1. Towards Understanding “Mercy” as “New Testament/Covenant”
To speak of “the new testament and mercy” is to speak of “mercy and mercy”. Mercy is the core, heartbeat or essence of the “new testament”. Its basic ingredients are compassion, love, forgiveness and justice (understood as truth in relationship, not as retributive justice). These terms are attributes of Godwho is love (1 John 4:8, 16); who“loved the world so much that he gave his uniquely beloved son”, not “to judge and condemn the world”, but to save it (John 3:16-17). God’s redemptive action born of mercy goes back to the proto-evangelium of Genesis 3:15. The antonymsof divine mercyareprincipally anger and judgement. When God is angry, God abandons humans to their devices and self condemnation or judgment; but in mercyand divine justice (God’s faithfulness to the covenant (cf. 2 Tim 2:13), God comes to humanity, knowing that left to themselves, they would never get out of their sinful condition,the condition of alienation from God (cf. Rom 3:21-25).
Jesus, God’s good news for humanity, embodies God’s merciful new covenant with humanity. He mediates it in the whole of the Christ event from the incarnation through his earthly life to the climactic event of the paschal mystery. In this mystery which embraces Jesus’ Last Supper, trial, passion, death on the cross and the resurrection, God’s gift of mercy is irrevocably ratified and sealed (John 19:30); its fruit for humanity is the outpouring of the Holy Spirit “on all flesh” as Peter interprets the Pentecost event (Acts 2:14-21; cf. Eccl 1:9).
On the cross Jesus mediated this new covenant both physically (crucified as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world) and vocally (“Father forgive them, for they know not what they are doing”). Yet his adversaries relentlessly, doggedly schemed to arrest and hand him over to be crucified. “They know not what they are doing” is a necessary mindset that engenders divine mercy and forgiveness.
Mercy as the new testament goes with a cluster of words: love, compassion, pity, forgiveness and justice. The concept is embodied principally in the vocabulary used: eleos (mercy, pity), splaggnizomai (having compassion), dikaiosynē (righteousness, a better rendering of the term in reference to God than justice with its endemic meaning of retributive justice), charis (grace), pistis (faithful/ness) and agapē (love). All terms speak to essential property or character of God in relation to sinful, helpless human beings without exception (Rom 3:23). The comprehensive end result of God’s mercy is sōtēria (salvation) and eirēnē (peace, wholeness/shalom) given by God unconditionally as free gift in Christ.
In essence, mercy as new covenant is God’s response to humans who aretotally powerless to do anything to change their state in life and who do not in any way merit or deserve the mercy. It is a visceral, spontaneous movement that arises from the depths of God, like an excess of adrenalin. Mercy moves God to reach out to pitiful humanity, without calculating, weighting of pros and cons, or asking questions (“not counting anyone’s sins against them”). It requires nothing from the recipient, not even gratitude, simply “appealing” to humanity to “be reconciled to God”, restored to wholeness (2 Cor 5:17-21).