THE DIVINE MERCY
The same day at evening,
being the first day of the week, when the doors were shut, where the disciples
were assembled for fear of the Jews, came Jesus and stood in the midst, and
saith unto them, Peace be unto you. And
when He had so said He showed unto them His hands and His side.
Our annual immersion in the
somber, deeply thought provoking events of Holy Week are behind us. The crescendo of relief and joy which Easter
day brings is also behind us, though hopefully still filling our hearts and
souls. Indeed this Sunday, the first
after Easter day is commonly referred to as Low Sunday, which is nothing more
or less than to contrast it to the momentous Sunday of the Resurrection.
As such today is a good time
to pause and reflect on all that we have visited, learned and participated in
during recent weeks. The soul searching
repentance which hopefully we felt during Lent; Palm Sunday and the popular
adulation of Christ as a king upon His triumphal entry into Jerusalem; the
deeply moving reflections of Holy Week, culminating in the betrayal, the
Passion and the Crucifixion of the man so recently hailed as a king. And, of course, the mighty Resurrection of
Jesus, which showed the true nature of His kingship.
The passage I just quoted
from today’s reading from the Gospel according to
So I wondered if there is
one word, or even a short sentence or phrase which neatly sums up all the
recent events. I believe there is such a
word and I will come to it in a moment.
Holy Week and Easter help us
to know God as nothing else does, and in that knowledge we find an
understanding of the properties of God.
He is revealed upon the Cross and again in the Resurrection, the
conquering of death.
Long ago God had spoken to
Moses in the burning bush. Moses was not
allowed to see God’s face, but after his encounter with God his own face shone
so much with the glory of God that Moses had to veil it from the
Israelites. Through Moses, meetings with
God, Israelites received the Law by which God wanted them to live.
Their obedience to the Law
was sporadic, so that time and time again God had to remind them where they
were going wrong and what was right. He
did so in direct action and through His prophets. And yet they and the world as a whole
remained ravaged by the evil of sin.
Only God’s intervention could remedy that, and God, as we know,
intervened.
The word I have in mind
describes that intervention. It
describes why it happened; it describes its nature and it describes the very
property of God revealed by His intervention.
We use the word more than 30 times in each celebration of Holy
Communion, and more if it is used in the Collect, Epistle and Holy Gospel of
the day. Indeed the word describes the
very nature of the Eucharist itself.
The word is mercy.
The power of God is infinite
and He could have dealt with the evil of sin by quite simply snuffing us all
out and starting again. Fortunately,
God’s infinite power is matched by His infinite Love. In fact, as the Collect for the eleventh
Sunday after Trinity says, God declares His Almighty Power “most chiefly in
showing mercy.” God pours out His power
and His Love through His property of Divine mercy and we have reason to be
very, very thankful for that. It is
integral to the Love which distinguishes Christianity from all other religions.
The property of mercy was
shown most vividly upon the Cross, where Jesus allowed Himself to be sacrificed
for our sins, offering salvation to all without exception. But our need for God’s mercy did not end with
the Cross. Jesus died there for our sins:
He took upon us the full weight of human sins, as Bishop Carl so clearly laid
out for us on Good Friday, but He did not expunge from man the sinful nature
that results in sinning. That means that
without His help we will keep on sinning.
Christ crucified gives us the reason to seek God’s mercy in helping us
to stop sinning. That is our task in
claiming the prize of salvation offered so freely from the Cross.
Look again at what happens
in the brief Gospel reading. The
disciples are locked in a room, hiding, the very men who abandoned Christ in
His hour of need, hiding for fear of the Jews.
When Jesus comes to them, He does not admonish them. Far from it, He shows them His wounds so they
know it is Him, though why they would doubt that when He has just appeared in a
locked room is beyond me. Then He says
with infinite gentleness, Peace be unto you, not once but twice. What a wonderful manifestation of the Divine
Mercy which took Jesus Christ to the Cross in the first place. Jesus showed them His wounds and gave them
His peace. For running away and for
cowering in fear, and all their other human frailties they needed His mercy and
that is what they received.
While we can imagine,
perhaps, what those wounds looked like, we cannot look upon them as the
disciples did. Nor do we need to – every
time we come to receive Holy Communion we are blessed with an even greater
mercy, we are given to feed on the perpetual sacrifice of the body and blood of
Jesus Christ.
The Prayer of Consecration
reminds us of His words as He instituted this feast at the Last Supper. Take, eat, This is my Body which is given
for you; Drink ye all, of this; for this is my Blood of the new Covenant, which
is shed for you and for many for the remission of sins.
When we receive, we are
immersing ourselves in that endless stream of Divine Mercy pouring still from
the Cross. Yet even in the very act of
receiving we need to invoke that same Divine Mercy, as the Prayer of Humble
Access reminds us. We are not worthy
So much as to gather up the crumbs under thy Table. But thou art the same Lord, whose property is
always to have mercy: Grant us therefore, gracious Lord, So to eat the Flesh of
thy dear Son Jesus Christ, And to drink His Blood, that our sinful bodies may
be made clean by His Body, And our souls washed through His most precious
Blood, And that we may evermore dwell in Him and He in us.
God’s mercy is so beyond our
comprehension that we can only avail ourselves of it by humbly invoking it.
Jesus Christ is the
revelation of God to us, a man in whom all the fullness of the Godhead dwells, and
since His Incarnation there have been no new revelations.
But there have been and
continue to be reminders, one of which is about the Divine Mercy. In 1993 Pope John Paul II beatified and then
in 2000 canonized Sr. Maria Faustina Kowalska.
The day of her beatification was the first Sunday after Easter, as was
the day of her canonization seven years later.
Sr. Faustina is often called the Apostle of Divine Mercy and this day is
now known in the Roman branch of the Church at least, as Divine Mercy Sunday.
Speaking as someone who is
very conscious of my own need for God’s mercy, I find it very sad that Sr.
Faustina and her work are not more widely known. She was an uneducated Polish nun, born in
1925, who, the Church believes, Jesus spoke to on a number of occasions. These encounters are recorded in her diary of
over 600 pages.
Included in the diary is the
Chaplet of Divine Mercy, which Jesus dictated to her and through her asks that
we all pray. It is a devotion which calls
to mind our ongoing need for God’s mercy and such words of our Lord’s as Blessed
are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy. Mercy is like God’s love – we receive it and
pass it on. It is too much for a human
to contain.
On this Low Sunday, this
Divine Mercy Sunday, I pray that all of us can pay special attention to the
invocations of God’s mercy in the rest of our prayers in our liturgy. I pray that we pay special attention to the
real and most merciful presence of Jesus Christ in that great miracle of mercy,
the Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist.
Contemplate, as you prepare to come to the Lord’s Table, His own words, Except
ye eat the flesh of the son of man and drink His blood, ye have no life in
you. Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh
my blood, hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day.
What greater mercy can we
ask for than the fulfillment of that promise of our Risen, Living, Lord.
Peter
Jardine+ Easter 1, 2008