God’s Mercy is His Covenant Love

The Kyrie Eleison is one of the best-known parts of the traditional liturgy of the church, when the congregation brings petitions to God, each one of them sealed with the alternating phrase: “Lord have mercy; Christ have mercy.”  I used to think that was kind of unnecessary ritual self-abuse.  I mean . . . yes, we are in need of God’s mercy, as we are sinners.  But our sin is forgiven in the confession.  Why then does the Kyrie take its place during the prayers of the faithful later in the service?  Why does the liturgy require that the people beat themselves up over their own sin during the bringing of petitions?  In order to understand this, we again need to put Old and New Testament together and look at them side by side.

I am sure I am saying nothing particularly new here, and to some it might already be common sense.  But it is new to me, at least with this degree of clarity, and hopefully will be helpful to any who read it.  I came to this realization recently while constructing a metered version of Mary’s Magnificat from Luke 1:46-56, which I will hopefully set to music in the near future.

My attention was drawn to verse 54.  “He has helped his servant Israel in remembrance of his mercy.”  The Greek word for mercy used here is ἔλεος in its basic form.  And by a strictly lexical definition, it means exactly what it sounds like.  It is an attitude or action of pity and kindness to those who are less fortunate or undeserving.  And it certainly means that.  We are undeserving and pitiable creatures to God, and the goodness he shows to us is mercy indeed.

But the phrase “in remembrance of his mercy” drew me deeper because it is very similar to Old Testament constructions such as those found in Psalm 136, where the psalmist proclaims that God’s “steadfast love endures forever.”

The Hebrew word for “steadfast love” is hesed.  In fact, in the King James Version, it is translated as “mercy.”  But that does not really begin to describe what it means.  The ESV’s “steadfast love” and even the NLT’s “faithful love” are closer.  Hesed is constance, faithfulness, covenant keeping, and ever-abounding love.  It is the love that God has for his people, which the Old Testament writers celebrated time and again.

So the question this raised in my mind was: could ἔλεος be legitimately translated as “steadfast love”?  Can it be taken as the Greek form of hesed?  And if not, then what word in the Greek expresses the same idea?  Of course, to determine this I turned to the Septuagint.  And the answer was quite clear.  So clearly obvious that I’m sure I can’t possibly be the first to see it, and I wondered why I hadn’t heard it before.

In the Greek Septuagint translation of the Old Testament, which was produced nearly 300 years before Christ and was accepted by the apostles, the word hesed is consistently translated as ἔλεος.  The gospel writers composed their accounts with a pen in one hand and the Septuagint in the other, as it were.  They used the language of the Greek Old Testament.  So if the Septuagint so consistently used the word ἔλεος to render the Hebrew word hesed, we can be sure that the gospel writers used ἔλεος to denote the same concept.

Old Testament hesed = New Testament ἔλεος.

When we read the New Testament and see “mercy,” then, this should bring an added dimension to how we understand it.  It is not just the mercy of a judge who acquits, or that of the benefactor who rescues.  Yes, it is that.  But there is a lot more to it.  God’s acts of compassion, his forgiveness, and his salvation are a result of ἔλεος—his hesed—his covenant faithfulness and love to his people.

So when we say “Kyrie Eleison, Lord have mercy,” we are not only asking God to forgive us our sins and look upon us with pity, though that is part of it.  But more than that, we are asking God to remember his covenant faithfulness, just as the Old Testament saints called on YHWH to remember his hesed.  Mary understood this through her deep-rooted faith in the God of Israel.  She understood that in sending Jesus, the Savior, God had finally come to rescue his covenant people.

Because he remembered his mercy.