Mercy is a quality we usually associate with a remission of penalty, or a mitigation of justice. This applies to both secular and divine justice.

In an earlier time, for instance, Lenten sentiment was comprehensively captured in the first few bars of the hymn God of Mercy and Compassion . Once you heard those bars, you were immediately plunged into the ethos of Lent.

Sin deserved nothing less than God's punishment. Lent was a time to plead for a tempering of the divine punishment with mercy.

In Biblical usage, mercy does include the idea of tempering or mitigation, but mitigation is by no means mercy's primary meaning. The first meaning is mercy as God's capacious love. It is so infinite that it reaches to the heavens (Ps 36); so enduring that it lasts for ever (Ps 89).

It is demonstrated in the events of history (the liberation from Egypt ), the events of nature, and in the very structure of the world. Thus the earth is full of the mercy of God; it is in the mercy of God that the rain and sunshine come (Job 37:13). Everywhere one looks, in other words, one is confronted with God's outflowing mercy.

The idea of mercy is also inseparably connected with that of covenant, and the meaning here is faithfulness and steadfastness. God entered into a special relationship with his people, and to this relationship he will never be false. He is faithful for a thousand generations.

The relations of human beings among themselves are meant to reflect his divine quality. Mercy is more important than sacrifice. It's an essential component in the sum total of human responsibility before God. As the prophet Micah put it: " You have already been told what is right, and what Yahweh wants of you. Only this, to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God " (Micah 6:8).

The comprehensive character of mercy is also clear in the witness of the New Testament. God is rich in mercy (Eph 2:4); and it is that mercy that we find at the throne of grace (Heb 4:16 ); which extends the covenant to the Gentiles (Rom 9:23 ), and which gives us hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ (1Pet 1:3).

Jesus mentions the notion twice, and the importance he attached to it is clear. He repeats Hosea in reminding his listeners that God wants mercy not sacrifice (Mt 9:13), and he condemns the Pharisees for being meticulous about ritual and ceremonial law while forgetting the great essentials, justice, mercy and faith (Mt 23:23).

His parable of the Good Samaritan is mercy in action, which we are all advised to go and imitate. Mercy was thus for Jesus, as it was for the prophets, a basic characteristic of the relations between Christians and their fellowmen and women.

The blessedness of mercy is not exhausted, however, in knowing that we resemble God in its exercise. If we follow the trajectory of the Beatitudes we have looked at so far, another line of interpretation opens up before us.

It is the poor in spirit who inherit the kingdom, the meek who will inherit the earth, those who mourn for the world's brokenness who will be comforted; those who hunger for righteousness who will be filled.

The preoccupation is with the anawim , those who can neither do nor fend for themselves, those who cannot hope to beat the world, so to speak, at the world's game.

They are all categories of blessedness because they enshrine the desire or the hunger for a world ruled by the vision of God. With such a world in existence, the poor will not be trampled on; people will not weep in vain; nor will the hunger for humanising relations and a deeply human life go unfulfilled.

The underside to all of this, however, is that while the vision is still to be actualised, the world remains stubbornly the same - hard, unyielding, and uncaring. The danger is that those who look to God for relief will be beset not only by bitterness and cynicism, but especially by anger. As the psalmist puts it under these precise circumstances: " I was overwhelmed with blazing anger because of the wicked ." (Ps 119:53).

"Blazing" anger is part of all broad revolutionary agendas. It's what animated the vision of Karl Max, and it still does Fidel Castro's. One remembers also the militant stridency of Grenada 's PRG, when revolution took over the island in the eighties.

It's not very helpful in the long run to call anger like this "unrighteous," as opposed to an anger (like Jesus' in the precincts of the Temple), which is purer and therefore "righteous". Revolutionary anger arises from a genuine intuition of the absence of righteousness.

The issue then turns on the question of means, that is, on matters of strategy or policy. Anger may be a natural originating impulse, but an impulse is not a policy. What tends to corrupt the impulse is the tendency to assume that the only thing to be put right is what's "out there." Change the system and you will change the world, whatever about the people in the system or the world.

What happens, then, more often than not, is that a new pattern of wrongness soon replaces the old, reflecting what is wrong with ourselves . " Blessed are the merciful " means in this context blessed are they who realise that all agents of transformations need mercy, if their work is not to be just a new chapter in the old story that the more things change, the more they remain the same.

The problem with anger in the face of injustice is thus its defectiveness. The disorder it sees is real, but the response is never comprehensive enough.

Anger never includes itself in the problem it swears to fight against. What mercy sees, on the other hand, is not selective. It sees the whole world made new, a world that includes the unrighteous and those they afflict or burden with anger.

Mercy is no sentimental option. It is as clear sighted as anger but with infinitely better resources for remaking the world in a way that's really new. It can do so because of its inherent character and power - high as the heavens, and belonging to the very structure of the universe itself.

Mercy is another name for the creative Word of God, which always realises its goal, and which never returns to God without achieving whatever purpose it set out to accomplish.