Mercy All Around--August 20, 2026

Mercy All Around--August 20, 2026

"Just as you were once disobedient to God but have now received mercy because of their disobedience, so also they have now been disobedient in order that, by the mercy shown to you, they also may now receive mercy. For God has imprisoned all in disobedience so that he may be merciful to all." (Romans 11:30-32)

In the last chapter of the whodunnit, you finally find out the identity of the culprit, the details of their clever plot, and the underlying reason for their scheme.  The detective, whether Miss Marples, Hercule Poirot, Sherlock Holmes, or a modern cinematic invention like Benoit Blanc from the Knives Out movies, finally unravels the motive for whatever elaborate ploy the criminal mastermind devised over the course of the story. We find out which clues were red herrings meant to misdirect us, which details were important all along, and, of course, the real question driving us to get to the last page:  why?  Why did the killer do it?  What was the purpose behind the conspiracy?  What was the motive for the caper?  And, of course, a good mystery writer can keep you guessing all the way until the final reveal. And once the "why" has been answered with a "because," readers of good mysteries typically find themselves satisfied, now able to see connections they had missed before, recognize the reasons for the twists and turns, and relish how the whole plot drove toward that one inexorable conclusion.

Well, in a manner of speaking, Paul has been doing the same thing here in this section of his letter to the Romans, spun out over the course of three whole chapters (ch. 9 through 11) as he reflects on what was surely a pretty thorny theological mystery.  The question was this:  If Jesus really is the long-awaited Messiah of Israel promised to the descendants of Abraham and Sarah from long ago, and if by and large most of those descendants (the people of the Jewish faith in which Paul himself had been raised) had rejected that claim, then what on earth was God up to?  Did God not see that rejection coming?  Did God make a mistake and somehow incorrectly assume that the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob would recognize Jesus as the Messiah, only to get it colossally wrong when the mob called for his crucifixion?  Or, was God giving up on those people because they rejected Jesus, and no longer going to keep the ancient promises to love and bless them forever?  What was really going on?

It really was a pretty frustrating puzzle, especially in the first century when Christianity was still very much figuring itself out and discerning whether it was a movement within Judaism (like the Pharisees, Sadducees, Zealots, or Essenes) or something new and different.  At first, when the church was mostly made up of Jewish believers, with just a few Gentile (non-Jewish) newcomers, it was easy to treat those outsiders as exceptions, but still to say that Christianity was "aimed" at reaching only people within Judaism.  But as more and more Gentiles came to faith and wanted to be followers of Jesus, the question became more and more pressing: what was God doing here?  Why would God allow so many of the covenant people to miss the One they'd been waiting for?  And what did it mean for them--was their hope, blessedness, and salvation now rescinded because they didn't believe in Jesus?  

Neither option sounded very appealing, theologically: one seemed to be saying that God was not intelligent enough to realize that Jesus would be rejected by so many of his own people, and the other sounded like it was saying that the promises of the covenant were not reliable if God was just going to break off relationship with the covenant people who had rejected Jesus.  Neither seemed to "fit" with the character of God revealed in the Scriptures, who is portrayed as knowing us better than we know ourselves and also deeply faithful in keeping promises, even in the face of our unfaithfulness.

Paul spends three chapters raising the issue, framing the question, offering data from Scripture, presenting premises, and building toward what we hope will be a whodunnit-style unmasking like the end of an episode of Scooby Doo. And finally at the end of what we call Chapter Eleven in the Letter to the Romans, Paul comes to a conclusion.  Addressing the largely Gentile audience of the Christians in Rome, he says this:

"Just as you were once disobedient to God but have now received mercy because of their disobedience, so also they have now been disobedient in order that, by the mercy shown to you, they also may now receive mercy. For God has imprisoned all in disobedience so that he may be merciful to all."

These Gentile/outsider Christians hearing his letter see that prior to their coming to faith in Jesus, they had been pointed away from God and estranged from God's goodness in their old devotion to the gods of the empire like Zeus, Apollo, Poseidon, Jupiter, Artemis, Mars, and even Caesar himself.  But God showed mercy to them and had pulled them into the divine embrace as they had heard the news about Jesus and God's love that went to a cross for them.  And how had those Gentile Christians come to hear about Jesus in the first place? Well, in many cases, it had been that when traveling apostles like Paul had come to their towns, they had first gone to bring the message to the Jewish community in the local synagogue and were often met with rejection there, which led the apostles to spread the news to everyone else, too.  In other words, the Gentile "outsiders" came to hear about Jesus typically because the message had first been rejected by the "insiders." Paul sees this as a bit of divine jiujitsu: God used the rejection of the gospel by one group to become the vehicle that leads to the inclusion of outsiders in the gospel's embrace.  Like Jesus' story about the guests to the wedding banquet who refuse to come to the party, leading the host to find other guests who will come even if they are poor, sick, homeless, or underdressed, Paul says that the "disobedience" of the religious insiders (rejecting the news about Jesus) is the thing that leads to the "mercy" shown to the religious outsiders.

But wait--that's not the only reveal!  Like a clever mystery wrapped inside an enigma, or a plot with a double-twist in the final pages, Paul keeps going.  He says that since the rejection of the Gospel by so many of the ancient covenant people led to the inclusion of the Gentiles, God will now also be able to include those who have rejected Jesus on the same terms.  The Gentiles had formerly been turned away from God but had been drawn close to God through the Gospel, and so in the very same motion, God can choose to show mercy on the covenant people who have rejected Jesus and still drawn them into God's love yet. That's the ultimate reveal at the end of this long and twisty section of Romans: "God has imprisoned all in disobedience so that he may be merciful to all." 

The goal, Paul says, all along, from God's perspective, has been to "be merciful to all." It may have taken a great many unexpected plot twists and curve balls to get there, but that has been God's grand design all along. God's motive in allowing history to unfold the way it has, including the manifold rejection of Jesus and the surprising embrace of outcasts and outsiders, has been to hand out mercy all around.  To all.  Religious "insiders" secretly covering over their hypocrisy and impious "outsiders" who were pointed completely the wrong way.  The ancient covenant people who had still managed to miss the Messiah when he came into their midst, and the brand-new still-dripping-wet-from-their-baptism-yesterday Gentile newbies who were still learning the story of Jesus.  The folks who had been keeping kosher all their lives but who couldn't bring themselves to believe in a crucified Christ, and the ones who had been sacrificing goats to Zeus the other day before hearing a new story that changed their lives.  God's real motivation all along--throughout the entire course of biblical and world history--has been to show mercy to everybody in the end.  That's the destination Paul sees everything driving toward, even when it took a winding path to get there.

That might surprise us if we have been picturing God as primarily an angry and vengeful executioner looking for any excuse to lob a lightning bolt at sinners. But like you experience when you get to the end of a mystery story and see how all the threads and all the clues had been there all along, in a sense, it is no surprise that the God of the Bible intends to show mercy to all.  That seems to be God's modus operandi all throughout the Scriptures: always pushing the boundaries wider, always reaching out to include the unworthy and unacceptable, always extending grace to sinners and providing grace for the mess-ups.  Here in these verses Paul just comes out and says that this is not a curious fluke that crops up in a couple of places in the Scriptures, but rather this has been God's design all along.  The whole goal has been to show mercy to all, by God's design.

When you see it laid out that way, it is both a startling surprise and also somehow the most natural thing in the world, you know?  And when we take Paul's claim seriously it shapes our understanding for how we live out our lives of faith, too.  The whole goal, always, is for ways to show mercy.  God's intention is to reach everybody.  God's design is to show all of us the truth that none of us can earn our way into God's good graces, so that when God's love does reach everybody we won't be foolish enough to think it was something we had to achieve.  

Maybe it takes a while to reach that conclusion, but that's how a good story works. Like making our way through the plot twists of a mystery novel, we eventually come to the big reveal at the end. God has been leading the whole human saga to the place where God could show mercy all around.

You and I have just gotten a two-thousand-year-old spoiler about the last page of The Story: Paul says it has all been leading to mercy for all, all along.

How will that change the way you see every face who crosses your path today?

Lord God, prepare our hearts for your surprising mercy and the breadth of its reach.