By Msgr. Joseph Prior • Posted February 21, 2025

(See the readings for the Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time)

Sarah was overwhelmed and distracted. She was a 61-year-old grandmother caring for eight children and grandchildren in her home. Her husband had died 15 years earlier. He had been the family’s provider. She struggled greatly to put food on the table. This particular week was especially difficult when she found herself in the local Walmart shopping for food. She filled her cart, went through the line and had no money to pay with so she just left. An employee stopped her as she neared the exit, and he had already called the police.

Her 18-year-old daughter accompanying her was on the autism spectrum and began to cry and wail when they were taken to a security room. Officer Wagner arrived and gave Sarah a citation for shoplifting. She then went home with her daughter. When the officer looked up Sarah’s profile he found nothing — no past offenses, not even a traffic ticket. Sarah was on his mind all morning. Being stirred by pity and compassion, he was moved to mercy.

Sarah tells the story that she had received a phone call that afternoon. It was Officer Wagner and he was stopping by the house. She was full of fear thinking that she was going to be arrested for the shoplifting. He arrived at the house and asked for some help. He had stopped at the local pantry and loaded the squad car with food for Sarah and her family. After they unloaded the car, the officer told Sarah that he had revisited the Walmart to speak with the manager. They decided to drop the citation and give her a second chance.

In this encounter, the police officer allowed himself to be moved by the woman’s plight. He showed her mercy in the form of providing aid and working with the store to forgive her wrong. By worldly standards he had nothing to gain, but not by God’s standards.

Jesus speaks in the Gospel reading for this Sunday, as he often does, about the importance of mercy. The passage includes what often has been called the “golden rule” – “Do to others as you would have them do to you.” That saying is so familiar to us that it might almost seem cliché. We should be careful about that for what Jesus is asking, in fact demanding, is anything but normal or regular.

The key to the passage comes in the middle: “Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.” Prior to this, Jesus starts by jolting our sensibilities: “love your enemies,” “do good to those who hate you,” “bless those who curse you,” and “pray for those who mistreat you.” Next he goes even further: “To the person who strikes you on one cheek, offer the other one as well, and from the person who takes your cloak, do not withhold even your tunic.”

Jesus clearly wants us to ponder these situations and how challenging they can be. In the next few verses he offers a series of rhetorical questions that reiterate the necessity of mercy and perhaps challenge our complacencies – for example: “For if you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them.” Jesus then reminds us that the reward for showing mercy, is mercy itself.

In the final piece of this passage, Jesus commands us not to judge others. The teaching against judgment is offered, in this context, because a judgmental attitude or action raises an obstacle to mercy. In judging someone else, we become the judge. In Jesus’ eyes, the Father is the only judge and he decides on clemency and mercy for “he himself is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked.” So the call to mercy permeates Jesus’ teaching: “Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.”

The first reading shows a powerful example of the extraordinary mercy to which Jesus calls us. David spares Saul. You may remember the fuller story, how jealousy of David slowly builds in Saul from the time of the slaying of Goliath to the present. Gradually that jealousy moves to vengeance as Saul plots ways to kill David. As we pick up the story in the first reading, Saul is in pursuit of David.

The reading recalls that David has an opportunity to eliminate his pursuer, the one who is trying to kill him. The opportunity is right there in front of him as he finds Saul fast asleep and his spear held upright by the ground next to him. Abashai urges David to let him take Saul’s life but David refuses. He takes the spear instead and uses it as evidence of his mercy.

Officer Wagner showed extraordinary mercy to Sarah in a somewhat ordinary situation in his life. His mercy was both one of graciousness (procuring and delivering the food) and forgiveness (canceling the citation).

Jesus calls us to extraordinary mercy especially in dealing with people who have wronged us, offended us or took advantage of us. He uses these extreme cases basically to say that the call for mercy applies to every situation. As God forgives, we are to forgive.

Jesus himself becomes the ultimate witness of God’s mercy when he, the sinless one, takes on his passion and death so that we sinners might be forgiven. He calls us to live this life of mercy in the day-to-day, ordinary course of life. “Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.”

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Msgr. Joseph Prior is pastor of Our Lady of Grace Parish, Penndel, and a former professor of Sacred Scripture and rector of St. Charles Borromeo Seminary.