Being Transformed by the Sacrament of Resurrection, Divine Mercy Sunday, April 16, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Divine Mercy Sunday
April 16, 2023
Acts 2:42-47, Ps 118, 1 Pet 1:3-9, Jn 20:19-31

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

The following text guided today’s homily: 

• The connection between the celebration of Easter and today’s feast of Divine Mercy was apparent last Saturday night at the beginning of the Easter Vigil, when the Church throughout the world solemnly sings something that at first hearing might seem almost blasphemous. Deacons or priest-deacons, in the Easter Proclamation, chant, referring to Adam’s and Eve’s sin in the beginning, “O Felix Culpa!,” “O happy fault, that earned so great, so glorious a Redeemer!” The idea behind calling any sin — Adam’s, Eve’s or ours — blessed is normally attributed to St. Augustine, but it’s a really just a paraphrase of what St. Augustine taught. The famous convert of Hippo actually wrote, “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 sins of his youth that eventually brought him such a great Redeemer 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. In a commentary on a Psalm, he declared, “The Lord knew that Adam would fall and then be redeemed by Christ. O happy ruin, which has such a beautiful reparation!” (Commentary on Ps 39:20). Elsewhere he wrote, “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 that traces itself to him, 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). So strong is this line of thought penetrating the Exsultet, that later the Church sings at the Easter Vigil, “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 — just like Jesus had said during the Last Supper about the one who would betray him — never to have been born.
• But the roots of the shocking expression about the felix culpa of Adam and Eve — and its connection to the mystery of Christ’s resurrection — go back far before Saints Ambrose and Augustine. There are deep Scriptural foundations for this profound Easter affirmation. St. Paul told us in his letter to the Romans, “All things,” and here can we think of our sins, faults and failings, “work together for the God for those who love God, for those who are called according to his purpose.” Jesus himself would say, in the great chapter 15 of St. Luke’s Gospel, about the Lost Sheep, Lost Coin and Lost Son: “Heaven rejoices more for one repentant sinner than for 99 who never needed to repent!” And we see that truth played out in Simon the Pharisee’s house when Jesus defends the sinful woman who washed his feet with her tears and dried them with her hair. Jesus affirmed that the one who has been forgiven little loves little, but the “one who has been forgiven much, loves much.” We grow to love Jesus in correspondence to how much we’ve experienced his mercy. And the more we receive his mercy, the bigger the celestial celebration.
• That’s why today’s celebration of Divine Mercy as the culmination of the Easter Octave is so important.
• In the moving Gospel we heard a few minutes ago, we witness what Jesus did on the evening of the day he triumphantly rose from the dead. He walked through the closed doors of the Upper Room where the apostles were huddling together out of fear and said, “Shalom!,” “Peace be with you!” Jesus had come down from heaven to earth and had sacrificed his life to give us peace, but it was a special kind of peace, one the world can’t give or take away. “Not as the world gives peace do I give it,” Jesus had said during the Last Supper three nights prior. The peace Jesus leaves and gives us is not the mere absence of war or conflict, but harmony with God through the forgiveness of sins. Without this type of peace, no other form can endure, because it is sin that destroys interior peace, the peace of the home, the peace of friendship, the peace of communities, the peace of nations. And so Jesus, wasting absolutely no time to set the next stage of his salvific peace plan in motion, on the night of his resurrection, divinely empowered the apostles as his peacemakers to bring that gift, and the joy to which it leads, to the ends of the earth.
• It’s important for us to pay close attention to the various steps Jesus took in today’s Gospel so that we can understand better the divine foundation of the Sacrament of his Mercy, better advantage of it and better explain it to all those, Protestants and some Catholics alike, who believe that they can and should confess their sins to God alone without the Sacrament. Jesus began by saying to the apostles, “Just as the Father sent me, so I send you!” We know that the Father had sent Jesus as the Lamb of God to take away the sins of the world and Jesus was sending his apostles to continue that saving mission of mercy. Since only God can forgive sins against Him (see Mk 2:7), however, Jesus needed to impart to the apostles that divine power. So he breathed on them as he said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” He gave them God the Holy Spirit so that they might forgive sins in God’s name, just as we hear every time the priest pronounces those beautiful words in the Sacrament of Penance, “God, the Father of Mercies, through the death and resurrection of his Son, has … poured out the Holy Spirit for the forgiveness of sins.” And then Jesus did something that refers to the essential structure of the Sacrament of Reconciliation. He said, “Those whose sins you forgive, they are forgiven; those whose sins you retain, they are retained.” Since Jesus didn’t give the apostles the capacity to read hearts and souls, the only way they — and their successors and their priestly collaborators — would be able to know which sins to forgive or to retain would be if people told them. And that’s what happens in the Sacrament of Confession.
• It’s so fitting that Jesus established this Sacrament of his Mercy on Easter Sunday Evening because he wanted to link the joy of his resurrection to the joy of forgiveness. He had pointed to the connection between mercy and Easter when he gave us the unforgettable Parable of the Prodigal Son. When the lost son returns to the Father to give his rehearsed speech of repentance, the Father interrupts him and erupts with happiness. He covers his son with the finest robe, adorns him with a ring and sandals, and kills the fattened calf. When the jealous older son asked why his dad was pulling out all the stops at the return of his brother, the Father replied, “We must celebrate with joy, because your brother was dead and has come to life again!” This Parable, which is about what happens in the Sacrament of Penance when we come back and say to our Father that we have sinned and he restores us to the full dignity as his beloved sons and daughters, points to the truth that every reconciliation is a resurrection! Pope Francis has called confession “the sacrament of resurrection.” In every good confession, a son or daughter who was dead comes to life again, healed of sins both mortal and venial, and made fully alive once more in Christ Jesus!
• That’s why it’s so appropriate, as we conclude the Easter Octave, to celebrate Divine Mercy Sunday. In 2000, St. John Paul II established this feast for the Sunday after Easter so that all of us could thank God for the gift of his merciful that led him to stop at nothing in order to save us from our sins and from the eternal death to which our sins lead. John Paul announced the establishment of this Feast during the canonization Mass of St. Faustina Kowalska, the humble Polish sister to whom in a series of profound mystical experiences during the 1930s, Jesus had revealed the depths of his merciful love for the human race and his desire for all people to recognize our need for his mercy, trust in it, come to receive it, and share it with others. One of the requests St. Faustina described in her Diary that Jesus made of her was about this Feast. She wrote, “The Lord said, ‘I want… the first Sunday after Easter … to be the Feast of Mercy. I desire that the Feast of Mercy be a refuge and a shelter for all souls, and especially for poor sinners. On that day, the very depths of my tender mercy are open. I pour out a whole ocean of graces upon those souls who approach the fount of my mercy. The soul that will go to Confession and receive Holy Communion shall obtain complete forgiveness of sins and punishment. On that day are open all the divine floodgates through which graces flow.”
• I will never forget, during St. John Paul’s homily at St. Faustina’s canonization, at which I was fortunate to be present as a newly ordained priest, when the Pope said, “It is important then that we accept the whole message [of God’s merciful love] that comes to us from the word of God on this Second Sunday of Easter, which from now on throughout the Church will be called ‘Divine Mercy Sunday.… By this act I intend today to pass this message on to the new millennium.’” I knew that from that point forward, I was being summoned, as all priests were, to be a particular herald of that message, something that has been made as a special task for me when Pope Francis appointed me in 2015 a Missionary of Mercy with his own faculties in the Sacrament of Confession. I rejoiced that I would have the opportunity, returning to parish work in Massachusetts, to bring this message and to celebrate Divine Mercy Sunday joyfully each year as the culmination of the Easter octave. I rejoice to be able to celebrate it with you today.
• What’s the Divine Mercy devotion all about? It’s about doing for Jesus’ love for us in the Sacrament of Confession something similar to what Eucharistic adoration has done for Jesus’ love for us in the Sacrament of the Eucharist. It wasn’t enough for Jesus that we merely know or even to intellectually to the reality that he is really and substantially present Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity in the Eucharist. Jesus himself came into the world, and through appearances to mystics and Eucharistic miracles, made clear his will that he wanted us to celebrate that gift with the Solemnity of Corpus Christ, with Eucharistic adoration, Holy Hours, processions with Him in the streets, like we’ll do next Sunday, and more. Similarly, it’s not enough for us to know and assent intellectually that Jesus has the power to forgive us our sins and does so through the Sacrament of Penance. He wants us to express our love and appreciation for it, because then, like with Eucharistic adoration, we will be better able to receive the infinite graces he wishes to give us through it.
• Just as there is a crisis of faith in the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist for which the U.S. Bishops have begun a three-year Eucharistic Revival, so there is a crisis of faith in Jesus working through the Sacrament of his Mercy. Many people have lost an appreciation of the importance of God’s mercy because they don’t think they need it. There’s an eclipse of conscience and a loss of the sense of sin that Pope Pius XII once said was the worst sin of the twentieth century. Saint John Paul II commented that secularism — living as if God does not exist — eventually leads us to seek to eliminate all vestiges of God from our daily life. We reduce sin from what offends God to what offends man, something we see everywhere today in a hyper-offended age. We deny or relativize moral norms we don’t like. Rather than take responsibility for our free actions, we blame our failings on our upbringing, on society, on others or on the devil. Many are tempted, John Paul wrote, “to replace exaggerated attitudes of the past with other exaggerations: from seeing sin everywhere they pass to not recognizing it anywhere; from too much emphasis on the fear of eternal punishment they pass to preaching a love of God that excludes any punishment deserved by sin; from severity in trying to correct erroneous consciences, they pass to a kind of respect for conscience that excludes the duty of telling the truth.” The world wants various sins to be canonized, not confessed and absolved. But the Lamb of God came into the world to take away sin, not to hallow it. As Jesus revealed in the Gospel, only sinners need a Savior, only the sick need a physician (Mk 2:17). The only way we will appreciate the depth of the Lord’s merciful love is to grasp, as we prayerfully, humbly and forthrightly confess at the beginning of each Mass, that “I have greatly sinned … through my own most grievous fault.” Jesus wants to help us grow in love of him loving us in this way. The Divine Mercy Devotion does just this: it helps us to recognize our and the whole world’s need for his mercy, to ask for it, to receive it deeply, and to pay it forward.
• When Jesus appeared to St. Faustina beginning in 1931, he didn’t teach us anything new about his merciful love that he had not taught us in the Gospel, but he revealed to us five practices by which we could deepen our gratitude for, and receptivity, to his Divine Mercy.
  • The first is Divine Mercy Sunday, which we’re celebrating today for the 23rd time.
  • The second is a novena to prepare for Divine Mercy Sunday, beginning Good Friday and concluding yesterday, in which Jesus asked us to bring to him each day a different group in need of his mercy.
  • The third is to pray to him through the image of Divine Mercy. As we see in today’s Gospel, St. Thomas was invited by Christ to touch his wounds and put his hand into Christ’s side from which flowed Blood and Water as a sign of his merciful love. Christ wants us to put our hands and immerse our whole being into his mercy. He told St. Faustina that he desired an image to be made in which the power of his wounds would be prominent. She wrote in her Diary: “One night when I was in my cell, I perceived the presence of the Lord Jesus dressed in a white tunic. One hand was raised in blessing, the other rested on his chest. From an opening in the tunic in the chest, two great rays were coming out, one red and the other clear… After some time, Jesus said to me, ‘Paint an image in accordance with what you see, with the inscription, “Jesus, I trust in you.”’” A little later, Our Lord explained to her the meaning of the two rays: “The two rays represent the Blood and the Water. The white ray represents the Water [baptism] that justifies souls; the red ray represents the Blood that is the life of souls [the Eucharist]. Both rays flow from the depths of my Mercy when, on the Cross, my Heart in agony was opened by the lance.” We come to Jesus in this image in order to bathe in the Living Water and Precious Blood that brings us to salvation, that brings us to the joy of Easter.
  • The fourth is to pray the Chaplet of Divine Mercy. This is something people can pray Rosary beads. St. Faustina heard an interior voice that taught her this prayer. On the larger beads of the Rosary, one says, “Eternal Father, I offer you the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of your dearly beloved Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, in atonement for our sins and for those of the whole world.” On the ten smaller beads, we pray, “For the sake of his sorrowful passion, have mercy on us and on the whole world.” You pray five “decades” in this way, after which, one prays three times the “Holy, Holy, Holy” from the Good Friday reproaches, “Holy God, Holy Mighty One, Holy Immortal One,” “have mercy on us and on the whole world.” What we’re doing in this beautiful prayer is making Christ’s prayer from Holy Thursday and Good Friday, in fact, Christ’s whole being, our own prayer. Jesus promised, “It pleases me to grant everything they ask of me by saying the chaplet… if it be compatible with my Will.” Jesus specifically asked priests — and I’m obeying him right now — to “recommend it to sinners as their last hope of salvation. Even if there were a sinner most hardened, if he were to recite this chaplet only once [with an attitude of trust, humility and sorrow for sin], he would receive grace from my infinite mercy.”
  • The last and perhaps most important of all is to stop whatever we’re doing and to pray particularly at three in the afternoon, the time at which he died on the Cross, invoking the Mercy of the Lord. Jesus told St. Faustina, “At three in the afternoon, implore my Mercy, especially for sinners, or at least briefly reflect on my Passion, especially on the abandonment I felt at the moment of agony. This is the hour of great Mercy for the whole world. … In that hour, I will deny nothing to the soul that asks me in the name of my Passion,” provided that we direct the prayer to him at 3 pm invoking the merits of his passion. It can be as simple as, “Jesus by the merits of your passion, have mercy on us and all the whole world,” or even, “Kyrie, eleison!”
• I would urge you to take up these five means in order to grow in your knowledge and love of Christ, to advance in your fruitful participation in the “sacrament of resurrection,” and to become merciful like he and the Father are merciful.
• Today, on Divine Mercy Sunday, we rejoice that three of our members will receive special outpourings of God’s merciful love. James Muse will become a Catholic today, professing faith with us in all that the Church teaches, making his first Confession, first Communion, and Confirmation. Because every Sacrament is built on the Sacrament of Baptism and no proof can be found that he was for certain baptized in the name of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, I will also conditionally baptize him in the living water that is meant to well up within each child of God to eternal life. Similarly on this day in which Jesus breathed on the apostles and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit,” we rejoice that he, together with Karina Magnus and Costanza Crivelli, will be sealed with the gift of the Holy Spirit in the Sacrament of Confirmation, having each prepared for it by being bathed in the Sacrament of Reconciliation and Resurrection earlier during the Divine Mercy Holy Hour. The Lord’s lavish love for them today is a sign of how he wishes to bless us with his Mercy and then with his Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity, so that we may more effectively with him Risen from the Dead. mercy. It’s through receiving his Divine Mercy in the Sacrament he established on Easter night lavishly to dispense it, that
• As we, in this Mass, offer the Eternal Father in heaven Jesus’ body, blood, soul and divinity, we ask God Father, who is Rich in Mercy, to grant us the courage never to tire of receiving what He never tires to give and to come to receive regularly that gift of his love through the hands of those same priests through whom he gives us each day his Son’s body and blood. Even though our sins may be like scarlet, the prophet tells us, they can become white, and even happy faults that deepen our bond with so great a Redeemer! And as we prepare in just a few minutes to behold the “Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world,” we ask the Holy Spirit to help us cry out with all our mind, heart, soul and strength what we see indelibly written at the bottom of the Image of Divine Mercy: “Jesus, I trust in you!”

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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