Second Sunday of Easter 2024 (Sunday of Divine Mercy)
This is the Sunday of Divine Mercy, but isn’t every Sunday a celebration of the mercy of God? Our psalm today cries out “His mercy endures forever.” God’s mercy, which in Hebrew reads as hesed, is everlasting. In fact, this statement, that God’s mercy is everlasting or endures forever, occurs over forty times in the OT. A whole psalm, number 136, is devoted to recounting all the historical times God showed His mercy to the people of Israel, in His creation, His liberation from Egyptian slavery, His leading them into the land of promise. God shows just how profound that mercy, that divine love is, especially by sending His only begotten Son, Jesus, to live and die as atonement for our many sins. He consummated that act of love by raising Jesus from the dead and enabling us to die with Him through baptism and our faith, so that we, too, can live forever and look forward to our own resurrection with all the saints into the eternal fiesta in God’s presence and embrace.
Of course, the Scripture that attract our attention most easily today is St. John’s description of the appearance of the risen Christ to His apostles, His giving of the Holy Spirit, and His deputizing them to forgive or retain sins. We needn’t fear our sins being retained, of course, unless we are unwilling to let go of them ourselves, to repent of them and sincerely desire never to commit them in the future. That is divine mercy applied right here and now in the Church.
What we are tempted to dwell on is the Thomas of doubt. He didn’t see Jesus on the night of His Resurrection, so Jesus came back a week later to let Thomas physically experience His real presence in the Church. Caravaggio’s painting draws us into the scene. Jesus in His glory is shown as the brightest image on the page. He physically pulls Thomas’ finger into the wound made by the centurion’s lance, while Thomas and two other apostles stare at the reality in amazement. But St. John’s Gospel is not aimed at them, but at you and me. We are specially blessed because we have heard and believed the Word without having to see or touch.
But the words I’d like us to meditate on today are also focused on ourselves. “Every one who believes that Jesus is the Christ is a child of God, and every one who loves the parent loves the child. By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and obey his commandments.” We might tend to say, “Sure, I love God and believe Jesus is His only-begotten Son, so of course I love Jesus.” But that cannot, must not, be the end. Action is the means whereby we show that we love. We love God and because of that we obey His commandments, so we are bound to love the children of God by obeying His commandments.
Sinning means disobeying God’s commandments, which are two-thirds focused on God’s children. That means honoring our parents and all legitimate authority, like by voting with our consciences turned on. That means not harming another unjustly, and only utilizing our sexual faculties within natural marriage, and not stealing or lying or coveting. It means loving our fellow humans as we love ourselves. And, as Jesus showed, it means even being willing to lay down our lives in love for them. But if we are not asked or forced to shed our blood for others, the least we are commanded to do is to forgive them any wrong they do to us.
That’s ultimately what we are bound by our faith and baptism to be and to do. We must be lovers in the image of God, and God promises us the mercy and grace we need to be that, and do that.
