Becoming Like God through Receiving and Exercising Mercy, Second Monday of Lent, March 18, 2019

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Solemnity of St. Patrick, Patron of the Archdiocese of NY (observed)
Readings for Monday of the Second Week of Lent
March 18, 2019
Dan 9:4-10, Ps 79, Lk 6:36-38

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• As we’ve been pondering for the last 12 days, the whole purpose of Lent is to become like God the Father. Today Jesus begins the Gospel by encouraging and commanding us to be merciful as God the Father is merciful. God is merciful love (hesed) and he who is rich in mercy wants to help us to become not only rich through our receiving that mercy but richer still in our sharing it. But the path God chooses to help us to become rich in mercy is at first glance surprising and paradoxical. Right after Jesus tells us to be merciful like his Father, he says, “Stop judging and you will not be judged. Stop condemning and you will not be condemned. Forgive and you will be forgiven,” before proceeding to summarize everything by saying, “For the measure with which you measure will in return be measured out to you.” If we’re merciful, most people interpret the text to say, we won’t judge other people. Mercy and judging seem to be polar opposites.
• But they’re not. The key is to understand whom we should be judging, because it is precisely through judging that we open ourselves up to God’s mercy and the transformation that always accompanies that gift. Pope Francis took up this theme in his homily a few years ago in his daily homily at the St. Martha Domus in the Vatican. He said that we can only progress on our Christian journey in life if we are capable of judging ourselves first. “We are all sinners,” he said, “not in theory but in reality,” but we need the ability to judge ourselves to be sinners in need of God’s mercy. We need to say, “I accuse myself!” We need to pray, as we do at the beginning of each Mass, “I have greatly sinned … by my own … most grievous fault.” Pope Francis says that many of us spend time judging others rather than accusing ourselves. ““We are all masters, professors of self-justification: ‘No it wasn’t me, it’s not my fault.’ … We all have an alibi to explain away our shortcomings, our sins, and we are often to put on a face that says ‘I do not know,’ a face that says ‘I didn’t do it, maybe someone else did,’ an innocent face. This is no way to lead a Christian life.” He continued, “It’s easier to blame others” but something important happens when “we begin to look at the things we are capable of doing: at first we feel bad, we feel disgusted, yet this in turn gives us peace and makes us healthy.” The Pope said, “If we do not learn this first step in life, we will never, never be able to take other steps on the road of our Christian life, of our spiritual life. The first step is to judge ourselves. Without saying anything out loud. Between you and your conscience. … This is what judging yourself means, not hiding from the roots of sin that are in all of us, the many things we are capable of doing, even if we cannot see them.”
• Once we begin to judge ourselves as the sinners we are, we can open ourselves to God’s mercy because we’ll recognize how much and why we need it. C.S. Lewis once said that the two essential truths of Christianity are that we’re sinners and that Jesus has come to save us from our sins. We can’t appreciate God’s mercy unless we recognize how desperate we are for it. And once we recognize how much we need it, then we can be compassionate on others who need it to. The way we stop judging and condemning others is when we recognize that but for God’s grace we would be under the very same judgment and condemnation because we, too, are sinners who have murdered Christ through our sins just as much as others have.
• But while judging ourselves instead of others is the first step, it’s not the last. The second step is a capacity to do reparation for our sins and the sins of others. One of the greatest aspects of the Divine Mercy Devotion requested by Jesus through St. Faustina is that we beg God the Father for mercy “in expiation for our sins and those of the whole world.” We see through judging ourselves that we’re all in a similar boat and hence we pray for our sins and those of others. That’s what we see the Prophet Daniel and the Psalmist doing today. Daniel was a prophet in Babylon and was certainly not guilty of all of the sins that brought the people into exile. Yet he prayed in their name to the Lord with the first person plural. He was praying for his sins and everyone’s, because they were all contributing factors leading to the exile. He implored, “We have sinned, been wicked and done evil; we have rebelled and departed from your commandments and your laws. We have not obeyed your servants the prophets, who spoke in your name to our kings, our princes, our fathers, and all the people of the land. Justice, O Lord, is on your side — [in other words, we have no excuses!] —  we are shamefaced even to this day: we, the men of Judah, the residents of Jerusalem, and all Israel, near and far, in all the countries to which you have scattered them because of their treachery toward you. O Lord, we are shamefaced, like our kings, our princes, and our fathers, for having sinned against you. … We rebelled against you and paid no heed to your command, O Lord, our God, to live by the law you gave us through your servants the prophets.” That was a forceful collective self-accusation. He wasn’t apologizing for the sins of “others” in the third person, but for all the sins, including himself among the sinners.
• But he didn’t lose hope because of those sins. That’s why he prayed, “But yours, O Lord, our God, are compassion and forgiveness!” God’s nature is to be merciful. And it was the same sentiment that led us to cry out with the Psalmist, “Lord, do not deal with us according to our sins.” We prayed in the verses of the Psalm, “Remember not against us the iniquities of the past; may your compassion quickly come to us, for we are brought very low. Help us, O God our savior, because of the glory of your name; Deliver us and pardon our sins for your name’s sake.” Notice that there’s no sense of entitlement in this prayer. But we are asking God to forgive us because of his merciful and glorious name, he who is kind and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in love. We don’t deserve forgiveness, but God extends it nevertheless because that’s who he is.
• This judging of ourselves and praying in collective reparation are two great lessons for us to learn in Lent. We’re called sincerely to beat our breasts and come to confession, accusing ourselves, not excusing ourselves, of the ways by thought, word, deed and omission we have not lived in communion with God. And we’re called to do reparation for our and others’ sins, because there’s much to repair in our families, parish, communities, nation and world. There is so much for which we need to say, “Sorry, Lord!” and “Do not treat us as our sins deserve,” the sins of abortion, the deconstruction of the family, hardness of heart toward Christ in the disguise of immigrants and the poor, taking the Lord for granted even on the Lord’s day, the murder of so many people for various reasons, and so many other grievous sins. We begin him to bring his compassion quickly to us because we have been brought very low.
• But there’s a third step. It’s the capacity to bring that mercy to others, so that we might genuinely be merciful like God is merciful to us, so that the measure with which we measure may be greater so as to receive in turn greater mercy because of our enlarged receptivity. That’s why the saint we celebrate today is so important.
• Born in Britain, the future patron of the Archdiocese of New York — and my native Archdiocese of Boston —  St. Patrick tells us that did not have much of a life of piety until he was captured by raiders at the age of 16 and sold into slavery in Ireland. Suffering and hardship often remind us of how much we need God and his captivity was a time of great growth in faith for him. Patrick said that during the six years he tended his slave master’s herds, he prayed constantly in the daytime and prayed almost as much at night, sometimes spending all night outdoors in prayerful vigil of the dawn. One night in a dream, he heard a voice telling him to be ready for a brave effort to secure his freedom. And he trusted in the dream, like St. Joseph trusted in the Lord’s nocturnal revelations. In the morning, Patrick escaped and hustled 200 miles to a boat that he saw in the dream was about to depart. After adventures and hardship during which he was able to bring many of the ship’s crew to conversion, he arrived home. But after several days of joyous reunion with the family he loved very much, he began to be moved in prayer and in dreams to think of all those back in Ireland who had never known the Gospel. Against the wishes of his beloved family, he decided to use his newly found freedom to dedicate himself to returning to the land of his captors, to preach to them the truth that would set them free. Having received mercy from God he wanted to share it even with his captors and the others of that same land. He had no illusions about how difficult the task was that lay in front of him. He went to France to prepare for the priesthood so that he would be able to bring the greatest gift of all, the presence of the Lord in the sacraments, to his missionary land. In France, he prayed, fasted and readied himself for 20 years. Then, at the age of 43, having been consecrated bishop so that he could found churches and ordain priests, he set off with a few apostolic collaborators. Over the course of the next 30 years, he labored tenaciously for the conversion of the nation. As one of the great “Lenten” saints, he famously fasted for 40 days and 40 nights on what is now called Croagh Patrick in prayerful bodily supplication that those entrusted to him would receive the Gospel with faith. Village by village, chieftain by chieftain, he planted the seed of the Gospel. Though his life was in constant peril due to the hatred of the druids, he soldiered on, and through prayer, mortification, disputation, and miracles, his life of faith bore enormous fruit. Twelve years after his arrival, he was able to found the Church of Armagh, Ireland’s primatial see. By the time of his death in 461, the whole nation was Christian.
• He renewed trust in God’s mercy every morning when he vested by praying a prayer he wore on a patch underneath his clothes. It was a daily reminder of how to repent and believe. It’s called St. Patrick’s breastplate or in Gaelic, Lorica. It’s one of my favorite prayers. The thrust of it is to surround himself by God. “I arise today through God’s strength to pilot me: God’s might to uphold me, God’s wisdom to guide me, God’s eye to look before me, God’s ear to hear me, God’s word to speak for me, God’s hand to guard me, God’s way to lie before me, God’s shield to protect me, God’s host to save me from snares of devils, from temptations of vices, from everyone who shall wish me ill, afar and near, alone and in multitude.” That led him to be able to say, ““Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me, Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me, Christ on my right, Christ on my left, Christ when I lie down, Christ when I sit down, Christ when I arise Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me, Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks of me Christ in every eye that sees me, Christ in every ear that hears me.” He enveloped himself in God and to do so was to immerse himself in God’s merciful love.
• Today at Mass God enfleshes his Mercy in the person of his Son, whom we’re about to receive. God the Father doesn’t treat us as our sins deserve, but treats us with the love he has for his Son who gave his life in justice and mercy to save our own. Today as we receive him, we ask through the intercession of St. Patrick to have Christ as Mercy incarnate be with, before, behind, in, beneath, and above us and to be able to share that mercy with everyone who thinks of us, speaks of us and hears us.

The readings for today’s Mass were: