Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for Divine Mercy Sunday (B), Vigil
April 10, 2021
To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below:
The following text guided the homily:
- This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us. It’s a dialogue that happened on the night Jesus triumphantly rose from the dead. It’s a colloquy that reveals Jesus’ true priorities, why he entered the world, why he suffered, died and rose. He did it all to impart Divine Mercy. And as we prepare to celebrate Divine Mercy Sunday, the exclamation point of the Easter Octave, let us enter much more into that great mystery and gift.
- On Easter Sunday evening, Jesus walked through the closed doors of the Upper Room where the apostles were huddling together out of fear and said to them, “Shalom!,” “Peace be with you!” Jesus had come down from heaven to earth and given 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. The peace Jesus leaves and gives us is not the mere absence of war or conflict, but a definitive peace treaty 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 peace plan in motion, on the night he rose from the dead 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 so that we can understand better the divine foundation of the Sacrament of his Mercy and better explain it to those who have been poorly catechized about the Sacrament or who claim that they can 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 we know that God alone 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 … sent the Holy Spirit among us 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 the two 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 erupts with happiness, that his son was dead and had been brought to life again.This Parable, which is about what happens in the Sacrament of Penance, points to the truth that every reconciliation is a 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 fitting that the Easter Octave concludes with Divine Mercy Sunday. In the great Jubilee of the Redemption, in the year 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 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.
- We don’t have time to cover this devotion, approved by the Church, in depth, but it features five elements that Christ revealed to Saint Faustina so that we would be able to grow in our appreciation of, and transformation through, Divine Mercy: stopping each day at 3 pm, when Christ breathed his last on Calvary, to implore his mercy and bring him our prayers; venerating him in the image of Divine Mercy, by which he, risen from the dead, blesses us and asks us to trust in him; praying the Chaplet of Divine Mercy, offering God the Father Jesus in the Eucharist and begging him, on account of his Son’s passion, for mercy on the whole world; praying a novena, starting from Good Friday, in which we bring to Jesus various groups of people in need of his mercy; and finally Divine Mercy Sunday, when we celebrate the end of the Easter Octave and ponder in the Gospel Jesus’ establishment of the Sacrament of his Mercy on Easter evening. Each of these five nourishes our gratitude for Divine Mercy, deepens our recognition of the need for it, spurs us to come to receive it, and helps us to learn how to share it, passing on to others the richness of mercy we have first received.
- Please permit me a personal word about God’s mercy. This past Wednesday, the best confessor I ever had and knew, Fr. Joseph Henchey, a priest of the Congregation of the Sacred Stigmata, died at the age of 91 in Chicago. He was a tremendous priest, someone Cardinal Timothy Dolan and Bishop Robert Barron have both called one of their great spiritual heroes. He was a great theologian, having taught at the Angelicum in Rome for many years, and a much sought after retreat master for priests, religious, seminarians and lay people. But his real genius was as a spiritual director and a confessor. When he was at the North American College in Rome, he would open his door at 4 am for seminarians who wanted to see him for some quick words of encouragement or for confession. He became so popular that they ended up building a confessional in the chapel where he would hear. But I remember once going to him to confess. I don’t remember what sins I had, but I was very sorrowful for them and that sorrow came forth. Fr. Henchey’s reply I’ve never forgotten: “We give thanks to God for the graces God has given you to make such a good confession. This whole experience of God’s loving mercy for you will help make you a good and merciful confessor. Let God make these sins happy faults that help you help others rejoice in so great a Redeemer.” That experience of the joy of being forgiven, of God’s wanting to bring good even out of the evil we commit, I’ve never forgotten, and I have always tried to hear others’ confessions as Father Henchey heard mine. Please entrust him with me to our Merciful Redeemer, that the measure with which Father Henchey measured out God’s mercy will be measured back to him.
- This Divine Mercy Sunday is an opportunity for all of us to give God thanks for his mercy that endures forever and avail ourselves more fully of the means he has given us to implore it. God bless you!
The Gospel on which the homily was based was:
Gospel
On the evening of that first day of the week,
when the doors were locked, where the disciples were,
for fear of the Jews,
Jesus came and stood in their midst
and said to them, “Peace be with you.”
When he had said this, he showed them his hands and his side.
The disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord.
Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you.
As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”
And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them,
“Receive the Holy Spirit.
Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them,
and whose sins you retain are retained.”
Thomas, called Didymus, one of the Twelve,
was not with them when Jesus came.
So the other disciples said to him, “We have seen the Lord.”
But he said to them,
“Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands
and put my finger into the nailmarks
and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.”
Now a week later his disciples were again inside
and Thomas was with them.
Jesus came, although the doors were locked,
and stood in their midst and said, “Peace be with you.”
Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands,
and bring your hand and put it into my side,
and do not be unbelieving, but believe.”
Thomas answered and said to him, “My Lord and my God!”
Jesus said to him, “Have you come to believe because you have seen me?
Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed.”
Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples
that are not written in this book.
But these are written that you may come to believe
that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God,
and that through this belief you may have life in his name.
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