Sunday, April 15, 2012

give me mercy

Homily
Divine Mercy Sunday
15 April 2012
St. Lawrence Catholic Campus Center at the University of Kansas
Daily Readings


Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good, his mercy endures forever!

It was about a year ago that John Paul II was beatified on this Sunday's Feast of Divine Mercy.  Many recall in 2005 Blessed John Paul died on the eve of this newly named solemnity, the last day in the octave of Easter.  It was as if his last witness was to allow us through his weakness to see his great confidence in God's mercy.  He allowed millions to keep vigil with him, and to contemplate the Holy Father's wounds at his moment of greatest vulnerability, the hours before his death.

By 2030, not that far away, it is projected that there will be as many agnostics as Catholics in the United States.  Not that the Church won't grow in number during that time as well, but agnostics will also grow, exponentially faster as a percentage of the population, unless something happens.  There are many who will ignore or even disdain the great truth of the resurrection of Jesus that has been passed down so carefully and courageously by our Church through the centuries.  When I hear again each year the story of doubting Thomas, my first reaction is to use this apostle as an example of the rampant skepticism and individualism that plagues modern man, and to wonder if any vigorous apologetic for the truth of the Resurrection will ever be enough for modern man, and turn the tide back in our favor.

Yet John Paul II forever took this 2nd Sunday of Easter in a different direction than I would have taken it.  John Paul II did not see the truth of the Resurrection as something that must merely be vigorously defended, but more importantly, as a truth that captures man and must be surrendered to.  For we never see our Lord get defensive, but always we see him responding to doubt with greater faith in man, and to sin with greater mercy.  Knowing that there would be no end to man's ability to doubt the truth of the resurrection, John Paul fought back not just with better arguments, but with a greater witness of how one surrenders to the truth of divine mercy as the greatest power at work in the world, a power even stronger than sin and death.  John Paul II witnessed to a mercy that is not so easily doubted because it goes beyond human logic and control.  John Paul II knew that faith in the resurrection could only grow in an age of skepticism if man is capable of surrendering to a mercy that is his origin, his constant calling, and his perfection in heaven.

Faith in the resurrection then, often limps because people at their core do not believe God loves them.  Archbishop Emeritus Keleher told us priests over and over and over never to stop telling people that God loves them, because for most, it will be the one thing they doubt the most and the longest.  John Paul II has done as much by naming this second Sunday of Easter Divine Mercy Sunday, and telling us that mercy is the  key to the Easter proclamation.

So my friends, we need to move beyond the poverty of calculating the minimum amount of God's mercy that we need to bail us out of jail and to squeak into heaven.  This kind of thinking is why Catholics love Lent and are lost during Easter.  We think of Lent as work and Easter as vacation, when in reality Lent is merely a warm-up for the great work of Easter, when oceans of mercy are unleashed through the Paschal mystery upon the world for its redemption, and you and I are sent personally by Jesus to be witnesses that our wounds too have been healed by the grace of the Resurrection, and to allow ourselves to be vulnerable before others, letting them put their fingers and hands into our lives that have been redeemed by Christ.

God's mercy does bail us out, for sure, but rather than minimizing the effects of divine mercy, we must come to a contemplation like St. Faustina of mercy as God's deepest attribute, the best definition of who he is, and what he wanted most to reveal about himself through the gift of Jesus. St. Thomas Aquinas gives us an astonishing definition of mercy as that power that brings a thing out of non-being into being.  When we think of mercy then, we should never think of small things, but always of big things.  We should think of mercy not just as bailout money, but that power that is recreating everything right now and bringing it into full being from the nothingness of the cross.  We Christians must never forget that we are awash in an ocean of mercy that at every moment is conquering sin and death.

Jesus responds to our doubts about his resurrection by letting us touch his wounds, by making himself more vulnerable again and again, even daring to allow us to touch him once again in the Holy Eucharist today.  Still, he asks us to put out into the deep, and to move beyond our ability to demand more and more proof, into an ability to surrender to a truth that is bigger than us.  He invites us not to settle for a truth that we can control, but to surrender to a truth that makes us younger and our lives bigger.  He promises those to be blessed who have not seen, and still have believed.

Let us surrender today to the awesome mystery of divine mercy.  Agnostics like to scoff sometimes at belief in a Father who would allow his Son to be tortured.  Yet what kind of a project is it to disbelieve God only because we cannot reduce him to our own expectations and judgments?  If the only mercy we had recourse to is one that met a standard we could agree upon from below, how could we ever hope for a life that flows from that mercy that is more than eye has seen, or ear has heard, or has so much as dawned upon the mind of man, the life prepared by God for those who love him.  Let us instead praise God with full hearts and minds on this Easter day, for surpassing out understanding and expectations, so that we are never doomed to worshipping ourselves, or hoping only in ourselves.

This Solemnity of Divine Mercy belongs perpetually now to the Easter proclamation of the Church.  Let us pray to know this divine mercy, and its power to recreate the world, as John Paul II knew it.  Let us celebrate the holiness of our late Holy Father, and ask him to pray for us who have recourse to him.

Give thanks to the Lord for he is good!  His mercy endures forever!  Amen

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