²² Through the Lord’s mercies we are not consumed,
Because His compassions fail not.
²³ They are new every morning;
Great is Your faithfulness.
²⁴ “The Lord is my portion,” says my soul,
“Therefore I hope in Him!” –Lamentations 3

Even as a small child sitting in Sunday school when I first heard of God’s mercy and grace, I was introduced to them as a couplet; as if they went together. As I began to read the New Testament for myself, as a small child, I came to see, that in particular, the Apostle Paul would use this couplet as the greeting to many of his epistles. But even back then I can remember trying to wrap my head around these concepts. I remember my Sunday school teacher telling us God’s mercy is Him (negatively) withholding what we do deserve, and on the converse, God’s grace was Him (positively) giving us what we don’t deserve. We can see how even the most basic of understandings, in a sort of ‘Jesus loves me this I know for the Bible tells me so’ way, we can, in an elementary approach appreciate some of the deepest truths revealed by God to us in the Gospel reality itself; both mercy and grace, in God’s economy in Christ for us, go hand-in-hand with one another. Can you imagine a God who simply withheld what we deserved from Him, a just God, and then didn’t give us what we don’t deserve: re-conciliation with Him? His mercy wouldn’t mean anything in that scenario; indeed, the only way we come to know of God’s mercy, is first as an experience of His grace embodied for us in the humanity of Jesus Christ. But in this grace, in Christ, we come to understand who God is, and realize that it was His mercy that became the occasion for His grace to assume sinful humanity for Himself, and in this election, to resurrect us afresh and anew as new creations in participation with Christ as the ‘firstborn from the dead.’

Karl Barth brings these realities together in a very beautiful way as he writes:

The mercy of God lies in His readiness to share in sympathy the distress of another, a readiness which springs from His inmost nature and stamps all His being and doing. It lies, therefore, in His will, springing from the depths of His nature and characterizing it, to take the initiative Himself for the removal of this distress. For the fact that God participates in it by sympathy implies that He is really present in its midst, and this means again that He wills that it should not be, that He wills therefore to remove it. We can see at once that the idea of the mercy of God is not evolved logically from a merely general notion of grace. Understood in quite general terms, as the free condescension of a superior to an inferior, it does not necessarily include the superior’s participation in, and determination speedily not to relieve, the distress of the inferior. Grace in itself and in general might equally well mean an unsympathetic and ineffectual inclination on the part of the superior. But we are speaking of the grace of God and therefore of the concrete relationship in which it becomes actual, of His grace towards the one to whom He is gracious. In this relation mercy is included in grace; grace itself is mercy. And by this mark and this alone we recognise the divinity of the love and grace of God: by the fact that it is merciful.[1]

We come to see how, in Barth’s thinking, ‘grace itself is mercy.’ Even in my elementary understanding as a child this would have made sense to me. It is because God enters into our world, our skin and bone, which is grace, that we also come to know that this act is God’s mercy; precisely because it is the obverse of His act, or grace to be us and with us. He gives us, in the concrete, what we don’t deserve—His riches—that by His poverty for us—His mercy (taking for us what we deserved::the Judge judged)—we can be participatio Christi (participants all the way down and up ‘in Christ’). This is the best news I’ve ever heard!

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II/1 §30 The Doctrine of God: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2009), 116.