To Thee, the Champion Leader and Lord, the Vanquisher of Hades, I, Thy creature and servant, offer a song of praise, for thou hast delivered me from eternal death. But as Thou hast ineffible loving-kindness, from all dangers that can be do Thou deliver me, that I may cry to Thee: Jesus, Son of God, have mercy on me.
Having looked at how mercy is defined and expressed within the context of scripture in both the New Testament and the Old Testament, I am going to look at mercy within the context of Orthodox Tradition, primarily within our main worship service, the divine liturgy. My two main resources for this are the service book used in my church, and my personal prayer book. Mercy as it is expressed within Tradition should not be viewed as an addition to or seperate from scripture, but must be understood within the context of how I have discussed mercy in the scriptures in my last two posts.
Before vesting for the liturgy, the priest recites "Have mercy on us, O Lord, have mercy on us, for laying aside all excuse, we sinners offer to Thee, as to our Master, this supplication: have mercy on us.", calling on God's mercy to accept and guide the service of the priests as they minister to Christ's flock, and to accept the worship of all the people that will be gathered together. In the Trisagion (thrice holy) prayers, we cry out "Holy God! Holy Mighty! Holy Immortal! Have mercy on us." and ask the Trinity to have mercy on us by cleansing our sins, pardoning our transgressions, and healing our infirmities by God's presence as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In the prayer before the first antiphon, God's mercy is described as "immeasurable" while we ask God to "impart the riches of Thy mercy and Thy compassion to us and to those who pray with us". In the prayer of fervent suplication, we ask God to "have mercy on us according to the multitude of Thy mercy. Send down Thy bounties upon us and upon all Thy people who await the rich mercy that comes from Thee.". We finally end with the dismissal of "May He who rose from the dead, Christ our true God, through the prayers of... all the saints: have mercy on us and save us, for He is good and loves mankind.", proclaiming Christ as the source of our mercy and trusting Him to answer the petitions of all that pray to Him with us and on our behalf.
The response to many of the petitions prayed for in the various litanies throughout the liturgy is "Lord, have mercy". This response has a twofold meaning. First, just as the Psalms describe the very act of answering prayer to be a mercy, we acknowledge that is a mercy of God just to be heard by Him and to have our prayers answered. In responding with "Lord, have mercy", the people unite their prayer with the priest or deacon chanting the petition so that the entire congregation may be of "one accord in prayer and supplication". Second, just as the entirety of scripture describes any act of compassion and kindness to be a mercy, we ask that our petitions be answered and acted on as mercies from God. In the various litanies we ask that His mercy be "according to Thy great goodness" and that all answers to our prayers are done "O God, by Thy grace". We also pray "having remembered all the saints" as we are mindful of our angels who behold the face of our Father in heaven, the great "cloud of witnesses" who have finished their race in faith, and all those who are gathered in the Church in this life "called to be saints" in Christ. In the great litany we pray for "the peace from above and for the salvation of our souls", for the welfare of our churches and all those that "enter with faith, reverence, and the fear of God", for our bishops, priests, deacons, and all the people, for our civil authorities entrusted with our care and our military entrusted with our defense, for "seasonable weather" and "abundance of the fruits of the earth", travelers, the sick and suffering, prisoners (whom Christ personally identified Himself with in Matthew 25), and our "deliverance from all affliction, wrath, danger, and necessity". We pray for those departed this life and that their sins are forgiven and they be established among the just. We pray for those about to be sacramentally received into the Church that God may "teach them the word of truth", "reveal to them the gospel of righteousness", and "unite them to His Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church".
Before beginning the prayers for the celebration of Communion, the celebration itself is referred to as "a mercy of peace, a sacrifice of praise". It is a "mercy of peace" because that just as Paul writes that we "shew the Lord's death till he come" as often as we "eat this bread, and drink this cup", and it is through Christ's sacarifice of Himself on the cross that "we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by his life" in His resurrection. And just as "we being many" are "one body" because "we are partakers of that one bread", we offer ourselves up to God in unity with Christ as a "sacrifice of praise".
There are a number of penitential canons in which we call on Christ to have mercy on us and forgive our sins including the Canon of St Andrew which we chant every year during lent and the Supplicatory Canon to Our Lord Jesus Christ in which we ask Christ to have mercy on us as was shown in the scriptures to the prodigal son, the base harlot, and king Manasses. On cheesefare saturday we sing "take not Thy mercy from us" and that sunday "Have mercy, O Merciful One, on me who have fallen.". But the greatest mercy we chant about in our hymns is the resurrection of Christ. Our hymns of the resurrection in the third, fourth, and seventh tones all say that Christ has granted the world "great mercy" by raising us from the dead by His resurrection from the dead. This is echoed in ode six of the Paschal Matins where we sing "Jesus, having risen from the grave as He foretold, hath granted us life everlasting and great mercy." and in the troparia for St Thomas Sunday and the Myrrh-Bearing Women. And this is because it is in and through being crucified and raised from the dead with Christ that our repentence brings us life in Him.
Through the prayers of our holy fathers, Lord Jesus Christ our God, have mercy on us and save us.
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