Mercy Trumps Justice Every Time
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Mercy Trumps Justice Every Time

That asymptote of being a disciple that exemplifies mercy in a world that seems to ruthlessly glorify justice is an asymptote I reach for every single day. Mercy trumps justice every time, and it always will.

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Mercy Trumps Justice Every Time

"The main message of Jesus, I believed, is that mercy trumps justice every time," Paul Kalanithi, author of When Breath Becomes Airsaid.

I believe the notion that mercy trumps justice every time, but I have had difficulty seeing that in my day to day life. Yes, mercy trumps justice every time. But what does that mean in day-to-day settings? Does it mean that as a teacher, I should be light on discipline and high on forgiveness? I believe so. I believe that punitiveness should be replaced with rehabilitation, that the ideal solution to our discussion around white privilege isn't to do away with it, but instead extend it to everyone.

I just finished reading Paul Kalanithi's When Breath Becomes Air, a memoir about a neurosurgical resident's life battling stage IV metastatic lung cancer. In his last year as a resident, Kalanithi battles rapid weight loss and excruciating back pain, and when he gets an X-ray, it indicates that the pain comes back looking normal -- Kalanithi was just aging. But while just a few months away from finishing his residency, his symptoms come back stronger than ever before, and his wife, Lucy, feels like Kalanithi isn't telling her the truth, and their marriage becomes strained. After visiting friends in New York, he receives a call from his doctor: his lungs looked blurry. He had metastatic lung cancer.

The subtitle of the book asks "what makes life worth living in the face of death?" That is the question that Kalanithi asked, and his journey being a patient in a reversal of roles where he was often the doctor, at the age of 36. He often told his patients that "it's a marathon, not a sprint, so get your daily rest" and implored them to get spend time with family and get extra support. But it was different when he was the one being told the same platitudes.

Despite the pain of the story, it was also one of hope, and crazy hope in the midst of Kalanithi's terminal illness. Lucy notes in the epilogue that cancer had actually saved their marriage and brought them closer together. He told himself the famous words from Samuel Beckett: "I can't go on. I'll go on," and helped Lucy bring their first child, Cady, into the world. Here were some beautiful words that Kalanithi wrote in the book for Cady:

"When you come to one of the many moments in life when you must give an account of yourself, provide a ledger of what you have been, and done, and meant to the world, do not, I pray, discount that you filled a dying man's days with a sated joy, a joy unknown to me in all my prior years, a joy that does not hunger for more and more, but rests, satisfied."

Kalanithi passed away in March, 2015. Cady has recently started kindergarten. According to Lucy Kalanithi, Cady has grown up with the idea of visiting her father's grave, in contrast to other kids who grow up into being part of a whole family, belonging to a religion, or loving animals. Often, she visits her father's grave in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Once, when Cady was 3, she asked Lucy to put stickers on her father's grave, and although Lucy briefly hesitated, she let her. It made Cady happy, and it made Lucy happy.

And I personally keep coming back to Paul Kalanithi's opening quote, that "mercy trumps justice every time." It was Lucy and Cady that gave mercy to Paul, despite his ailments and despite the problems in his marriage preceding cancer. In this part of the book, Paul Kalanithi describes why he gave up on an atheism he developed after college, when "my notion of God and Jesus had grown, to put it gently, tenuous," when he rejected his faith for failing on empirical grounds, as a doctor, as a scientist.

But he returned to the central tenets of Christianity, "sacrifice, redemption, forgiveness" because he found them so compelling. There will always be a gap between empirical knowledge and the spiritual because science is inherently unable to grasp central parts of human life, from the hate to envy to hope to love. The Old Testament, yes, prioritizes justice. We see the case of the adulteress in John 8, being shamed in front of a crowd, and being dragged onto the street:

"Teacher, this woman has been caught in the act of adultery. Now in the Law, Moses commanded us to stone such women. So what do you say?

And yes, Moses did command the people of God to stone such women, telling us in Deuteronomy 22:22 that "if a man is found lying with the wife of another man, both of them shall die." And that was when Jesus said to the crowd "let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her." It is in the context of how believers had a partiality to the rich at the expense of the poor that James told his audience in James 2:13: "Judgment without mercy will be shown to anyone who has not been merciful. Mercy triumphs over judgment."

From my perspective, James means that if we don't show mercy, we'll be shown the same judgment from God to answer for our actions that we gave to those we gave justice over mercy.

I see the interplay between justice and mercy all the time in my day-to-day interactions with others. I need mercy from God for all the things I can do better. Yes, I spend hours every week planning my lessons to maximize my students' learning in my special ed classroom, but the lessons so often go off-task and get sidetracked. I feel every day like I didn't do right by my students, and Lord do I need mercy from God and from my students for not doing good enough for them on a daily basis. I need mercy from homeless people on the street when I don't give and don't look them in the eye. I need mercy for when I get impatient and agitated at my students not doing work or following directions. I need mercy for all those times I still pull out my phone and check it while driving, for the times when I neglect people I love because I'm "busy."

I know all these are sins I have to answer for, that if the law reigned over grace, if justice reigned over mercy, I should be dead for.

Yet I am still here, still improving and shaping myself as a better Christian, teacher, friend, brother, and son. The only reason I can do that is because of the core tenets of faith that Kalanithi so gracefully mentioned: sacrifice, redemption, and forgiveness. I'm not all the way there yet. I'll never be. I still will get angry and impatient, even though I want to give the same gift of mercy that God and others so often give me. In the most popular words of Kalanithi, "you can't ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving."

That asymptote of being a disciple that exemplifies mercy in a world that seems to ruthlessly glorify justice is an asymptote I reach for every single day. Mercy trumps justice every time, and it always will.

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This article has not been reviewed by Odyssey HQ and solely reflects the ideas and opinions of the creator.
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