Review of Disrupting Mercy: The Gift of Extreme Kindness Motivated by Compassion by Matthew C. Clarke

Matthew C. Clarke, Disrupting Mercy: The Gift of Extreme Kindness Motivated by Compassion, Newcastle, Australia, Turning Teardrops into Joy, 2022. 337 pp. $17.50 USD. ISBN: 978-0648724827. 

The room was small and smelled like burnt coffee and secondhand clothing. I found a seat on a worn couch, set down my coffee cup, balanced a notebook on my knee. I looked around sheepishly, not quite sure what to expect at my first board meeting for The Micah Mission.¹ Micah is a restorative justice organization, walking closely with men just getting out of the carceral system, supporting their reintegration and the restoration of community through friendship. 

Out of the small office two part-time staff did everything from helping recently released guys get prescriptions or rides to probation check-ins, to phoning around for leads on jobs, to facilitating a number of Circles of Support and Accountability for members who’d offended sexually.² Over the next nine years I’d hear their reports of this work, and I’d find myself carried into all the gladness and heartache of friendship with guys who got out, who faced the grinding challenge of addictions and PTSD and finding work when you have a record, who reoffended, went back inside, got out again, disappeared. 

Work for restorative justice is one of the worlds within which Matthew C. Clarke orients his exposition of mercy. Clarke and his wife, Annabella Rossini-Clarke, operate Turning Teardrops into Joy, an umbrella nonprofit that, among other projects, seeks to address modern slavery via a perpetrator-centric lens.³ Stories from this work and from people caught in the carousel of the carceral system are scattered throughout Clarke’s Disrupting Mercy. Mercy, Clarke suggests, must make sense in this context if it’s to make sense anywhere.

Clarke’s other frame for his account of mercy is biblical—the story of Zacchaeus in Luke 19. To the question “Who can be saved?” (Luke 18:26), Jesus responds with mercy, first to blind Bartimaeus on the outskirts of Jericho (18:35–43) and then to the rich, corrupt outsider Zacchaeus, calling him down from his sycamore tree. Jesus enacts mercy as running “against the social current,” as “dignifying,” as a gift that “upended the idea of debt” (7).

These touch points—restorative justice, Zacchaeus—keep Clarke’s (at times philosophical) task of better-defining mercy anchored both in the grit and grief of life in the real world and in the narrative shape of God’s life given in Jesus. They also resonate with the key tensions addressed in Clarke’s redefinition of mercy: sin and guilt, charity, forgiveness, and power. 

Clarke encapsulates his new definition of mercy in what sounds like a simple phrase: “Mercy is a gift of extreme kindness motivated by compassion” (13). But this definition seeks to step carefully through ground rent by historic theologies of atonement, by critical philosophical accounts of power and the gift. Clarke endeavors to locate discussion of mercy beyond forgiven guilt and within God’s tender compassion toward all suffering and God’s yearning for full-fledged shalom. Mercy is one moment in a greater “ecology of love” (15), disrupting structures of harm, opening possibilities for transformation.

But, Clarke stresses, mercy—even divine mercy—only opens possibilities for restoration. As gift, mercy remains wholly noncoercive, with no assured results. Clarke, in dialogue with John Barclay’s Paul and the Gift, lands on the term “nonconditional”: Mercy acts in compassion with no guarantee of results, like Jesus who freely heals the ten men with leprosy (Luke 17:11–19). Through sensitive readings of mercy in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament and via nuanced conversation with partners ranging from Jacques Derrida and Genevieve Vaughan to Les Miserables and Nick Cave, Clarke establishes mercy as “the foundation stone of a gift economy,” one which “save[s] us from the tyranny of transactional thinking” (28).

Clarke maps mercy beyond the logic of exchange or retributive theology. Mercy is not simply leniency, choosing to give evil a pass by God staying God’s hand of wrath. Instead, mercy is an active choice to pursue restoration through “acts of mercy that undermine evil by enabling a better alternative” (111). Clarke removes mercy from the metaphorical courtroom and places it back in the community of shalom. Rather than suspending justice, mercy weaves community back together, opening the possibility for justice too to be restored.

However much Clarke succeeds in reframing mercy as a response to suffering, his account does not quite escape the gravity of Christianity’s long habit of viewing mercy as God’s solution for sin. Chapter 5, “Mercy and Justice,” reads like a long refutation of such frameworks where mercy serves primarily as the antidote to God’s judgment. But even when Clarke over the next four chapters positions mercy as a response to “brokenness,” the language of sin and wrong, mistakes and failures continues to push its way back into the conversation. 

Following Marcus Borg, Clarke traces three biblical macro stories for mercy’s response to suffering, devoting a chapter each to sin and forgiveness, bondage and liberation, and exile and return. Each offers a robust exploration of the meaning of mercy, but the first of these runs nearly half again as long as either of the following chapters. Similarly, when Clarke “puts mercy to the test” in chapter 10, examining how mercy might be enacted (as a subheading has it) “toward *really* bad people” (204), his restorative account still focuses on the problem of moral offense, here in the case of those who perpetrate modern slavery. Even within Clarke’s restorative vision, the central challenge to mercy remains “how mercy can be directed toward perpetrators of awful abuse without negating justice” (210).

Perhaps the work of redefining mercy necessitates ongoing engagement with previous, sin-centric frames. But, for me, reading Disrupting Mercy has me dreaming of mercy beyond sin. What might mercy mean if God’s heart is the driving concern of the story, where sin appears only as a convoluted subplot? Clarke offers hints, particularly in reflection on racham, one of the prevalent Hebrew terms rendered in English as “mercy.” Pointing to the term’s shared linguistic root with rechem, “womb,” he observes that a mother’s care is bodily—a feeling and a yearning. Beyond the problem-solving of atonement or the calculus of covenant and conditionality, how might mercy be defined as tangled in the feeling of God, just as “womb-like love” originates purely with “the nature of being a mother” (44)? What might mercy continue to mean in a world after sin, in shalom fully restored?

Publishing with an independent press allows Disrupting Mercy leeway to approach mercy from many angles, interrupting exposition with personal stories, close readings of moments in novels and films, or (in one instance) quiet, blank space to hold the grief of the millions displaced from their homes. Clarke prefaces each chapter with an “initial thought to ponder,” often guiding the reader to search online for a recording of a musical performance or work of art to be a silent conversation partner in the chapter’s discussion. Each chapter closes with a prompt for reflection and space to journal reflections.

Disrupting Mercy invites readers to conversation about the many ways we meet God’s gifts of extreme kindness. (It would make an excellent selection for an adult education class.) The text also invites us, as we are restored to God’s ecology of love, to become participants in extending God’s mercy, accepting the “invitation to flourish within a community of grace” (88).

Josh Wallace is a pastor and educator in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, in Treaty 6 Territory. He teaches at St Thomas More College and serves as Church Engagement Minister for Mennonite Church Saskatchewan.