Why Mercy Triumphs over Judgment
As Christians, our righteous anger at sin must never surpass our compassion for sinners.
In the Square of Saint Petersburg, a young Fyodor Dostoyevsky stood shivering in the snow alongside fellow convicts, arrested for belonging to a literary circle considered treasonous.
A priest carrying a cross led the convicts in a procession, arranging them in lines while their sentence was read—death by firing squad. But at the last second, a horseman arrived with a prearranged message from the tsar: Instead of execution, Nicholas “mercifully” commuted their sentences to hard labor.
While boarding the convict train to the work camp in Siberia, Dostoyevsky was given a copy of the only book he was permitted to read in prison: the New Testament. Over the next four years of his incarceration, he’d consider the injustices of 19th-century Russia in light of Christ’s mercy.
Dostoyevsky sought to understand how mercy restores human hearts—indeed, all of creation—into the righteous image of God. He wrote, “There are souls that in their narrowness blame the whole world. But overwhelm such a soul with mercy, give it love, and it will curse what it has done, for there are so many germs of good in it. The soul will expand and behold how merciful God is, and how beautiful and just people are.”
The need for mercy is just as relevant today—but it can be difficult to offer in a world worthy of judgment.
When our eyes are opened to God’s kingdom, we recognize injustices in the world that didn’t occur to us before. Hungering for the right ordering of life, we feel irritated by the fallen condition of humanity. We get unsettled, maybe indignant, or perhaps infuriated by the forms of wickedness and oppression we see around us.
As a result, anger can often be the besetting sin ...