Mercy, mercy!

When Portia in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice pleads with Shylock to abandon his claim to a pound of flesh from Antonio, she calls on the divine attribute of mercy.

“The quality of mercy is not strained,” she proclaims. “It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven.”

Some of the most beautiful lines in Shakespeare, Portia’s speech is not only a call to a vengeful money lender, himself persecuted by the Christians of his city, but an appeal to all in power to show mercy to their subjects.

Mercy, Portia continues, “is an attribute to God himself;/ And earthly power doth then show likest God’s/ When mercy seasons justice.”

When I heard last week that Brandon Bernard, who had been on death row for over 20 years, had been executed, I thought of Shakespeare’s words, and how absent mercy is in our society today.

The Bernard execution on Thursday was the ninth federal execution since Trump revived the death penalty in July, and the first of five scheduled in the lame-duck period. It was followed Friday evening by the execution of Alfred Bourgeois, a 54-year-old intellectually disabled man.

Three more federal executions are planned in January. If they take place, Trump will become the most prolific presidential executioner in over a century.

Mercy, our outgoing president would like us to believe, is weakness. To heed the petitions of human rights activists as diverse as Sister Helen Prejean and Kim Kardashian would diminish him in the eyes of his followers.

Arguments will continue over the death penalty, opposed by President Elect Joe Biden and Vice President Elect Kamala Harris. In their opposition, they reflect shifting public opinion. A 2019 survey showed that sixty percent of Americans favor life imprisonment over capital punishment. There is also the knowledge that since 1973 one hundred and sixty inmates sentenced to death have been exonerated.

But beyond arguments over criminal-justice policy is something Shakespeare still asks us to consider, mercy. As Portia proclaims, mercy is “mightiest in the mightiest, it becomes/the throned monarch better than his crown.”

Mercy, of course, was not an invention of the Elizabethans, who themselves practiced barbaric and cruel capital punishment. Rather, it’s a quality as old as time, embedded in ancient scripture. “What doth the Lord require of thee,” proclaims the Hebrew prophet Micah, " but to do justly and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?

And in the Beatitudes: “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall be shown mercy.”

A healthy and democratic society is built on justice. But mercy, granted in a way that preserves safety, will restore life and community. Mercy calls for an end to the degrading and cruel practices of execution. It is seasoning for the justice we all seek.

“Peace on earth, and mercy mild,” carolers sing this Christmas season. Let it be so.