Monday Devotional: April 3, 2023

Bible Reading: Psalm 36:5-11 (NRSVUE)

⁵ Your steadfast love, O Lord, extends to the heavens, your faithfulness to the clouds. ⁶ Your righteousness is like the mighty mountains; your judgments are like the great deep; you save humans and animals alike, O Lord. ⁷ How precious is your steadfast love, O God! All people may take refuge in the shadow of your wings. ⁸ They feast on the abundance of your house, and you give them drink from the river of your delights. ⁹ For with you is the fountain of life; in your light we see light. ¹⁰ O continue your steadfast love to those who know you and your salvation to the upright of heart! ¹¹ Do not let the foot of the arrogant tread on me or the hand of the wicked drive me away.

Holy Week is the most momentous time of the year for Christians. The faithful somberly recalls the events leading up to Jesus’ death on the cross. By now, we know them by heart — the triumphal entry into Jerusalem, Judas’s betrayal, the Last Supper, Jesus’ arrest, crucifixion, death, and burial. It is all so poignantly familiar to those of us who have been Christ-followers for a while.

But if anything about Holy Week can stop us in our tracks and capture our hearts anew, it is the mercy of it. When we pause to ponder on Jesus’s death on the cross, we become aware of a mercy so wide that it boggles our minds. Mercy happens when we are shown compassion we do not earn or deserve. When Jesus gives his life on the cross in our place, to atone for our own sins — that is simply mercy writ large.

As the English hymn writer Frederick Faber observed, “There’s a wideness in God’s mercy, like the wideness of the sea” (UMH, No. 121). In our scripture reading today, we see that God’s mercy is so wide that it includes all people — Jews and Gentiles, saints and sinners, influential people and nobodies. This is good news. God provides for the needs of all people all over the world. Not only do humans receive mercy; God’s providential care extends to animals too. God provides for all living things on the earth — people, wild beasts, birds, and bugs.

Because of God’s mercy, nothing gets lost, and no one falls through the cracks. In a world that in so many ways tries to tell us that we don’t matter, don’t measure up, and are not “essential,” God begs to differ. In God’s merciful acts for all creation, every living creature is provided for, loved, and treasured.

Prayer

We thank you, loving God, as we recognize just how wide is your mercy and how deep is your care for all your creation. Amen.

By Kathleen Stephens, The Upper Room Disciplines 2020, page 126.