit that we're sinful human beings who contribute to the brokenness of the world. Why does this happen? Because we're all self-deceived by our sin. As David states in Psalm 19: “Who can discern their own errors? Forgive me my hidden faults.”
Sin blinds us to the fact that we all have hidden faults that we can’t see and motivates us to blame others for them, all in an attempt to maintain our façade of self-righteousness. As D.A. Carson writes: The sinner who won’t face up to his sin hates all other sinners.
But to think that we are sinless is to live in self-deception. In 1 John 1 states, “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” Sin affects all of us, not only in the thoughts, beliefs, and actions that it causes us to commit, but also the way that it deceives us from seeing that we’re sinful.
This problem isn't new, though, and goes all the way back to the Garden of Eden. When Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit they became self-deceived by their sin. And so when confronted by God, Adam, rather than admitting that he ate the fruit, blamed both God and Eve. He said, “The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.” And Eve, no doubt feeling the heat of Adam’s attack, passed the blame for her sin onto Satan: “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”
By acting like this, Adam and Eve show us a fundamental characteristic of our sinful heart: we all try to deal with our sin by judging other people and pointing out their sin. Instead of admitting their sin, they rejected God, took on his role as judge, and started blaming everyone but themselves.
Our society assumes that if we can get rid of God and Christianity we'll become more tolerant and less judgmental, but in reality, as Baylor professor Alan Jacobs says, it's the exact opposite:
When a society rejects the Christian account of who we are, it doesn’t become less moralistic but far more so, because it retains an inchoate sense of justice but has no means of offering and receiving forgiveness. The great moral crisis of our time is not, as many of my fellow Christians believe, sexual licentiousness, but rather vindictiveness. Social media serve as crack for moralists: there’s no high like the high you get from punishing malefactors.
While trying to use social judgment to create social change might feel good, the end result isn't social flourishing, but rather social destruction.
part 2: Jesus’ approach to social change
Through his fifth Beatitude, Jesus challenges everything about the secular approach to social change. According to Jesus, a flourishing society doesn't happen through social judgment but rather through social mercy. That's the key point of his fifth Beatitude:
Flourishing are the merciful, because they shall be shown mercy.
A flourishing society isn't the result of an obsession with judging and punishing "evil" people, but rather happens when we show mercy to each other.
But this idea is radical, and both secular and religious people hate it! How are you ever going to change society by being merciful? We think showing mercy will allow evil to continue unchecked and will cause injustice to grow. And so we reject Jesus' approach to social change, confident mercy would never work in a society as broken as ours.
But Jesus wasn't naive. He lived in a cruel world, surrounded by even more evil and injustice than we have today. Yet he still taught his followers the path to flourishing is found in showing mercy to one another.
so what does Jesus mean by being merciful?
To understand how being merciful leads to flourishing, we first have to understand what Jesus meant by mercy. Mercy, as understood in the Bible, can be defined as: showing compassion to hurting people. When Jesus calls us to be merciful, he's telling us to show compassion, empathy, and concern to people who are suffering from the misery of sin.
Mercy is more than just being nice to people or feeling bad for those who have problems, but rather is entering into the pain, hurt, and struggle of those suffering from the effects of sin. As Clarence Jordan wrote:
Mercy is not merely pitching a coin to a beggar, but rather a whole attitude towards life. By the 'merciful' Jesus means those who have an attitude of compassion toward all people that they want to share gladly all that they have with one another and the world.
Jesus calls us not to condemn others, but rather to show compassion to them, whether they are suffering from the spiritual, emotional, physical or economic effects of sin.
so what does mercy actually look like?
The problem with a concept like mercy, though, is that we always redefine it to minimize its requirements on us. To break through this human tendency, Jesus told the parable of the Good Samaritan.
In this parable, a Samaritan man came upon a Jewish man who had been robbed, beat up, and left for dead. Rather than ignoring the dying man, like a Jewish priest and Levite had previously done, the Samaritan risked his life by stopping to bind up his wounds, put him on his donkey, and took him to the local inn, where he offered to pay for the injured man’s care until he was healed.
This parable destroys our intellectual definitions of mercy and causes us to see what biblical mercy actually looks like. It is:
Compassion in action: Mercy isn't just an ideal or feeling, but is a tangible action. Mercy isn't an abstract desire, but rather love in action to help lessen their suffering from sin.
Generous compassion: Mercy is costly love, and when you show it to others it will require you to be generous with your time, money, and life.
Compassion towards all, even the people you don't like: Mercy isn't just compassion towards people that you like, but rather to everyone, even your enemies. As pastor Derwin Gray put it, "Being a merciful person means that you cross ethnic, cultural, and religious barriers to help hurting people."
No doubt the priest and the Levite had strong opinions about what was wrong with society and how to fix things, but yet when they were given a chance to actually help someone in need, they avoided it.
The Samaritan man, however, didn't blame the injured man for messing up his life or tweet out how the politicians in Jerusalem needed to fix this problem. Instead, he showed great compassion towards this hurt man.
why is it so hard to be merciful?
While everyone would approve of the Good Samaritan’s actions, we all struggle to show mercy to other people, much less believe that mercy is the way to create social change. So often, when we see sin ravaging our society, we're so focused on destroying our enemies that we never show compassion towards those whose lives are being wrecked by sin. So why is the desire to judge others, and not show mercy, the default mode of our hearts?
We're all self-righteous: The main reason we're not merciful is because we don't think we need mercy. We believe in our own moral superiority, which makes us feel comfortable holding others to our standards and punishing them when they fall short. "If I can be perfect, or at least pretty close," we all think, "Then I have the right to expect perfection from everyone else." This is especially true when we're young, since we assume we’ll do everything perfectly when we’re older and in charge.
We don't believe in a cosmic Judgment Day: In an attempt to be more loving and kind, our secular society (and increasingly the church) has gotten rid of the idea that God is a divine judge who will one day judge the world. While it sounds so open-minded to not believe in a day of divine judgment, in reality, this has caused our society to turn every day into our own personal judgment day! If you don't believe that there's a God who will someday hold people accountable for their sin, then you have to act as God, judging and punishing everything yourself, out of fear that if you don’t, evil will go unpunished.
We don't feel like being merciful gets things done: We resist showing mercy to others, especially our ideological enemies, because it doesn't feel like we're getting anything done. We're all impatient with God's methods and believe that we don't have time to show mercy. "Things need to change now!" we say to ourselves. So we use the secular approach to social change, thinking it will be a shortcut to a flourishing society.
Because of these reasons, we all naturally resist the idea of showing mercy to others.
so how do we become merciful?
But if we are to ever follow this Beatitude and be merciful, we have to see how Jesus challenges our natural way of approaching the world. To become merciful, we need to:
Understand our own need for mercy: You'll never show mercy to others until you realize your own need for mercy. To do that, you have to recognize that there's a standard, God's law, that's about your ideological standard. While you might be able to finesse your ideology to make yourself look good, when you compare yourself to God's law your self-righteousness will disintegrate. We're all sinners who have rebelled against God and are wreaking havoc on the world around us.
As the Holy Spirit works in our hearts he breaks down our self-deception and helps us understand our need for God's mercy. Tim Keller says that to Jesus "the only distinction in humanity that matters is not the good and the bad, but rather the proud and the humble.” When we recognize that there is no one good, then we can repent of our pride and humbly accept God’s mercy towards us.
Trust that God will judge the world with perfect justice: Having recognized our brokenness and need for God's mercy, we have to then admit that only God is qualified to judge other people. We're not. Psalm 98 says that God will judge the world in righteousness and the peoples with equity: perfect fairness.
We can be merciful when we trust that God is a just judge who will deal fairly with all human beings. As Hebrews 9 tells us: "Every person is destined to die, and after that to face judgment." Our job isn't to judge the world now, but rather to show mercy to those around us and to help them prepare for God's future judgment. This is the same role that Jesus took on earth, who said in John 3: “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”
Rest in God’s plan for the world: once we recognize our need for mercy and our lack of ability to judge the world, we still have to grow in our ability to trust God’s plan for the world. So often we see how things are going in society, how sinful people succeed and righteous people suffer, and we say, “How is this fair God? Are you asleep up there?”
We’re tired of waiting for God to get his act together, so we step in, take control, and start judging and punishing everyone around us. But when we do this, it shows that we don’t understand God’s heart. The Apostle Peter reminds us:
With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day. The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance. But the day of the Lord will come like a thief.
When we become merciful when we stop trying to fit God into our plan and instead trust that he will judge evil when the time is right.
When we recognize our sinfulness and our need for mercy, it allows us to let go of our delusions that we’re supposed to judge the world, and rather sets us free to serve it with great compassion.
so why do the merciful flourish?
Jesus says that the merciful flourish not because they create good karma or meet God's standard, but rather "because they shall be shown mercy." This Beatitude can be confusing at first. Is Jesus saying that we have to show mercy in order to get God's mercy?
We have to remember, though, that the Beatitudes aren't if/then statements (if you do this then you'll flourish), but rather an invitation to participate in the flourishing life of God's kingdom. The merciful flourish, not because the mercy they show impresses God, but rather because it demonstrates that they understand their need for God's mercy.
This is the point that Jesus was trying to get across in the parable of the unmerciful servant. When the servant refused to forgive the other man for a small debt, even after he'd been forgiven a huge debt by his master, he showed his master that he didn't think he actually needed mercy. The servant wasn't sorrowful for his debt and he hadn't been moved or changed by the great mercy of his master.
So many people are like the unmerciful servant: they will use God for forgiveness when they do something really bad, but when they refuse to show mercy to the people around them, it demonstrates that they don't actually believe they need God's forgiveness. As Reinhold Niebuhr wrote:
Forgiveness is possible only to those who know themselves to be sinners. Moral idealists never forgive their foes. They are too secure in their own virtue to do that. Men forgive their foes only when they feel themselves to be standing under God with them, and feel the divine scrutiny all ‘our righteousness is as filthy rags.’
The merciful flourish because they understand their need for mercy from God, which causes them to repent of their sins, ask for his forgiveness, and experience the his new life. First Peter 1 tells us:
According to God’s great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.
The merciful flourish because God has forgiven them of their sins and will show them mercy when Jesus comes again at the end of time to judge the world. The merciful receive God's mercy and are invited into God's new heavens and new earth for an eternity of flourishing.
But how can God be both merciful towards us and just towards sin? Because of the cross. God can be a God of both mercy and justice only because Jesus took the punishment for our sin on the cross. He satisfied God’s perfect justice, so that we can receive God’s never-ending mercy. As Psalm 103 says:
The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. He does not deal with us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our iniquities.
As we enter society as people who have been saved by Jesus' death and resurrection, we are able to balance God's call to justice with his merciful provision of a savior.
so how do the merciful flourish now?
But the merciful don’t just flourish in the future, their merciful lives create flourishing in the here and now! How? Because merciful people:
Help to solve the problems of a hurting world: Merciful people don't just complain about everyone else, but instead use their lives to address the pain and suffering of sin. They run towards the problems of the world, since they know that the only reason they don't struggle with the same sins is because of God's grace, not any moral goodness of their own.
They give up their aloof apathy because they recognize they are a part of the problems in our society. They see how their brokenness has contributed to the hurt, pain, and suffering of the world, and become energized by God's mercy towards them to extend costly love to others.
Create the space to work through our sin: Because merciful people understand their own need for mercy, they don't look down on other people in order to judge and punish them, but rather seek to show mercy to them so that they can introduce them to God's forgiveness. When we see that we’re not going to be judged and punished by the other person, we finally feel safe enough to admit that we are sinful, and that we contribute to the problems of our community, neighborhood, and culture.
Mercy melts our hearts and lets us be honest, with both ourselves and others, about our true condition. This doesn’t happen overnight, but with time, God uses mercy to change hearts and give people the space they need to repent of their sin, which is what changes society. Mercy then allows us to show respect, compassion, and love even to people who disagree with us so that we can work together towards a greater good.
Jesus' approach to social change doesn't seek to punish people for their past sins, but rather uses mercy to introduce them to their need to repent for their sin. What makes social mercy so different from social judgment, is that it allows for sin to be dealt with and worked through, instead of covered up and hidden.
Secular approach: social judgment —> social punishing —> social breakdown
Jesus' approach: social mercy —> social repentance —> social flourishing
It’s only when we become merciful people that we can switch from the secular approach to social change to Jesus’ approach.
but is mercy anti-justice?
But there’s one last question we have to ask: doesn’t being merciful just allow the status quo of society to continue unchallenged? If we fall into that trap, it’s because we misunderstand God’s mercy.
Justice and mercy are not an either/or situation with God. You don't have to either pursue justice or mercy, but rather are to work towards justice in a merciful manner, not punishing others for what they have done in the past, yet not compromising on boundaries and enabling sin in the future.
We see this in Micah 6:8, a popular Bible verse at the moment:
And what does the Lord require of you, but to do justice, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?
So many people are so focused on doing justice, that they overlook the second two commands. They skip right over “love mercy” and “walk humbly” and instead unconsciously interpret this verse if it’s saying, “Do justice, love judgment, and walk proudly, because I know what’s right.”
But that's not what the verse says! Micah gives us a logic to pursue justice: We are to
Walk humbly —> love mercy —> do justice
God wants us to pursue justice, yes, but only through mercy and walking humbly with him. We are not to judge others as we seek justice, but rather are to respond to the effects of sin in their life with a deep and compassionate mercy.
Mercy then is not sufficient for a just society, but it is necessary. Justice is something we must do, but only when we have cultivated a humble and merciful spirit. Mercy is not anti-justice, but rather anti-judgment. While there are times to be angry at sin and the injustice it creates, we are always to respond in mercy, not judgment. As Jesus says, “Be merciful, just as your heavenly Father is merciful.”
so where do we get the power to be merciful?
If you try to force yourself to show mercy to other people you won't be able to do it. Your tendency to compare them to your ideology will always win out in the long run. You’ll never be able to rationalize your way into costly compassion for the hurting and sinful of society.
Instead, the only way to develop a merciful heart is to see the mercy that motivated Jesus to come to this earth and rescue you. Jesus didn't have to do anything to help us; he was under no obligation to leave heaven, much less die on the cross. Yet Jesus willingly did these things because he loved us so much. Matthew 9 says:
When Jesus saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.
God saw the mess we had made of the world in our sin, and despite our rejection of him, chose to become a man and die on the cross to rescue us from ourselves. And on the cross, during the greatest injustice in the history of the world, Jesus didn’t judge and punish us, but rather said, "Forgive them, for they know not what they do."
Because of Jesus’ mercy and forgiveness towards us, we are called to do the same, to run towards the brokenness of the world, not to save ourselves, but to introduce everyone to the love, compassion, and flourishing life that’s only found in God.
Part of the tension between these two social ideals is that both are including in the original vision for the United States. We see this in the American Pledge of Allegiance, which ends with the phrase “With liberty and justice for all.” Because of this, both groups create a mythological “origin story” around their social ideal, that the United States was founded specifically to ensure that their ideal would be the main goal of the country.
If you want to see how ideologies actually work, think about two popular signs: “Freedom isn’t free” and “Refugees are welcome here.” At face value, these statements seem bland and non-controversial. But in our current ideological clash, depending on which community you live in, some people see one sign as evil and the other as good, while people in another community will have the exact opposite opinions.
