This reflection was written by Jesse Zink for this week’s Wingèd Ox, a weekly news digest distributed to the college community. You will find reflections from previous weeks here.

Dear colleagues,

By now, I imagine many of you have heard or read the sermon delivered by Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde at an inter-faith prayer service at Washington National Cathedral attended by Donald Trump last week. At the end of the sermon, Bishop Budde spoke directly to the president and urged him to “have mercy” on those who are afraid because of his proposed policies, such as immigrants or members of the LGBTQ community. Her sermon provoked an astonishing range of commentary and reaction. Some cheered her on. Others criticized the way she directly addressed one person in the congregation. Some challenged her views or said that politics shouldn’t enter the pulpit.

Without adding overly much to the digital tonnage of that commentary, I want to highlight one aspect of this sermon. In speaking to the president, Bishop Budde could have invoked many ideas. I would not have been surprised if she had opted for the word justice, i.e. do justice, Mr. President, in relation to these communities. The rhetoric of justice is common in the Episcopal Church and in many other mainline Protestant churches in the United States and Canada. But the word justice doesn’t appear in her sermon. Instead, Bishop Budde appealed for mercy. Why might this be?

Talking about justice quickly gets us into questions of right and wrong: what is rightly owed to someone or some group or what is wrongly being taken away? In the formulation of the ancient Greeks, which continues to exert considerable sway in western thinking today, justice is about giving to each what is their due, that is, giving to each what is right. I absolutely do believe that there are rights and wrongs and that there are right and wrong distributions of goods, resources, and status in the world. In other words, I believe in justice. But I’m not convinced that in divided and contentious situations making conversations about right and wrong primary or central is a good first step. It can make people defensive or reveal that we are a long way from a shared sense of right or wrong.

Mercy, by contrast, does not rely on notions of right or wrong. It merely asks us to recognize that there are people who are suffering in the world and asks us to have compassion for them, to “suffer with” them as the etymological roots of the word compassion suggest. In my experience, walking alongside those who are suffering—and allowing others to walk alongside us when we suffer—is a far more effective way of changing minds and hearts than appeals to justice.

Perhaps it’s for this reason that the word “justice” rarely crossed Jesus’ lips. But he spoke about and embodied mercy, grace, and compassion all the time, both during his ministry and ultimately when he suffered with humanity on the cross. Indeed, if forced to summarize the Christian good news in a single word, mercy would be close to the top of my list. As the reaction to Bishop Budde’s sermon illustrates, mercy is an idea that is so foreign in our world that when it is spoken aloud it lands in exactly the way the disruptive, unsettling, and wonderful good news it summarizes first did.

May we too seek to embody that mercy in our ministries.

Faithfully yours,

Jesse Zink