Saint John Paul II and God’s Superabundant Mercy, 29th Tuesday (I), October 22, 2019

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Tuesday of the 29th Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of St. Pope John Paul II
October 22, 2019
Rom 5:12.15.17-21, Ps 40, Lk 12:35-38

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Eight days into this 24 day feast on St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans we have every second year, we get to an important clarification by St. Paul with regard to justification. Normally we can look at sin and forgiveness as more or less “loss and restoration,” that we squander our relationship with God and then get it back, and sometimes we think we get it back in somewhat a lesser stage, wounded. If we were to put it in monetary terms, we have a $100, we go bankrupt, and then God graciously restores us, but because of our wounds we really now only have $90. But St. Paul stresses something different today. He describes that God’s response to our sin will far surpass the depth of that sin, and not only our sin but the sins of the whole world. St. Paul stresses this superabundance: “If by that one person’s transgression the many died, how much more did the grace of God and the gracious gift of the one man Jesus Christ overflow for the many.” “For if, by the transgression of the one, death came to reign through that one, how much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the gift of justification come to reign in life through the one Jesus Christ.” “Where sin increased, grace overflowed all the more, so that, as sin reigned in death, grace also might reign through justification for eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.” We can’t focus on that “how much more” enough if we’re really going to understand how God responds to us. Jesus alludes to this very clearly in the Parable of the Prodigal Son. The younger son who never really got the Father’s love (just like the older son didn’t either) when he realizes he hit rock bottom and remembers that even the slaves in his father’s household were treated well wants to come back and be treated like a slave (it’s the “lesser,” the “90” I mention above). But then the Father not only treats him as a beloved son by investing him with sandals that slaves never had but gives him things that far surpass what he had before: he puts a signet ring on his finger signifying he had power of attorney and trust, he kills the fattened calf for him (making the other brother jealous) and covered his pig-dung-infested clothes with the finest robe he had. This is a sign of his superabundance!
• At the Easter Vigil we sing of this “how much more” with words that at first glance might seem to border even on blasphemy. The deacon or priest-deacon, in the Easter Proclamation that could be called in a sense “The Gospel of Easter” or simply the Easter Kerygma, chants, “O happy Fault, that earned so great, so glorious a Redeemer!” The theology behind calling any sin — Adam’s or ours — blessed is described in the prayer said at the Easter Vigil, on Christmas Day, and during the Offertory of the Mass when a drop of water is added to wine when we pray, “O God, who wonderfully created human nature and still more wonderfully redeemed it.” Human nature, created wonderfully by God, is left in an even more marvelous state after sin because of Christ’s work of redemption. The phrase, “O Felix Culpa,” “O Happy Fault,” is normally attributed to St. Augustine, but it’s not a direct quotation but a paraphrase. The converted saintly bishop of Hippo actually said, “For God judged it better to bring good out of evil than not to permit any evil to exist.” And it’s likely that he was influenced not only by his experience of the multitude of happy sins of his youth that eventually brought him such a great Redeemer and led him to write about it in his famous Confessions, but by the preaching of the saintly bishop who had helped bring him to conversion in Milan. St. Ambrose would often from different angles stress this theme, something that may have helped St. Augustine realize that God wanted to transform the manure of his past into fertilizer for new growth. “The Lord knew that Adam would fall and then be redeemed by Christ,” St. Ambrose declared. “Happy ruin, which has such a beautiful reparation!” (Commentary on Psalm 39, 20). Elsewhere he said, “We who have sinned more have gained more, because your grace [of mercy, Lord] makes us more blessed than our absence of fault does” (Commentary on Ps 37, 47). And in one of the Prefaces of the Ambrosian Liturgical rite, the priest sings to God, “You bent down over our wounds and healed us, giving us a medicine stronger than our afflictions, a mercy greater than our fault. In this way even sin, by virtue of your invincible love, served to elevate us to the divine life” (Sunday XVI per annum). So strong is this line of thought penetrating the Exultet, that later we sing, “Our birth would have been no gain had we not been redeemed.” Were it not for Christ’s redemption, it would have been better for us never to have been born, just as it was for Judas. This is what St. Paul is talking about in today’s first reading, and this should give us hope. We’re living in a day in which sin abounds and therefore the death to which sin leads is all around us. But St. Paul tells us that it’s precisely at this time where God’s grace and life overflows all the more.
• In the Gospel today, we see not just this superabundant response of God but also how to receive it. In the Gospel, Jesus, speaking about his second coming but also about the way we’re supposed to await and receive him each day, says that if he finds us with loins girt and lamps lit, he will proceed to seat us at table and wait on us. The Master waits on the servant, the Creator humbles himself in love before his creature. This is what he did during the Last Supper and something he promises to do at the Eternal Wedding banquet. His response is so much greater than our receptivity! But he calls us to two things. First, to have our lamps lit like prudent virgins for his coming (Mt 25:1-13). We’re called to pray, to await him, to long for him, even in the second or third watch of the night. Second, he wants our loins girt, our tunics — or cassocks, albs or habits in other words — tucked into our belts as we would to work or to run. This is an indication that he wants to find us working in his vineyard and journeying to spread the faith and help others to await him and collaborate with him with lamps lit and loins girt.
• Today the Church celebrates the Memorial of Pope St. John Paul II. He was a Pope whose entire life and papacy were framed within the context of God’s superabundant mercy, how much more the grace of God and the gracious gift of Jesus Christ overflow for the many. In 1981, he said, “Right from the beginning of my ministry in St. Peter’s See in Rome, I consider this message [of Divine Mercy] my special task.” In 1997, he added, “The Message of Divine Mercy has always been near and dear to me. … [and] in a sense forms the image of this Pontificate.” In August 1992, St. John Paul II solemnly entrusted the world to Divine Mercy “with the burning desire that the message of God’s merciful love … be made known to all peoples of the earth.” He would declare in 1997, “There is nothing that man needs more than Divine mercy.” In his second encyclical, “God is Rich in Mercy,” he would write, “The Church must bear witness to the mercy of God revealed in Christ … seeking to introduce it and to make it incarnate in the lives both of her faithful and as far as possible in the lives of all people of good will … [and] to call upon the mercy of God, imploring it in the face of all the manifestations of physical and moral evil.” He focused in that encyclical on how God is so much richer in mercy than we impoverish ourselves through sin. He wrote there, “Christ reveals God as ‘rich in mercy.’ … This truth is not just the subject of a teaching; it is reality made present to us by Christ. Making the Father present as love and mercy is, in Christ’s own consciousness, the fundamental touchstone of his mission as the Messiah.” And it’s what he summoned us to carry out, with lamps lit and loins girt. “Christ, in revealing the love-mercy of God, at the same time demanded from people that they also should be guided in their lives by love and mercy. This requirement forms part of the very essence of the messianic message and constitutes the heart of the gospel ethos. The Teacher expressed this both through the medium of the commandment which he describes as ‘the greatest,’ and also in the form of a blessing, when in the Sermon on the Mount he proclaims: ‘Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.’ … Christ’s messianic program, the program of mercy, becomes the program of his people, the program of the church. … Is not this the position of Christ with regard to man when he says: ‘As you did it to one of the least of these… you did it to me?’ Do not the words of the Sermon on the Mount: ‘Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy,’  constitute, in a certain sense, a synthesis of the whole of the good news, of the whole of the “wonderful exchange” (admirabile commercium) contained therein? … The church must consider it one of her principal duties–at every stage of history and especially in our modern age–to proclaim and to introduce into life the mystery of mercy, supremely revealed in Jesus Christ.” That’s what he sought to do throughout his 26 years and 7 months as the earthly vicar of Mercy Incarnate, ultimately seeking to help the whole Church turn from sinners to saints. That’s what today on his feast he inspires us to receive and give. God who is rich in mercy, by his superabundant grace, seeks to make us rich in mercy so that with his mercy we might enrich the world.
• Today we have come here with lamps lit and loins girt and the Lord is going to have us here around his table where not only will he serve us but feed us with himself. The whole rest of the day is an opportunity to allow the superabundant gift of God we receive here to overflow, heading out to do his work and announce his Gospel of superabundant mercy with the zeal with which St. John Paul II announced and enfleshed it and which Christ wills us to emulate.

The readings for today’s Mass were: