“The name of God is mercy,” so says the current Pope, who is seriously big on the mercy thing.
Just in case you are wondering, I am a self-confessed, practicing Catholic. Although, given my various misfit mystic musings on this blog and elsewhere, there would be more than a few among my Catholic brethren who would cast me as a heretic, if not outright heathen.
You won’t find references in my writing supporting the notion that ‘God is out to get you,’ because everything I have experienced of the living God who walks with us suggests the polar opposite. Pope Francis is right on the money: God can indeed be called mercy.
I am old enough and Irish enough to have received, back in the day, a vigorous Catholic education. We’re talking old-school here, administered by priests and nuns who didn’t spare the horses on the hellfire-and-brimstone god of fear and trembling. I’ve spoken to plenty of – let’s call them recovering Catholics – who have never fully got over this misconstrued, ‘God is out to get us’ teaching. You know the one where we’re doomed, fully doomed, if we step a little, let alone a lot, over holy line.
It’s time to drop the old god of fear and trembling get with the mercy beat.
As for burning in hell in the afterlife, well, I would suggest that’s more the product of Dante’s brilliant and hugely influential creative imagination, rather than what is now accepted as sound contextual theology. Let me be clear, if any of this was God’s modus operandi, this little black dusk would have drowned without trace a million times. Or if you will, burned baby burned!
Dante’s brilliance was that he merged the Christian thought of his day with Greco-Roman myth. In doing so – on the fiery path he walks with Virgil – we get treated to an exposé which is light on the Abrahamic God of love and tends more to the of Greco-Roman gods. Now, these were a fearsome bunch of gods indeed, who, it has to be said, had scant regard for humanity. The fusing of Christianity with the wisdom of the ancient Greeks is not without its problems and the point just made is among them.
“God’s name is Mercy.” And if you can name it, comrades, you can claim it!
You don’t get to be Pope in the twenty-first century without being able to buckle your theology belt. Pope Francis also has the advantage on his spiritual journey of real time exposure to Liberation Theology and I’ve written about that previously. However, he goes to the very core of the whole bible in naming God as mercy. This is among the foremost and oft repeated identifiers of God throughout the text, which find their source in the book of Exodus:
The Lord passed before him, and proclaimed, “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness” (Exod 34:6).
This is not the first time I’ve drawn upon this self-identifier of God in my blog posts, and it won’t be last. Its importance is paramount not just because of its multiplicity of use elsewhere in scripture, but because it is God’s big self-disclosure of who God is!
Now, when Yahweh goes to the trouble of telling us directly that the very nature of the God is merciful and abounding in love, it’s time to drop the old god of fear and trembling get with the mercy beat. The Pope is bang on the blessed money, “God’s name is Mercy.” And if you can name it, comrades, you can claim it!