Searching for Mercy

There is no better word than mercy. Mercy is remarkable, and it goes against the natural human response of revenge.

Revenge is fundamental in Western movies. Considering the American West, with its unforgiving terrain and history of lawlessness, the Western genre creates movies where revenge replaces justice. There’s a sense of satisfaction when an evil person who inflicts pain on someone, especially an innocent person, gets his comeuppance.

Any writer knows in order to stir up a sense of justice, the character must be created in such a fashion as to be worthy of loathing, or at least the acts done must be evil. As the plot unfolds, the revenge factor makes the audience feel satisfaction in the eye-for-an-eye story. A good example of this is the John Wayne movie The Searchers where a family is attacked by a Comanche tribe and the parents and brother are murdered and the daughters are carried off. When the abducted girls’ uncle (John Wayne’s character) and relatives search for them, they use whatever means necessary to avenge the loss of life, even cutting out the eyes of dead Comanches to instill fear in their enemy that the dead men will not enter the Happy Hunting Grounds (heaven). If the audience was not shown the flaming cabin and told one daughter was raped at the beginning, this would appear overly cruel. Because of the brutality the degree of revenge seems to be justice.

Mercy, on the other hand, is not just forgiveness, but release. We are released from the responsibility of what we have done.

If, in our fallen world full of sin, we know wrongs must be righted, how much more does God’s justice require retribution for sin? The way he fulfilled justice is through mercy.

Being human, we seem to want mercy for ourselves and justice for others. But God is not us, and He knows that what heals souls is both forgiving us our evil desires and acts, and making us accountable for that which we do or think. In the Sacrament of Reconciliation, we see both enacted, first absolution for sins, then penance to offer a remedy for our chosen path of sin. Mercy and justice both are necessary to change us.

The dance between mercy and justice floats above the ordinary. If we only have mercy alone, then everyone would sin freely because mercy wouldn’t have a price. If there’s only justice, there is no remedy for sin.

We understand revenge better than justice and mercy. Because we feel rage, we relate to retaliation. A revenge culture becomes a fear culture with no room for mistakes and no possibility of redemption. Still, we ourselves sin and regret our actions. We want to be forgiven. Redemption is the reason we understand mercy. Mercy isn’t permission to sin. Mercy is forgiving the sin.

At the end of The Searchers, John Wayne’s character, Ethan, tries to shoot the niece he spent years trying to locate when she declares that she is a Comanche. His fellow searcher, Martin, stands between Ethan and his niece to shield her from his rage. The act of extracting revenge has become a quest without reason at this climatic point. Reason is what makes justice possible. We need men and women like Martin in this world. His sister was taken away and his family was murdered, and still he accepted that his sister had become what he hates, a Comanche. He wanted her to live even if she lived a life he hated. Through our sinfulness we embrace a life counter to God’s vison for us, and yet God loves us regardless.

Perhaps John Ford’s Catholicism inspired him to make a revenge movie where mercy commanded the last word. Of course the depictions of revenge mark imperfect characters the way confession marks imperfect sinners. There is no perfect roundness at the end, but a real account of a flawed man in Wayne’s Ethan. This is why the act of mercy is all the sweeter in the end.

Revenge leads to more war, while justice and mercy lead to peace. Because we are God’s children, we achieve the higher value of mercy. Humans, by God’s Divine purpose, understand God through mercy. Mercy is forgiving the guilty. The best stories are full of mercy because every one of us needs it. The complex natural desire of revenge is tempered with justice, and salvation is acquired with mercy.