Lord, Have Mercy

Matthew 15:21-28

There are certain actions and words and stories and encounters in our life, which occur so often as to become beneath our notice. The people we live with can be taken for granted; going to work, the person at the gas station, showering, getting dressed, the daily routine becomes for us boring and soul-sucking.  We gladly gloss over the ordinary things and consider them trite, looking for that which we may consider “extraordinary.” We have become so desensitized to the beauty of the ordinary and the everyday events and encounters that we miss the very medicine we need for the healing of our souls. 

Rather than sweeping away of the ordinary things in our life let us consider a small prayer that Orthodox Christians say more than any other. This prayer is not a huge theological treatise on the essence-energies distinction, nor does it expound on the nature of the soul or the nature of angelic beings or how the Saints are made aware of our prayers. It does not explicitly speak to the state of the soul after death or have a systematic triadology. We hear it and say it so often that it perhaps has become for us something we simply throw away. It is ordinary. It is nondescript. Because it is so short and so simple, we have perhaps come to believe that it is unimportant; a matter of “vain repetition.”

Yet, it is everything.

In the Divine Liturgy, we hear and sing the prayer, “Lord, have mercy” about 30 times, not including special petitions or additions to the service. When we add the services of 3rd and 6th Hours to that, we are at about 120 times on a Sunday morning. If we are to include 9th Hour, Vespers and Matins and 1st Hour into the mix, the number doubles again. In all of those times, in all of those prayers, each and every time we utter, “Lord, have mercy,” we manifest the care and the faithfulness of the Canaanite woman set before us today.

This woman, whom we are to regard as the mother of the Gentiles comes out of that Gentile ignorance. She comes out of her idolatry just as she comes out of the twin Gentile citadels of Tyre and Sidon to meet the Lord who has left the Jewish lands. They meet: on the one hand, the Glory of the People of Israel and the Light of revelation to the Gentiles; and on the other hand, the mother of Gentiles, those who sat in darkness.

As is often the case with mothers, this woman was steadfast. This mother refused to stay in the idolatry of her Gentile world. She refused to stay silent. She remained steadfast. There was simply nothing that she would not do, regardless of ridicule on behalf of her demon-possessed daughter. She stood in vigil. She walked to and fro, and seeing the Light of revelation, she cries out with a most beautiful prayer, “Have mercy on me, Son of David!”

We have the image here of a beautiful liturgical call and response. God calls and she responds. When the priest prompts the people with Let us pray for… I wonder if we notice how the response isn’t people saying their own individual prayers in a cacophony of cross-talking, but rather the simple response: Lord, have mercy. When the priest is calling us to prayer for the peace of the world, or for travelers, for forgiveness of sins, for our civil leaders, for the sick and the suffering, for our cities and monasteries, with voices, we respond: Lord, have mercy. The power of this simple 3-word phrase is staggering.

The 14th century theologian, Nicholas Cabasilas, in his commentary on the Divine Liturgy,  writes:

why is it that, whereas the priest asks them to pray for so many different things, the faithful in fact ask for one thing only—mercy? Why is this the sole cry they send forth to God?

[…]it is because prayer implies both gratitude and confession. Secondly, to beg God’s mercy is to ask for his kingdom, that kingdom which Christ promised to give to those who seek for it, assuring them that all things else of which they have need will be added unto them.

So, we ask continually for the Kingdom of God. In the face of suffering, in the face of successes, in the face of poverty or riches; in this government or that; in this economy or that; in this argument or that, we cry, we beg, we desire nothing other than the Kingdom of God.

When Orthodox have prayed for the emperors who actively sought them out to slaughter them, they prayed for the Kingdom of God. When the Orthodox in Russia prayed in the midst of a bloody revolution, they prayed for the Kingdom of God. When the Canaanite woman drew near the Jewish messiah in the presence of an unfriendly crowd, she called out for the Kingdom of God.

“Lord, have mercy,”

It is our desire, it is our plea, it is seeking first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness. Yet, how often do we forget these 3 simple words? How often do we forget during our busy hum-drum days that these 3 words, these 3 hum-drum words, are a petition that God’s Kingdom will come upon us and upon those around us?

Brothers and Sisters, the mother set before us today, cries out for the mercy of God’s Kingdom for her daughter. Again, being the mother of the Gentiles, she does this for us here today.

Today, in the scriptures, a Gentile comes out of the hell she had known and does what a mother does: asks the Savior to grant his Kingdom upon her children.

Let us honor her for her steadfast faith in the smallest of things, and let us give thanks to the One who grants His Kingdom to her, her daughter, and to us, her spiritual children and successors.

Let us, today, remember what it means to cry, “Lord, have mercy.”