The Boomerang on the Playground

In 1997, a fifth-grader named Marcus Torres stood at the edge of the blacktop at Jefferson Elementary in Tucson, Arizona, watching his classmate David trip and scatter his lunch tray across the concrete. Marcus laughed. He pointed. He made sure everyone else saw. For three weeks, Marcus made David's humiliation a running joke — imitating the stumble, calling him "Tray Boy" in the hallways.

Then one April afternoon, Marcus caught his shoe on a crack during a kickball game and went sprawling in front of the entire grade. The silence lasted two seconds before the laughter started. And it was David's voice he heard first — not mocking, but offering a hand up. "That concrete hurts, doesn't it?" David said quietly.

Marcus told that story twenty years later at a men's retreat, his voice cracking. "I deserved exactly what I got," he said. "But David gave me something I didn't deserve — mercy."

The prophet Obadiah delivered God's word to Edom, a nation that had gloated over Jerusalem's destruction and even looted its survivors. "As you have done, it will be done to you; your deeds will return upon your own head." The Almighty sees every act of cruelty, every moment of schadenfreude, every hand raised against the vulnerable. His justice is precise — what we send into the world circles back. But here is the gospel's breathtaking twist: in Christ, the boomerang of judgment was caught by nail-scarred hands, so that mercy might reach even those who deserve the concrete.