Encountering Mercy

“For the sake of his sorrowful Passion, have mercy on us and on the whole world”.

For the past nine days, those words have been said millions of times, as Catholics throughout the world have prayed the Divine Mercy Novena in preparation for today, Divine Mercy Sunday. Beginning on Good Friday and concluding today, the Chaplet of Divine Mercy has been recited as a way of prayerfully reflecting upon the mysteries of our salvation. The Divine Mercy Chaplet is a private devotion – it’s not an official prayer of the Church. But it does encapsulate well what these Easter days invite us to do: to reflect upon what Jesus experienced – his Passion, Death, and Resurrection – and then in light of that invoke God’s blessing upon ourselves.

We tend to think of God’s mercy in relation to our sins. For example, at the beginning of each Mass, we call to mind the times we have failed to love God and one another, and we invoke God’s mercy collectively in the form of asking for his forgiveness (and in turn, the forgiveness of one another). It’s true that forgiveness is the principal aspect of mercy, but mercy goes deeper than that, especially when we are talking about the Divine Mercy. The mercy of God isn’t just about pardoning our offenses; it also heals us, and elevates us, and gives us the strength of grace in the places we need it most. We might say that mercy, all-encompassing, is God’s way of meeting our needs in the present moment and drawing us ever closer to himself as our final end.

It is important to recognize that God’s mercy always comes to us through Jesus. We are able to make supplication to God and invoke his mercies because of the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of his Son. Through those saving mysteries of our faith, the Risen Jesus becomes the instrument of mercy for us – his humanity, once dead but now resurrected, bridges the gap between God’s divinity and our humanity. In other words, it’s through the Risen Body of Jesus that we are saved.

Today’s Gospel gives us a beautiful depiction of exactly this. It’s the Risen Jesus who comes to the disciples, on the evening of Easter Sunday, not with vengeance or recrimination, but instead to bring them mercy. That mercy surely included forgiveness for the fact that they had abandoned him in his hour of need. But it also is given as something much deeper, as peace – “Peace be with you,” Jesus says to them. In the form of peace, the Divine Mercy of Jesus heals them, and restores the friendship they had with him, and finally raises that relationship to a whole new level, as Jesus calls them to become ministers of his mercy to others. And of course in the part of the Gospel that deals with Thomas, we see how it’s his encounter with the Risen Body of Christ that moves him from doubt to belief. For Thomas, the Lord’s Divine Mercy is something tangible, something living, not just given by but encountered through the Risen Body of Jesus.

Christ and the Doubting Thomas (c. 1480) by Luca Signorelli

All of this is relevant to us because, in every Mass, we encounter the same Risen Jesus that the disciples did in that upper room. Having called upon God’s mercy, as I mentioned earlier, we are then present, mystically, at the Lord’s Passion and Death in the Eucharistic sacrifice. And having received the Lord’s peace, and having exchanged a sign of that peace to each other, we then encounter the Risen Body of Jesus who communicates God’s mercy and peace to us. In the Eucharist, the Lord makes his own Presence the very font of Divine Mercy that heals us, restores us, and raises our friendship with him to new heights.

Friends, perhaps that prayer of the Divine Mercy Chaplet can become the prayer of each of us today: “For the sake of his sorrowful Passion, have mercy on us and on the whole world.” Because God desires to give us his mercy by giving us an encounter with his Risen Son, who can heal and restore us in all the ways that we need it. Whether it is in the form of Holy Communion, or whether in some way, we need the grace of the Lord’s Divine Mercy to move us in the way that it moved Thomas and the other disciples, from fear to faith, from doubt to belief. Though we may not see the Lord’s Risen Body in the same way as the disciples did, we can encounter him here just as truly, just as intimately – and blessed are we if we believe that.

A Love Stronger than Death

On Wednesday of this past week, I went over to our parish school to visit the religion class of our older students. I like to do that every so often as a way of interacting with them a bit more than I do during our weekly school Mass. I answered a few questions that they had left for me in their Questions for Father box; they wanted to know, among other things, what I like to watch on TV, what my favorite song is, and whether I preferred McDonald’s or Taco Bell. You know, the important stuff.

But really, my primary purpose in making a visit to their classroom was to ask them what they knew about Easter and about the events that led up to it that we as a Church have been celebrating for the last three days, a period we call the Sacred Triduum. We talked about how Jesus ate a final meal with his friends, a meal in which he washed their feet as a sign of his love and a commandment for them to follow. We talked about how he was betrayed by one of his friends, and was arrested, tried, and condemned to death. We talked about he took up a Cross, a terrible instrument of torture that he made into a sign of love and salvation. And we talked about how he was crucified on that Cross, died, and was laid in a tomb.

I asked the school kids: “Is that the end of the story?” And of course, they all earnestly replied, “NO!” And they’re right – it wasn't the end of that story. But while we know that, when those events were actually happening, that wasn’t apparent at all. We may experience the sorrow of Good Friday, but we also feel the tinge of joy that Easter Sunday is coming. But that wasn’t the case for Jesus’s disciples. Maybe they had a vague wisp of belief in something more to come – remembering the Lord’s promises, believing in God’s justice, hoping for the possibility to somehow be reconciled with him who many of them had denied and abandoned. But even if there was some glimmer of these things deep in their hearts, mostly there was just pain and confusion and grief and loss.

But there was also love. As this Gospel tells us, the women from Galilee who were his disciples, who had known him and supported him from the beginning of his ministry – they still had love for Jesus. He was dead and buried now, a big stone keeping him in and everyone else out; but no matter, they still loved him. It could only have been love that made them go out to the tomb that morning at daybreak – despite the danger of doing so, despite the terrifying events of the prior days, despite the seemingly definitive ending that is death – they went to show love to the dead body of their friend and Lord. And what did they find there? Not a dead body but an empty tomb, the huge stone rolled away. And they heard in the words of these two angelic men that Jesus had been raised from the dead.

Federico de Madrazo, The Three Marys at the Tomb (1841)

We are familiar with all of this. We know the basic details of the Easter story, at least as well the children of our school do. But what this simple, strange Gospel story invites us to consider is: do we know it as well as those women of Galilee? Has the message of Easter been made *real* for us? On that morning, those women found their love rewarded – matched by a Love from on high. In that light of dawn, those women of Galilee discovered that the heart of God is also full of love, and had done something they could not. Because the Resurrection of Jesus is not something to be only known about, or even only believed, but it’s something that must be loved. The love of the Risen Jesus is stronger than death.

And so, we must look more deeply into our hearts, to see what is in there that has brought us out on this morning. We knew that this Sunday would follow last Friday; we knew that the Easter season follows upon Lent. But the fact that we know what happened does not mean we really have *understood* it. There’s lots of reasons that can bring us to church on Easter morning: a sense of obligation, a family gathering, a fear that we would miss out. But the best reason to come and celebrate this day is because we can say that what is in our hearts is precisely what those women of Galilee had in theirs – love. Can I say that? Can you?

Friends, the Good News is that, no matter our answer, love is the reason we have come here this morning, because love is the reason that God has for us to be here. Just like he brought those women of Galilee to the empty tomb, to see and believe in the depths of his love, so too he has brought you here today. And he who is Love itself, he who once was dead but who now lives forever, he loves you and he wants to give his love to you, and to make you come to believe in him, just as those women did, with a love stronger than death. He invites you to begin anew this morning, to encounter his love not just at Easter, but every day, especially here in the Mass where he becomes truly Present.

As we prepare for this Eucharist, let us pray that this Sacrament might help our love for the Lord to grow each day, until that day when a love stronger than death will bring us to him in the glory of the Resurrection.

The Only Word

We all know what it’s like to be at a loss for words. But sometimes, there simply are no words adequate to the moment. That’s an uncomfortable thing to say as someone who makes his living preaching words to others, but I’ve thought of that more and more in the last several weeks, particularly in light of the war in Ukraine. It struck me in a particular way two weeks ago when I learned of the terrible loss of life in the town of Bucha, where civilians – non-combatants ­– were tortured, brutalized, and killed. I thought “There are no words for this.” For some tragedies, for some evils, there is simply nothing to say.

I imagine that feeling might be with many of us today, right now, having just heard again the Passion of Jesus. Twice in one week now, we have read the account of an innocent man tortured, brutalized, and killed. It’s a tough story to hear, even for a non-believer, but for us who do believe, it’s even harder, because we hear the prophecy of Isaiah and we see it fulfilled in Jesus: “it was our infirmities that he bore, our sufferings that he endured; he was pierced for our offenses, crushed for our sins.” Jesus, the Son of God, didn’t just die for us – he was killed by us, on account of our sins. When we begin to truly contemplate that, words fail us and we are reduced to silence.

And yet the purpose of today is not to feel deep sorrow, to be weighed down with shame, or even to be reduced to silence, but rather to hear the word that God speaks to us in the Cross. For while words may fail us, while we may not know what to say, God does – and the word he speaks to us is the Incarnate Word, his Son, dying out of love for us. In the Cross of Christ, we see reflected back at us all the ugliness of evil, all the nastiness of human hatred and jealousy, all the helplessness of death, and we see God’s answer to all of it – the love of his Son embracing all of it in order to take it away.

This is the deep mystery of today, the difficult truth that resists understanding. To contemplate that the Son of God died for us, for our sins, is a hard reality to stare in the face. But it’s even harder to understand that somehow that terrible death wasn’t the end of our relationship with God, but the fullest expression of his love, and the deepest sign that he could give that nothing can take that love away. That’s a mystery that truly defies explanation. It’s a truth that we must simply behold, in silence, and believe.

And if we do, we will see how, standing before the love of God revealed to us in the Cross of Christ, it is the only word we truly need. In the face of our sufferings and pains, our trials and tragedies, and above all our own deaths, all other words pass away, but this word remains. God offers this word to us still – he speaks it always – the word of his love, the word of his presence, the Eternal Word made Flesh, who suffered death this day out of love for us.

Covenant and Command

At the close of Mass this evening, instead of giving a final blessing, I will process through the church with the Blessed Sacrament. As that happens, we will sing a hymn written about 800 years ago by the Dominican friar St. Thomas Aquinas. His brilliant theology is still widely read and studied, but St. Thomas is perhaps as well known today for his deep love and devotion for the Eucharist. Over the course of his life, he wrote five hymns about the Eucharist and the most famous of these is the Pange Lingua, the one we will sing.

In one of the last stanzas of the hymn, St. Thomas succinctly summarizes the whole meaning of this evening’s liturgy: “Et antiquum documentum novo cedat ritui” – “And may the ancient covenant give way to a new rite.”St. Thomas is referring to how, on the night before he died, Jesus established a new and eternal covenant that fulfills and succeeds the prior covenant God had made with his people Israel. As we heard in the first reading, that old covenant had the Passover meal as its principal sign. Each year, the Passover lamb would be sacrificed and eaten as a remembrance of and a sharing in God’s saving action to bring his People out of slavery in Egypt. In the new covenant of Christ, the People of God partake not of roasted lamb but of the living Body and Blood of Jesus Christ, who as the Lamb of God, sacrificed for us on the Cross, has brought us out of slavery to sin and death. That’s why we can say, echoing the words of St. Paul, that whenever we eat the Bread that has become the Lord’s Body and drink of the Cup that is his Blood, we have Communion with the Lord and proclaim his death and resurrection.

Icon of Christ Washing the Feet of the Disciples (1497), Kirillo-Belezersky Monastery, Russia

Maybe it seems strange then that our Gospel today tells us not about the eating and drinking at the Last Supper but instead the washing of feet. Only the Gospel of John recounts this event, and it seems that he does so as a way of explaining the new covenant with Christ in a different way. Jesus washes the disciples’ feet so that they can have an inheritance with him, as he tells Peter. But he also does it a sign of what they must then do for each other – and not just for each other, but for all. The new covenant with Christ, then, is about sacrificial love, and Jesus will show them the depth of that sacrificial love the next day when he goes to Calvary. Just as the Lord stooped to wash the disciples’ feet, so too he would stoop to bear the Cross for their sake, for the sake of all who have an inheritance with him.

But, if the Lord has made himself lowly for us, even to the point of death, then we who have Communion with him in the new covenant of his Blood must also do the same for others. When we come to partake of this Supper that we call the Eucharist, we commit ourselves to serving others with sacrificial, Christlike love – not by washing their feet, but by helping the poor, lifting up the lowly, welcoming the stranger, forgiving the sinner, working for peace and reconciliation. Just as Christ poured himself out for us, so too we who receive him, who have Communion with him, must pour ourselves out in loving service to one another.

In a few moments, friends, we will once again partake of the Sacrament of the Altar. We will do so at Jesus’s command, in memory of him, but not just with his memory but his very Presence among us. As we partake in this ritual meal, what St. Thomas calls the new rite of our covenant with him, may we remember that it is only by his grace and his Presence within us that we can fulfill his command to do what he has done for us – to lay down our lives in love for one another.

His Story, and Ours

Only two times during the Church year are we given the option to read the Gospel in the way we just did. One is today, and the other is this Friday.

I’ve sometimes wondered why that is. Why, on these specific days, Palm Sunday and Good Friday, with this specific Gospel passage, are we given the option to read the Gospel in parts, with various speakers, not just those who are ordained? On the one hand, there’s the practical element of making it a little more engaging. It’s just a little easier to pay attention when there are different speakers, especially when the Gospel is so long. But I think there’s another reason too, which is this: participating in the Gospel, having a role and saying a few words ourselves, makes it come alive for us in a new and more profound way.

And isn’t that ultimately the goal of this coming week? The mysteries of Jesus’s Passion, Death, and Resurrection lie at the heart of our faith all through the year, but in this Holy Week, they are meant to come alive for us – not only for us to find meaning in them, but that they may resonate with meaning for our lives here and now. In these next few days, we are invited to participate in the story of salvation, and realize that in some way, in the deepest ways, it’s our story too. We are the crowds that cheered Jesus into Jerusalem, and those that shouted for him to be crucified. We are the disciples who ate and drank with him at the Last Supper, and who then fled in fear and denied him. We are the women who wept and mourned him on the Way of the Cross and who stood with him at the foot of Calvary. We are all of these things; we are faithful and fickle.

Christ's Entry into Jerusalem (c. 1860) by Hippolyte Flandrin

But ultimately, the point of our faith – and the point of this Holy Week – is that Jesus himself is the one with whom we identify the most. We are present in him, and he in us. That’s what it means to be the Body of Christ, and that’s what ultimately makes this week holy. In him, our sufferings become redemptive; in us, he is at work, to bring us by our faith and hope to a share in his victory. Let’s participate again in his story, in our story. Let’s enter into this week with prayer, and with participation, joining our story to his, so that his triumph may be ours.