Mercy at the margins

Mercy at the margins

Farming is a marginal activity. Is the seed of good quality? Will it germinate? Is it weed and bug resistant? Will the rains come when it is time to sow and time to water the growth. Will the rains stop as the field is white unto harvest and not spoil the crop? What will the yield be? What is the market like? What is the profit margin?

Farmers make their profit (and family income) at the margins. It’s the bottom field and the corners of the paddocks that make the difference between bankruptcy, survival and thriving.

What a challenge then to hear God speak about those margins: When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not wholly reap the corners of your field, neither shall you gather the gleanings of your harvest. You shall not glean your vineyard, neither shall you gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the foreigner. I am Yahweh your God. (Lev 19:9).

Mercy was to be shown at the margins of the fields.

Why this? The answer lies with God and with the history of his people.

God has a particular eye for the widow, the orphan and the stranger:  “You shall not wrong a sojourner or oppress him, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt. You shall not mistreat any widow or fatherless child. If you do mistreat them, and they cry out to me, I will surely hear their cry, and my wrath will burn, and I will kill you with the sword, and your wives shall become widows and your children fatherless (Ex 22:21-24).

He expected his people to remember when they were the stranger and to act accordingly: You shall remember that you were a bondservant in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God redeemed you: therefore I command you this thing today (Dt 15:15). And again: You shall not deprive the foreigner, or the fatherless of justice, nor take a widow’s cloak in pledge; but you shall remember that you were a bondservant in Egypt, and the Lord your God redeemed you there: therefore I command you to do this thing (Dt 24:17-18 and see also 19-22).

It gets worse! Even the land that was promised to Abraham and which so vital to a farming community was not really theirs. It was always ‘borrowed’ from God and was to be used for him: ²³ “The land must not be sold permanently, because the land is mine and you reside in my land as foreigners and strangers. (Lev 25:23). Israel was an exile nation even at ‘home’ in the promised land.

Israel’s farmers were to leaved the margin of their crops for the marginalised people because that’s where God’s eye was.

God’s people after Jesus are likewise called to remember that we are exiles and strangers who don’t really belong (1 Pet 2:11). We too, are to remember that true religion consists (at least in part) in caring for marginalised widows and orphans (Jas 1:27). We too are to show mercy at the margins.

And so it is good for each to ask who are the people at the margins that are within my ability to show God’s mercy? Who is my ‘orphan’, my ‘widow’, my ‘foreigner’ and my ‘stranger’? Who is on the road to my ‘Jericho’? Who are the losers, battlers and those whom the passing world does not see or hear with mercy’s eye and ear?

Mercy at the margins – that’s what God expects from his people. And that’s what he showed in sending the child who was born in a barn to unmarried parents from up-country Nazareth and who was rejected by those at the centre and hung out to die outside the city wall.

Grace, like farming, is mercy at the margins.