Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for Divine Mercy Sunday, C, Vigil
April 23, 2022
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 this Sunday. 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. That’s why since 2000, this Sunday, the exclamation point of the Easter Octave, is called Divine Mercy Sunday, and is meant to help us focus on and enter far more deeply into that great mystery and gift.
- It’s a gift ever actual. I’m not sure whether you’ve had a chance to see Mark Wahlberg’s new movie called Father Stu, which focuses on the inspiring true story of Father Stuart Long, a priest of the Diocese of Helena, Montana, who died in 2014 of the debilitating disease after only six-and-a-half years as a priest. He is an extraordinary icon and ambassador of Divine Mercy. He was the son of nominally Protestant parents, a football player, wrestler, Golden gloves championship boxer, and English major, who ended up moving to Hollywood in search of movie stardom, only to work as a bartender, bouncer and security guard. This fun-loving, strong, self-confident, kind big boy had his life upended in a life-threatening motorcycle accident at the age of 30. When he recovered, he was convinced that his life had been saved for a reason. He started to search for that reason. A desire to wed his live-in girlfriend, Cindy, who would only marry in the Catholic Church, led him to enroll in classes to become a Catholic. As he was being baptized at the Easter Vigil in 1994, he felt God calling him to become a priest. He acted on that call, eventually entered seminary and was ordained a transitional deacon a dozen years later at 42. Around that time, he started to experience various physical difficulties, which were eventually diagnosed as inclusion body myositis, a progressive disease that eventually takes away one’s control over one’s muscles such that one is practically paralyzed and even can lose the ability to breathe. Bishop George Thomas of Helena, however, after much prayer decided to ordain him a priest anyway, convinced in prayer that the Lord wanted Stu to be an icon of Christ, the Suffering Servant, and show the redemptive power of Christian suffering. Fr. Stu’s unlikely calling manifests the power of God’s mercy in calling sinners to become ambassadors of his mercy. In the movie, when he’s being interviewed for the seminary, the future Father Stu mentions God’s calling Saints Paul, Augustine and Francis of Assisi to prove that sometimes God’s most effective ambassadors of mercy are those whose being and history exude it. He preaches three times in the movie, in a talk at a prison, in a reflection as a seminarian at Mass, and at his ordination, and each time describes that God in his mercy cares for us all. And after he enters the nursing home, where he spent the last three years of his his priesthood, we see how his principal ministry was anointing the sick and hearing the confessions of his fellow residents, staff and people from all over greater Helena, who, at 8:30 each morning, would start to form a long line stretching even outside the front door. They found in Father Stu someone whom they knew could understand their moral failings as well as someone who could give encouragement, advice and surgical penances to overcome them in cooperation with God’s grace. His whole life became a testimony to God’s mercy and now, thanks to the new movie, his story will be known far beyond Montana.
- The mercy of God is supposed to have just as powerful an impact in our life as it did in Stuart Long’s. We’re called to recognize our need for it, come to receive it, conform our life to it and, according to our state in life, share it. As we’ll hear in this Sunday’s Gospel, Jesus, on Easter Sunday evening, walked through the closed doors of the Upper Room where the apostles were huddling together out of fear and said to them, twice, “Peace be with you!” Jesus had come down from heaven to earth and given his life to give us a special kind of peace, one the world can’t give or take away. 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. And so the Risen 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 others. 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 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 the beautiful words of absolution 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 declared, “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 prepared words of repentance, the Father erupts with happiness, saying, “My son was dead and has 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 through sin 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 love 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. In Jesus’ words to St. Faustina, he asked her as his “secretary” to write down five ways by which he wanted us to grow in our appreciation of, and transformation through, Divine Mercy: to stop each day at 3 pm, when Christ breathed his last on Calvary, to implore his mercy and bring him our prayers; to venerate him in the image of Divine Mercy, by which he, risen from the dead, blesses us and asks us to trust in him; to pray 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; to pray a novena, starting from Good Friday, in which we bring to Jesus various groups of people in need of his mercy; and finally to celebrate Divine Mercy Sunday, when we punctuate the end of the Easter Octave by pondering Jesus’ establishing the Sacrament of his Mercy on Easter night so that we could enter into his resurrection. 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.
- As you listen to these words, I will be in Rome to celebrate Divine Mercy Sunday with Pope Francis, together with my fellow papally-appointed Missionaries of Mercy from across the globe. Pope Francis has sought throughout his papacy to make God’s mercy real. He’s reminded us many times that God never tires of forgiving us and begs us never to tire of receiving what God never tires to give. He’s also emphasized how God’s greatest joy is forgiving, because, as Jesus taught us, heaven rejoices more over one repentant sinner than over 99 righteous people who never needed to repent. Our receiving God’s mercy not only fills us with joy but fills heaven.
- As we prepare this Sunday to offer to the Eternal Father his Son’s Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity in atonement for our sins and those of the whole world — as we prepare, in other words, to unite ourselves to Jesus’ prayer on Holy Thursday, Good Friday, Easter Sunday — we thank him for his mercy that endures forever and ask for his mercy on us and on the whole world.
The Gospel on which this 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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