My dear brothers and sisters in Christ, today our Holy Mother Church celebrates Divine Mercy Sunday in response to the desire of Our Lord, revealed to St. Maria Faustina Kowalska in the 1930s, that the first Sunday after Easter be celebrated as a feast of His Divine Mercy.
While this feast usually focuses on the mercy of Our Lord, this mercy of the Son is imbricated in a Trinitarian economy of mercy.
In the second reading today, the first letter of St. Peter proclaims the mercy of the Father:
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,
who in his great mercy gave us a new birth to a living hope
through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead,
This is the mercy of God the Father is that even though we sinners deserve eternal death, there is, nonetheless, life after death. This is the living hope which we celebrate at Easter. The mercy of God the Father is the actualization of the ancient promise of life after death. Actualization, because, as we hear in the Gospel today, the apostles and disciples saw and touched the man who had been certifiably dead and was now living and breathing among them.
Brethren, we have lived so long within a Christian era, with the certainties of the Christian faith, that we do not really appreciate what it means to live with the certainty that there is life after death. That this life is not subject to the capriciousness of divine or other beings, but an invitation to eternal life with a loving God, in Paradise. There is no terror of unending cycles of life and death, each new life possibly taking us lower in the hierarchy of lifeforms. Indeed, so long, and so powerful has hope of Christianity been, that even non-Christians seem to now live with the idea that there is a good life after death, that paradise awaits us all.
Typically, with these non-Christians, there is no sense that a great price was paid for us to be able to live with this hope. We Christians, however, know that the price paid so that those excluded from paradise since the fall of Adam could return, was the brutal death of Our Lord Jesus Christ obedient to the wish of His merciful Father.
The mercy of this great price was that we now know that there is no need for us to sin. Until the death, and resurrection, of Our Lord, there was no certainty that there even was life after death. Like the atheists today, who simply believe that life ends with death and all we have is this one life. And since there is only this one life, one must make the most of it, whatever the cost! This cost is very often the abuse of, or lack of mercy to, others. After all, if there is no life after death, and all we have is this one opportunity, we ought to make the most of it, taking care of ourselves, leaving the rest to fend for themselves.
If the mercy of the Father was the giving of hope through the resurrection of Our Lord, Our Lord, the Son, offers His own mercy when He says to the disciples:
Receive the Holy Spirit.
Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them,
and whose sins you retain are retained.
The mercy of God the Son is the fact that despite His great sacrifice, which should prompt us to sin no more, He is willing to continue forgiving our sins and thus permit us to enter heaven. As Our Lord promised St. Faustina:
I pour out a whole ocean of graces upon those souls who approach the fount of My mercy. The soul that will go to Confession and receive Holy Communion shall obtain complete forgiveness of sins and punishment.
And so, my dear brothers and sisters, I urge you all; do not approach the altar for communion if you have not first confessed in the last fifteen days. Confess, and then worthily come to drink from the fountain of Divine Mercy.
The Spirit has its own role to play in this economy of mercy. The Holy Spirit, which is the mark of God’s ownership of us (Eph 1: 13-14) reminds us actively of what God the Son said to us (Jn 14:26):
Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy. (Mt 5:7)
Adding:
give, and it will be given to you; good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap. For the measure you give will be the measure you get back. (Lk 6: 38)
It is mercy that the Holy Spirit urges us to give to each other, whispering to us – those who are baptized – that it is in the measure that we give mercy, that we shall obtain mercy. It was mercy that animated the life of the early church as we hear in the first reading today from the Acts of the Apostles:
They devoted themselves…
to the breaking of bread and to the prayers….
they would sell their property and possessions
and divide them among all according to each one’s need.
It is in the act of confession, dear brothers and sisters, that we are enabled to articulate our desire to show mercy, and beg the grace of the Spirit to help actualize this mercy in Our Lives.
Through mercy, my dear brothers and sisters, we are invited into the inner life of the Trinity; we should grab this opportunity! May Our Lord grant us all the grace to humble ourselves in confession, and benefit from the flow of mercy from His open heart.
(A version of this homily was first preached to the faithful at the Cathedral parish of St. Catherine of Alexandria on 11 April 2026.)
(Image reference: The Throne of Mercy with the Virgin, St. John, and Angels with the Arma Christi, Anonymous artist, circa 1470, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin.)
No comments:
Post a Comment