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Brothers and sisters, looking at the Gospel reading tonight, the healing of the lepers, please be seated.
And especially on Thanksgiving, when this Gospel lesson is read, the usual focus is on the one thankful leper, fitting with the Thanksgiving theme. But my focus tonight, I want to look at that request that the lepers made of Jesus, “Lord, have mercy.” Really it wasn’t a statement or a request; it was a prayer to Jesus asking for mercy.
And really, mercy is one of those words that to me anyway doesn’t seem to get mentioned much in worship, or it just doesn’t seem like it anyway. I mean, as Lutherans we like words like grace, forgiveness, justification, and mercy. I think it’s left out a little bit, but in the Bible, it’s there a lot. Depending on the translation, it’s close to 300 times the word “mercy” comes up.
And of course, mercy, a way to define the word, is not getting the punishment or consequence that you deserve. Example: you’re speeding, you get pulled over, and the police officer gives you a warning or leaves you off completely, right? Mercy, right? Y’all have been there. You know, guilty as charged here. I tell the students at University of Lutheran Church, if a professor could have deducted points on a test but he didn’t, that’s mercy.
Now, in the Jewish culture at the time, lepers didn’t get too much mercy. In fact, they didn’t get much of anything because they really didn’t deserve anything. According to their law, lepers were considered unclean, and they were shunned, and kind of for good reason. They were shunned and avoided because they had a contagious disease, and it was at that time pretty much fatal.
The law had a distance rule that lepers were required to keep a certain distance from people and even give them a warning to say to people, “Unclean, unclean,” like to say, “Don’t come here, you know, warning, disease here.” And that’s why these lepers are standing at a distance, it says, and why they had to lift up their voices. I mean, basically they had to yell to Jesus, “Master, have mercy on us.” According to Jewish law, their leprosy, their skin disease, was their total identity to all the other people, so they cry out to Jesus.
And Jesus pretty much breaks the law. He doesn’t shun them; He doesn’t avoid them. He closes the distance between Him and them, and He deals with them. And He, most importantly, hears their prayer. He healed them. He had mercy on them by their faith in Him, saying that they were healed. No, they didn’t deserve it. But there are lots of people in the Bible who didn’t deserve any mercy: David, Jonah, Paul, just to name a few people who didn’t deserve mercy from God because of their sin.
Instead, they deserved to be shunned and avoided by God. And us too, we’re no different. We don’t deserve anything because of our sin. In fact, our sin is kind of like leprosy, except we don’t have a skin disease; we have a sin disease, and it makes us unclean. It makes us distant from God, and we should be shunned and avoided by Him. And maybe that’s how some of your sins make you feel: unclean, diseased, distant from God, and even shunned and avoided by Him—not deserving anything from God.
Maybe your sin has you feeling that way, but if you’re sorry for them, and you confess those sins, you confess that sin disease to God, and you lift up your voice and cry, “Lord, have mercy.” He hears that prayer. And we do that together in worship several times, actually.
I say that mercy doesn’t seem to come up much, but it’s there in worship a lot. In fact, the Kyrie that we sang, basically, we say, “Lord, have mercy,” several times, right? Kyrie means “Lord,” Kyrie eleison, there’s your Latin for the evening, means “Lord, have mercy on us here.” And then in the Gloria, when we sang, “Lord God, Lamb of God, You take away the sin of the world, have mercy on us.”
And also in the confession, we prayed, “Most merciful God,” right? And then we confess that we justly deserve Your present and eternal punishment, but for the sake of Your Son Jesus Christ, have mercy on us. And then in our prayers, in our corporate prayers, the pastor prays and the response of the people—the pastor says, “Lord, in Your mercy,” and we respond, “Hear our prayer.”
So mercy is there corporately in worship when we lift up our voices and cry for that, but no, none of us deserves it; but God gives it. Again, if you’re sorry for your sins, if you confess your sin disease and you cry out to the Lord, “Lord, have mercy.” He hears that prayer. He doesn’t shun you. He doesn’t treat you as unclean. He comes to you. He hears you and forgives you and heals you. God gives mercy to you in the same way as the lepers, through faith in Jesus.
Faith in His death on the cross and His resurrection from the dead to give you that mercy. You get that mercy in confession as you confess, “Most merciful God.” You know that, “Have mercy on us.” Then the pastor responds with, “In His mercy God has forgiven you.” Again, it’s not nothing you deserve, but it’s something God freely gives.
Because through Christ, you see, God doesn’t just see you as a sinner. He doesn’t see the sin that you’ve done, said, or thought, no matter what it is or how bad you think it is. God doesn’t see you as unclean. He sees you as His child by the death and resurrection of His Son for you.
You see, your sin disease is not your identity. Through Jesus, God sees you as His own child, and He gives mercy to you and heals you of that sin disease. “Lord, have mercy.” To be honest with you, I pray that prayer quite a bit. I mean, not just as some quaint little saying like “Lord, have mercy,” sort of thing.
No, I pray it for me, but also for others, especially when I don’t know what else to pray. Especially as you just look at this world that we live in, read or hear the news of just how messed up things are, and you’re left with nothing else to pray but, “Lord, have mercy on us. What are we doing to ourselves?” “Lord, have mercy.” When you don’t know what else to pray, there’s this—it’s a great prayer. It seems, like I said, so quaint or so simple, but it’s loaded with the prayer for God to have mercy, to forgive, to heal, to not shun or avoid us in this world, but to have mercy on us.
And perhaps you could pray that too because you probably know people who need mercy, need mercy from you in particular. Really, they’re facing bad situations, bad consequences in life they can’t get out of the trouble that they’re in, and they really need mercy, and you can pray for them. “Lord, have mercy on them,” and where you can, you should show mercy too.
Even for those who disagree with you, or even consider your enemy, these people need mercy. They, too, are victims of the leprosy of sin. They’ve got a sin disease too, and they need mercy. No matter what your relationship is with them, they may need mercy from you.
Let me remind you of some words of Jesus. In Luke 6:36, Jesus said to His disciples, “Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful.” And I know that’s hard. Being merciful to people that you disagree with may really put mercy to the test sometimes, right?
Yeah, maybe now you’re dealing with people who you differ with politically, religiously, professionally, philosophically. They’re your friends; they’re your neighbors; they’re your family; they’re your co-workers. This is happening at work, at school, at home, on Facebook. When you have these difficulties with people, maybe look at the situation this way: that every negative interaction you have with somebody, or negative circumstance or situation that you get into, see it as an opportunity to show mercy.
That’s a test on I-35 at times, I know. Now think of it as an opportunity that you can show mercy, or at least lift it up in prayer: “Lord, have mercy.” Because others we encounter may be seeking it, wanting mercy, and we can pray it for them, their healing of stress or illness, maybe even sins. We pray, “Lord, have mercy on them,” that they may know that mercy.
We know the wonderful mercy of God, right? We know it in His death, in His sacrifice for us, in His resurrection from the dead. We know it; we see it. But others need to know it, and we’re those deliverers of mercy.
You know, these lepers’ lives in the story were completely changed, right? Really, they’re physically, emotionally, spiritually, they were completely changed by Christ’s mercy. And there may be others you know that need that too, and that can be completely changed by that same mercy. Mercy for all kinds of trouble, problems, adversity in life.
So again, perhaps every conflict you have with someone can be an opportunity to have mercy. God has mercy on us, and we give great thanks for that today on Thanksgiving Day, but may this also be a day of mercy giving—not just Thanksgiving. Because you know how it is when there’s adversity in life or conflict with others.
When your sin disease is overwhelming, we cry, “Lord, have mercy.” There’s a jazz song that really fits this really well, I think, and I came across a quote by a famous jazz saxophonist, Cannonball Adderley—extra points if you know who that is, okay?
He said before the performance of this song, “You know, sometimes in life we’re just not prepared for adversity,” he said, “and when it happens, we get caught short. And when adversity happens, we don’t know exactly how to handle it when it comes up. Sometimes we just don’t know what to do when adversity takes over.” And he says, “I have advice for all of us.”
And he says, “I got this advice from my piano player named Joe Zawinul”—extra extra points if you know who that is. He wrote this song, and the name of the song sounds like what you’re supposed to say when you have the problems of adversity and trouble in your life and you don’t know what to say and you don’t know what to do—and the name of the song is “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy.”
May the Lord have mercy on us all. Amen.
Now may the peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen. Thank you.
