On this Divine Mercy Sunday we recall the words of Saint Thomas Aquinas: “Mercy consists in bringing a thing out of non-being into being.” We see this transpire concretely in the life of the early Church. The community of believers “was united, heart and soul” and “everything they owned was held in common.” They were filled with awe; they were witnesses of wondrous signs; they dedicated themselves to the good of the other; they were selfless and generous. They lived with the faith that can “overcome the world”. That is what the Apostle Thomas is looking for in the Lord’s open side. “The secret of Christ’s heart is revealed to us through the clefts of his body. (Saint Bernard)
The Mystery of Mercy
Where does the Father’s infinite mercy come from? David is a man of the Old Covenant. He knows the One God. We, as people of the New Covenant , are able to recognise in the Davidic Miserare the voice of Christ, the Son of God, treated by the Father as sin for our sake (cf Co 5:21). Christ took upon himself the sins of all (cf.Is 53;12), so as to make satisfaction for justice wounded by sin; in this way he maintained a balance between the justice and the mercy of the Father.
It is significant that Sister Faustina saw this Son as the merciful God, yet she contemplated him not so much on the cross but rather in his subsequent state of risen glory. She thus linked her mystical sense of mercy with the mystery of Easter, in which Christ appears triumphant over sin and death (cf Jn 20: 19-23).
I have chosen here to speak of Sister Faustina and the devotion to the merciful Christ which she promoted, because she too belongs to our time. She lived in the first decades of the twentieth century and died before the Second World War. In that very period the mystery of Divine Mercy was revealed to her, and what she experienced she then recorded in her Diary. To those who survived the Second World War, Saint Faustina’s Diary appears as a particular Gospel of Divine Mercy, written from a twentieth-century perspective. The people of that time understood her message. They understood it in the light of the dramatic buildup of evil during the Second World War and the cruelty of the totalitarian systems. It was as if Christ had wanted to reveal that the limit imposed upon evil, of which man is both perpetrator and victim, is ultimately Divine Mercy. Of course, there is also justice, but this alone does not have the last word in the divine economy of world history and human history. God can always draw good from evil, he wills that all should be saved and come to knowledge of the truth (cf 1 Tim 2:4): God is Love (cf 1 Jn 4:8). Christ, crucified and risen, just as he appeared to Sister Faustina, is the supreme revelation of this truth…
The Paschal Mystery confirms that good is ultimately victorious, that life conquers death and that love triumphs over hate. (Blessed John Paul 11)
Visit the Easter Garden in the Church’s Sacred Space.
Check out the Link to the Diocesan Website below for the Gospel reflection by Bishop Martin Drennan.
