Becoming Merciful Like Our Great and Awesome God, Monday of the Second Week of Lent, February 26, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Monday of the Second Week of Lent
February 26, 2024
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 several 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,” and we need the ability to judge ourselves to be sinners in need of God’s mercy. We have to say, “I accuse myself!” We have 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 often 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.” 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 toward others who need it, too. 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: we, too, are sinners responsible for Christ’s crucifixion through our sins just as much as others have.
• While judging ourselves instead of others is the first step, however, 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 witness 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 in the first person plural. He was praying for his sins and everyone’s, because those sins 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, including himself among the sinners, for all the sins committed. He didn’t lose hope, however, 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, “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. 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, chaplaincy, 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. We expand our capacity to receive God’s mercy by sharing that mercy with others. God gives us plenty of opportunities to practice that every day. One of the greatest forms of almsgiving is to give others a second, third, or seventy-times-seventh chance.
• 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 big him to have his mercy packed down and poured into our lap to overflowing so that we may measure that mercy out in prayer and charity and eternally have that mercy fully measured back to us.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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