“The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.”  (Psalm 103:8)

‘Mitigation specialists,’ are a group of professionals who work in a very small niche of the legal world.  They represent convicted murderers and others whose crimes were so grave that they were sentenced to death.  Their job is to seek mercy in the courts for those whose crimes were merciless.  The goal is to present the convicted person as just that, a person.  They don’t try to excuse the inexcusable.  That’s not their mission.  They seek to present a more comprehensive picture of the person than just the crime they committed, including the factors that have contributed to their criminality. 

There is no question of innocence.  The people they represent are guilty.  These legal advocates want to spare the lives of those who didn’t spare others.  They get to know the offenders and strive to see in them the common humanity that their clients failed to see in their victims.  In turn, they hope to make us as a society see these people as fellow humans, in hope that we (acting through the justice system) will be unable to kill them.

I learned about this legal specialty because I saw an article titled, “The Mercy Workers,” and I just had to know who these ‘mercy workers’ might be.

As I read the article and reflected on the title, I thought being a ‘mercy worker’ should not be a specialist’s job.  If there ever was a job that everyone should learn it is to be a mercy worker.  There’s a huge need for mercy workers.  It’s not just murderers and criminals who need mercy.  All of us ordinary sinners need mercy too – all the time.

We non-specialist mercy workers need to use the same basic techniques as the professionals.  We need to see each other in context, to see that we are more than the worst things we do.  We need to see the one in need of mercy as a human – as one of us.

Jesus tells us, “Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.”  (Luke 6:36)

God is the original mercy worker.  Mercy depends on truly identifying with the wrongdoer, seeing him or her as a person like me.  God in Christ identifies with us fully, living a genuinely human life, dying a genuinely human death, an innocent victim of human sin.  Instead of destroying sinners, God in Christ absorbs the violence and sin of those who are guilty as hell.  This is the ultimate model of mercy.

It was a costly mercy.  It cost Jesus his life.

Prayer: God, be merciful to me, a sinner who is reluctant to extend mercy to my fellow sinners.