Mercy Wild

For the last month, our oldest has been belting out Christmas carols. It is sweet even as the lyrics are often not entirely accurate. A few weeks ago, Jim busted out “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,” which is one of his go-to standards this time of year. This isn’t an accident because I have been heavily dosing the holiday playlists with the soundtrack from A Charlie Brown Christmas for as long as he’s been alive. He started singing:

Hark! The herald angels sing
Glory to the newborn king
Peace on earth and mercy wild

I chuckled a little and corrected him. It’s “mercy mild” not “mercy wild.” And then I immediately wished that I had not done that. A few minutes later I told Jim that I actually liked his version better.

There is little about the Christmas story that one can consider mild. It’s the story of God becoming incarnate as a helpless and vulnerable baby. The way I see it, the story reads like a desperate, last-ditch gambit to save the world. The co-conspirator with God is an unwed teenage girl who willingly agrees to this harebrained scheme even though her pregnancy could have cost Mary her life one way or another. She, an uncertain fiancé, and a ragtag group of shepherds stand on one side as the vengeful puppet king of the world’s foremost superpower stands on the other.

It is a story of refugees and late night escapes over borders. It is a story where Mary sings of God, “He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; He has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.”

It is a story of love. God’s love for this world. Mary’s love for God, her people, and her child. Joseph’s fragile love for Mary. And stories about love contain multitudes. They are stories of hope and peace and joy. They are stories of passion and sacrifice. They are stories about grace and forgiveness and mercy. Stories where nothing—not death or life, angels or demons, the present nor the future, nor any powers, nor any failures—can stand in the way of that love.

Such tales of mercy can never be categorized as mild. For if God so loved the broken world enough to enter into it as a powerless child then the mercy embodied is as fierce as the mother who protected him. The old hymn says there is a wideness in God’s mercy and there is a wildness there too.

When we do so much to hurt each other, when being a Christian is often an exercise in simply trying to be less of a hypocrite each day, when we neglect the poor and the hungry and despise our neighbor even though the prophets begged us to welcome them in for eons, the idea of God and sinner reconciled is a wild mercy. A flailing attempt to rouse a drowsy world from a nightmare of its own making.

God loves the world so much that God could not just sit on the sidelines. In that baby, God enters into the world at great risk. As the story evolves, God invites everyone to join into that gambit. It started with Mary and then it moved on to the disciples, the poor in spirit, those who mourn, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, the one with ears to hear, you, and me. To love God and neighbor and to show such a wild mercy is a gamble. At Christmas—In Mary, in the shepherds, in God becoming a fragile child—we see that gamble is worth the risk.

There is nothing mild about any of that. Yeah, I like Jim’s version of that line better.

Hark! The herald angels sing
Glory to the newborn king
Peace on earth and mercy wild
God and sinner reconciled
Joyful all ye nations rise
Join the triumph of the skies
With angelic host proclaim
Christ is born in Bethlehem
Hark! The herald angel sing
Glory to the newborn king