Second Sunday of Easter (A)
1 May 2011
St. Hilary’s, Chicago
“It is mercy I desire, not sacrifice.” “Lord have mercy, for we have sinned against you.” Mercy – Mercy – Mercy!
Today, we celebrate the Octave of Easter, the final day of the eight days the Church celebrates the great joy of Easter day itself. And, for the past several years, this Sunday has been remembered in the Church as “Divine Mercy Sunday.” Why do we have “Divine Mercy Sunday”? What does this even mean? The answer to this is already present in our readings.
During Holy Week, we remembered how Jesus Christ gave his life for us. He didn’t come as a king to reign in this world. He didn’t come to give us a burdensome law code and enforce it by social structures to make us follow him. He came “meek, and humble of heart.” His followers were so free under his rule that one betrayed him, one denied him three times, and all of them fled from him at the hour of his most urgent need. And, on Easter morning, they start hearing reports that he is alive, and they run to see the empty tomb. – And, they fear, so they hide – like Adam did in the garden.
In the upper room, we see the eleven gathered behind locked doors, not knowing what to do, and utterly afraid. What happens if the Jews get them? What happens if the Jews blame them for this rumor of Jesus being alive? What if maybe, somehow impossibly maybe, Jesus is alive – how would he handle his unfaithful disciples?
And, behold, Jesus – alive! – stands in their midst. Notice what he says, how he acts. If one of us were to offend someone or do something hurtful to another, we would expect retaliation, retribution, hatred, anger, and the like. We see this all the time in our politics, our movies, and our own lives. You lied to me, now I refuse to trust you. He went behind your back to undermine your authority, now you make your authority over him felt. And, we further stigmatize our own community of life and faith.
But, this is not what Jesus does. These 11 men were to stand beside him to the end, and they did worse than nothing. Yet, Jesus doesn’t come in and yell at them. He doesn’t rub in their mistakes and make them feel more guilty than they already are. He doesn’t condemn them. He doesn’t take back the love he has for them. Rather, he says, “Peace be with you.” They are still frightened, fearful, amazed. He shows them his hands and side, effectively saying both “It’s really me!” and “I know what you helped make happen to me,” and says again “Peace be with you.” What mercy – rather than condemning them for murdering God, he takes away their fear and gives them peace.
This is divine peace, this is divine mercy – that the love of God can conquer all fear, sin, and hatred – that the love of God reigns supreme. For, it is in this great moment, to these men who are themselves among the greatest of sinners, Jesus breathes on them and says, “Receive the Holy Spirit./ Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them,/ and whose sins you retain are retained.” This is divine mercy – that the very act by which the most atrocious sin of deicide was committed, i.e. the crucifixion of our Lord, would be the very act which would bring about our reconciliation and our peace. This is divine mercy – that God’s heart would be pierced, and we would see hidden inside not divine wrath, not divine retribution, not divine vengeance, not divine retaliation, but rather divine pardon, divine peace, divine forgiveness, divine reconciliation, divine love, divine mercy.
Today, we live in a world which is all too quickly losing its understanding of mercy. Cardinal George has described this as a society in which “everything is permitted and nothing forgiven.” This is entirely contrary to the Gospel. Our life in Christ demands a moral structure in conformity to the will of God. Not everything is permitted, and so we continue to preach. However, unlike some of our Christian brothers and sisters, even some within the Church, we believe that everything can be forgiven. And, as proof of this, Christ gave the apostles and their successors – the bishops and priests – the sacrament of Reconciliation.
This is divine mercy, that the men who ran from the cross would be forgiven and themselves go to the cross for Christ in the end. This is divine mercy, that Simon of Cyrene would continue to follow Christ, even after he laid down his cross, and his two sons would become bishops in the Church. This is divine mercy, that the soldier who pierced the heart of Christ would himself die confessing him to be God. No one, no matter where in life, no matter what sins may have been committed, can be separated from divine mercy.
So, as we celebrate this great Divine Mercy Sunday, we must continue to pray for greater mercy in our world. At 2:00 PM, confessions will be heard here in the church. At 3:00 PM, the hour Christ died, the hour of mercy, we will pray the prayer we get from Saint Faustina – the Divine Mercy Chaplet, which is prayed on ordinary rosary beads. Those who participate in these will receive a plenary indulgence – the forgiveness of all their sins (in the sacrament of confession) and the remittance of all the punishment due to sin in purgatory. Of course, this affords each of us to show that divine mercy to a soul in purgatory by offering the indulgence for one of them.
Finally, I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the man who placed this great Divine Mercy Sunday on the Church calendar, the man who was truly a brilliantly shining light in the Church and throughout the world, who worked to teach all the nations about the mercy of God, who went into the cell of the man who would have been his assassin and forgave him, who died in Christ on Divine Mercy Sunday. Today, we celebrate the beatification of Pope John Paul II, whom has been called the patron of my generation in the Church. So today, after years of waiting, we can finally say,
Blessed Pope John Paul the Great – pray for us!
