Divine Mercy

Happy Easter! Any excuse to say 'Happy Easter'. Today we celebrate the conclusion of the eight day Easter feast. Now we begin the Easter season which continues until Pentecost. We spent forty days preparing, we spend fifty days celebrating. But we also prepare during this time, we prepare for the divine descent of the majesty of the Holy Spirit once again. And so while we are celebrating the Resurrection, part of the time we spend celebrating should also be with a plea in our hearts-that Jesus would open our hearts more deeply to precisely that power of the Spirit that raised Him from the dead. So that as we celebrate Pentecost once again, and more deeply, always more deeply, God the Holy Spirit can penetrate our hearts. So that we can experience that same power that raised Jesus; so that we can live for Him too; so that we can celebrate who He is and what He has done.

Today in a special way we also remember mercy. Many Catholics around the world are petitioning the Church that this day-the Second Sunday of Easter-would be formally designated in the Church as Divine Mercy Sunday. There are parishes that will have celebrations remembering Divine Mercy. But we don't need a special designation to enable us to do that. The prayers and the Scriptures today speak to us of God's mercy. It's a mercy that we need to understand because it's a mercy that is a gift that has set us free and a gift that we need to proclaim. We need to proclaim correctly because the world's understanding of God's mercy is getting progressively more and more distorted. If we're going to serve the Gospel, we need to proclaim 'mercy' as Jesus understands it, as He teaches it in the heart of the Church. Mercy today for the world consists in making God kind of a benign Santa Clause sort of figure for whom sin is irrelevant .'God is so merciful He would never send anyone to hell.' 'But,' the world adds, 'because there was no original sin , and mortal sin is virtually impossible, you couldn't go to hell anyway.'

Well, the world's perspective on this and on virtually everything else is, of course, wrong. Mercy does not consist in God taking a blind look at our sin. Mercy consists in precisely what we heard in the Gospel: "Receive the Holy Spirit. Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them." God has, practically speaking, built into the heart of His Church the vehicle for His Divine Mercy. That's the Sacrament of Reconciliation. When we need mercy, we come and we get mercy. But, we have to, in a certain sense, throw ourselves on the mercy of the court. We don't simple assume the court is going to benignly ignore the wrong doing we have done. We recognize that we receive God's mercy when we come and we ask for God's mercy. We do people a grave disservice if we allow them to continue in the false understanding that somehow mercy does not need to be sought or that it is just automatic, or that God just does it. When Jesus provides a specific vehicle for doing something, and especially when in the establishment of that vehicle of mercy He says, "Whose sins you retain are retained", it becomes clear that when it comes to mercy, He wants to be asked and He wants to be asked in this way: that people come before Him, they repent of their sins, they ask for His grace. When they do, then they hear the words that we all long to hear: "God the Father of mercy, through the death and resurrection of His Son, has reconciled the world to Himself and sent the Holy Spirit to us the for the forgiveness of sins." (I won't continue the words of absolution, since we don't do general absolutions), but that is the mercy Jesus invites us to, to come and receive. But in order to talk about mercy, you have to talk about sin. Sin is extremely unpopular. At least in terms of talking about it and yet Jesus invites us to speak a clear word. If we talk about sin, people accuse us of being traditional, legalistic, scrupulous, old-fashioned, etc. So what. If you don't understand sin, you don't understand your fundamental need for a Savior. If you take the saving aspect out of the ministry of Jesus, you reduce Him to the way the world treats Him, as kind of a benign therapist: 'Jesus will make you all better'. That's not His role necessarily. Or I should say, it's not His primary role. It is true that a relationship with Him is wondrously therapeutic. But, His primary intent is for us to see Him as Savior and Lord; to come to Him for forgiveness of sins; to come to Him that He might be the center of our lives. It can take a lot of courage to reach out and to share with people that they have a Savior who wants to forgive them, and it involves sharing with them with great circumspection. We must share that sin is wrong. that sin has horrendous consequences, but that it's easy to get rid of in the sense of having it forgiven: twenty seconds in the confessional, and a penance that is usually painless and God wipes us clean. How difficult can that be? There are people laboring under enormous amounts of guilt everyday, who, if they would simply take advantage of this vehicle of mercy that Jesus has placed in the heart of His Church, would have their lives changed. If we talk about sin, people say 'you're trying to make me feel guilty'. Well, guilt can be the healthy interchange between God the Holy Spirit and our conscience. God built the capacity for guilt into us, at least the potential for it, to enable us to turn around. Thank God that guilt does not feel good or we would run after sin even more than we do. Guilt is an unpleasant feeling. Guilt is God's way of saying 'turn around, go the other way.' The guilt that is a function of the presence of the Holy Spirit acting on our conscience terminates the moment of the absolution, because that's what God intends to bring us to--to bring us to the point where we say, 'I'm sorry. I'm sorry I've offended you.' Where we say 'I firmly resolve with the intent of Your grace to sin no more'. Then we hear those wondrous words of absolution and our hearts are restored like that of a newly baptized baby. That is mercy. Not that God gives us what we deserve, God gives us what He freely chooses to grant in virtue of what Jesus did on the Cross. Let us plead with Him today that we would have a deeper and deeper appreciation of Mercy and that we would also have courage, the courage to speak of the reality of sin, of the need of a Savior and of the availability of this wondrous grace of mercy that is open to any that wish to receive it All they need do is simply to come and take advantage of what Jesus has placed in the heart of His Church.