Summary
Mercy and the Salty Life
"Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful." With these words from Luke 6:36, Jesus presses His disciples past the easy boundaries we like to draw around our love. We are glad to be salt and light—to bring flavor, purity, and preservation into the world—so long as we get to choose the recipients. We love those who love us. We do good to those who do good to us. But Jesus refuses to let us narrow His call that way. Even sinners, He reminds us, love their own Luke 6:32–34. The salty life of a Christian must extend even to those people—the ones we secretly delight to see put in their place.
Notice where Jesus delivers this teaching. Luke records that He came down and stood on "a level place" Luke 6:17. In the prophets, the level place is often a place of devastation, mourning, and ruin—as in Joel 1, where the fields are stripped bare and the ground itself laments. Jesus preaches mercy precisely there, to people whose lives are fractured. And by the Spirit's inspiration, His words on that plain reach across time to us, who live in our own level places of suffering, sin, and shame.
The command itself is concrete: "Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you" Luke 6:27–28. "Do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return… for he is kind to the ungrateful and the evil" Luke 6:35. This is the shape of Merciful living—not a sentiment, but action: loving, blessing, lending, giving, doing. Mercy is not based on feeling, and it is not measured against the worthiness of its object. We do not deserve mercy either; we deserve God's wrath. Yet in love and grace He has poured mercy upon us anyway.
The popular bracelet asked, "What would Jesus do?" It is a fine question, but an honest answer humbles us: Jesus would do everything we will not, everything we cannot. So the better question is what Jesus did—and what He is doing still. He came down into our level place. He bore our sins in His body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness, and by His wounds we are healed 1 Peter 2:21–24. "But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved" Ephesians 2:4–5.
This is the foundation of forgiveness, and it is what makes mercy in us possible. In Holy Baptism Jesus enters our level place, takes hold of us, washes us clean, claims us as His own, and fills us with His Spirit. He turns us from being "those people" into His people. The ungrateful and the wicked are made children of the Most High. And being made His, we are also being remade—molded daily into His image, so that showing mercy becomes more natural, more truly ours.
So the salty life is not flavor saved for friends and withheld from enemies. It is God's own mercy on our lips and in our hands, going outward to the very people we would rather avoid. It is loving, blessing, praying, giving—especially when we don't feel like it—because the Father has first been merciful to us. And by His grace, those people may yet become His people. "Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful."
Video citations
- "Merciful" 10-2-22 — If you would please open your Bibles to the Gospel of Luke, the sixth chapter, if you're using a Pue edition of the Bible, that's on page 56 in the New Testament, we're in Luke the sixth chapter.…