Mercy
The Fifth Beatitude
Blessed—the merciful, because they will be shown mercy (Matthew 5:7).
Mercy. What an interesting word. In our culture, mercy has to do with care for or helping others (we have a Mercy Hospital in our town), forgiving others, not pouring on a defeated opponent (“show some mercy” or the “mercy rule”).
In this beatitude, Jesus uses the adjective “merciful” to describe the attitudes and actions of a person showing mercy.
This word for merciful occurs only one other time in the entire New Testament, in Hebrews 2:17 to refer to Jesus the “merciful and faithful high priest.”
So why does Jesus use this word in this beatitude?
It is the word used in the Old Testament for God’s mercy—ḥanun. Time after time Yahweh is referred to as “gracious and merciful (raḥum wḥanun) , slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love.”
In speaking this word, Jesus recalls God’s character of love, mercy, favor, and patience for the many Jews listening to him.
In saying the merciful are blessed, he is saying these people exhibit a fundamental element of God’s character, ḥanun.
As such they will be mercied by the God of mercy.
The verb eleeō contains the same idea: to show grace or favor or mercy, and is very common in the OT to translate the verb ḥanan. And once again, this verb, to show mercy or favor or grace, is overwhelmingly connected to Yahweh.
The basic idea of mercy is that the recipient of mercy is in a vulnerable position that someone else could exploit to their benefit. The merciful person not only does not exploit the vulnerable person but chooses to help that person or to show grace to them. In Luke, Jesus’s parable of the Good Samaritan is an excellent example.
This beatitude may be the simplest of the eight at its heart: all of us are in need of mercy and grace, so Jesus declares blessing from God those who show it. This beatitude is the closest to Jesus’s teaching on forgiveness: we forgive others because God has forgiven us, and we endanger our own forgiveness when we do not forgive others. Replace “forgiveness” with “mercy” and you have close to what Jesus says here: Show mercy to us as we show mercy to others.
In Jesus’s day, true mercy went against the honor driven culture of the day. Mercy would be along the lines of allowing a defeated opponent to remain alive. The “merciful one” maintained superiority. Our culture may be different in some ways, but not in this one. So much charity today is more about the giver than the receivers. We almost have a cult of philanthropy.
But the true mercy Jesus speaks of is the mutual compassion of “we all need mercy,” “we are all in the same boat,” and since God is merciful to us, we need to extend the same to one another.
Mercy to one another is a response to God’s love for us.
As 1 John puts it: “Beloved, if God loves us in this way, we also ought to love one another” (1 John 4:11).
An Invitation
Are you interested in learning New Testament Greek? I will be teaching an intensive course with 50 hours of live instruction via Zoom from June to August. Please contact me at jack.painter@gmail.com or go to https://www.rightonmission.org/intro-to-new-testament-greek for more information. I would love to have you!
Observations on the Greek text
Thus far these observations have been free to all readers and free subscribers. Subsequently, they will be available for paid subscribers. Besides observations on the Greek texts that I address, later I plan to add both beginning and advanced Greek instruction for paid subscribers.
There is very little new from the previous beatitudes, so I thought I would say a word about finding Old Testament background to these verses. Many Bibles have cross-references that are helpful for this task, but I use a Bible search program called Accordance. This program is similar to Logos Bible software, but was developed for Macintosh many years ago (which I have used for more than thirty years). In any case, Accordance has tremendous languages resources for Bible study and I regularly have Greek, English, Hebrew, Syriac and Latin open for comparison, as well as modern language translations.
In the case of Matt 5:7, I did a search of the Greek ἐλεήμων in the Greek Old Testament (called the Septuagint or LXX), then opened a parallel Hebrew Bible and found the corresponding Hebrew original with all the instances in the OT, mostly Hebrew ḥanun (חַנּ֥וּן). Often I will then search for the Hebrew word with Greek parallel text to see if there is more than one Greek word that the translators used in different contexts. For both Greek and Hebrew, I have several dictionaries/lexicons that give various “glosses” or possible translations, with a listing of verses that fit these.
After doing this research, it is still up to me (or you) to weigh the context for exactly how the word is used, and how it might related to uses in the New Testament. Doing this study is quite important for understanding the New Testament, because in the first century the Bible was the Old Testament, or more properly “the Scriptures” or the Law, the Prophets and the Writings (TaNaCh). The New Testament writers knew the Scriptures intimately and were influenced by the Greek in the Greek translation.