BUT to do good and to communicate, forget not”—but neither forget that this incessant worldly talk about charity and benevolence and generosity and liberality and gifts and donations is almost unmerciful. Oh, let news writers and tax gatherers and parish beadles talk about generosity and count and count the receipts; but let us never fail to realize that Christianity essentially speaks about mercy, that Christianity would be the last of all to reward the unmerciful; as if the poor and the wretched were not only in want of money, and so on, but were also excluded from the highest power of all, that of being able to show mercy, because they are not able to be generous, charitable and benevolent. But one preaches and preaches, ecclesiastically and secularly, about liberality and generosity—one forgets even while delivering the sermon, about mercy. This from the Christian standpoint is an indecency. The poor man who sits in church must groan; and why must he groan? Is it so that his groaning, together with the preacher’s eloquence, might help to get the purse strings of the rich opened up? Oh, no, he must groan, in the scriptural sense he must “groan against” the preacher, because just when one is so eager to help him, one suffers the greatest injustice. Woe to the one who consumes the inheritance of the widow and the fatherless, but woe, too, to the preacher who keeps silent about mercy in order to speak about charity! The preaching should be solely and alone about mercy. If you know how to speak effectively about that, then will the benevolence follow as a matter of course, in proportion to the individual ability. But consider this, that if a man by talking about charity procured money, money, money, consider this, that by keeping silent about mercy, he acted unmercifully toward the very poor and wretched, for whom he secured relief through the help afforded by the rich gifts of charity. Consider this, that if the poor and the wretched disturb us by their petitions, we may be able to get their poverty relieved by charity, but then consider that it would be far more terrible if we forced the poor and the wretched to “hinder our prayers” by groaning against us to God, as the Scriptures say, because we atrociously treated the poor and the wretched unfairly by not telling them that they can practice mercy. We shall in this talk about mercy keep close to this thought, and try to guard ourselves against confusing mercy with what really belongs to external conditions, over which consequently, as such, love has no control, while it does truly have mercy in its power, just as certainly as love has a heart in its bosom. Because a man has a heart in his bosom, it by no means follows that he has money in his pocket, but the former is far more important, and is certainly decisive as regards mercy. And truly, if one had no money but really knew how to encourage and inspire the poor and the wretched by talking about mercy: then he would have done quite as much as the one who throws some money to the poor, or holds forth about charity from the rich.
So we shall meditate on:
And Can Do Nothing
We shall strive, according to the ability granted us, to make it as obvious as possible, as alluring as possible, to bring as close home to the poor as possible, what consolation there is for him in being able to be merciful. We shall speak about this by doing away with a part of the worldly illusion. But truly our desire is, by means of what we say, to contribute whatever is needed to make the one who can be charitable and benevolent as humble as possible in his giving, as is well pleasing unto God; as modest in divine shyness as is becoming to a Christian: as willing to give and yet as unwilling to confess that it is alms, as is the one who turns away his face in order not to be shamed by others seeing that it brings him honor; or as the one whose left hand actually does not know what his right hand does.
Mercy has nothing to give. It follows as a matter of course that if the merciful has anything to give, then he gives it most willingly. But it is not on this we focus our attention, but on the fact that one can be merciful without having the least thing to give. And this is of great importance, since the fact of being able to be merciful is a far greater perfection than having money, and hence being able to give. If that man celebrated for eighteen hundred years, the good Samaritan, had not been riding but walking on the way from Jericho to Jerusalem, where he saw the unfortunate man lying; if he had carried nothing with him with which to bind up his sores; if he had then lifted the unfortunate man up, laid him upon his own shoulders and borne him to the nearest inn, where the landlord would under no conditions receive either him or the unfortunate, because the Samaritan did not have even a farthing, and could only beg and beseech the hard-hearted landlord to be merciful, since a man’s life was at stake: if he had not therefore. still, no, the story is not even finished—hence, if the Samaritan now, far from losing patience because of this, had again gone on, carrying the unfortunate man, had looked for a softer bed for the wounded, had sat by his side, had done everything he could to stanch the flow of blood, but the unfortunate man had died on his hands: would he not then have been just as merciful, quite as merciful, as that merciful Samaritan? Or would there be any objection to calling this the story of the good Samaritan?