Divine Mercy Sunday, Conversations with Consequences Podcast, April 15, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Divine Mercy Sunday, Vigil
April 15, 2023

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 at the end of the Easter Octave 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. That’s why since 2001, 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.
• Late in his pontificate, St. John Paul II, who established Divine Mercy Sunday, was asked what was the greatest problem facing the world. He didn’t say the threat of nuclear mutually-assured destruction, global warming, endemic poverty, terrorism, scandals in the Church, or the impact of particular sins that continuously cry out to heaven — even though he took all of those problems seriously. To the surprise of most, he said that the greatest problem was “unexpiated guilt.” He recognized that after two World Wars and the Cold War, the Holocaust, the genocides in Armenia, the Ukraine, Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur, after so many atrocities from tyrannical governments, after the waterfalls of blood flowing from more than two billion abortions worldwide, after the sins that have destroyed so many families, after so much physical and sexual abuse, after lengthy crime logs in newspapers every day, after the scourge of terrorism, after so much hurt and pain, the terrible weight of collective guilt crushes not only individuals but burdens structures and whole societies. This is only growing as we witness atrocities in Ukraine, in northern Nigeria, in Yemen, in China, in Louisville, Nashville, Hialeah, Half Moon Bay, Monterey Park, Uvalde and the list goes on. The modern world is like one big Lady Macbeth, compulsively washing our hands to remove the blood from them, but there is no earthly detergent powerful enough to take the blemishes away. We can converse with psychiatrists and psychologists, but their words and prescriptions can only help us deal with our guilt, not eliminate it. We can confess our sins to bartenders, but they can only dispense Absolut vodka, not absolution, and inebriation never brings expiation. We can escape reality through distractions and addictions — drugs, sports, entertainment, materialism, food, power, lust, and others — but none can adequately anaesthetize the pain in our soul from the suffering we’ve caused, endured or witnessed. Whether we admit it, whether we realize it, the whole world is longing for redemption, forgiveness, reconciliation, and a restoration of goodness. We’re yearning for a second, third or seventy-times-seventh chance. We’re pining for a giant reset button for ourselves and for the world. And if we can’t have that personal and collective do over, then at least we ache for liberation from the past and, like the diminutive tax-collector Zacchaeus in the Gospel or Charles Dickens’ Ebenezer Scrooge, for a chance make up for has been done. We want, need and pant for atonement. And in response to that perpetual, urgent and ever new need, God responds with his mercy. Where sin abounds, grace superabounds. And so St. John Paul II emphasized, and Pope Francis has continued to emphasize, that we are now living in a “kairosof mercy,” from the Greek word that means “favorable time or occasion” for God’s forgiving love.
• That’s what we celebrate this Sunday. In the Gospel, Jesus walked through the closed doors of the Upper Room where the apostles were huddling together out of fear and he first 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 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 among nations. And so Jesus, wasting absolutely no time to set the next stage of his 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 so that we can understand better the divine foundation of the Sacrament of his Mercy and better explain it to those, like many of our Protestant brothers and sisters but also some Catholics, 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 God 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 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 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, because, he said, 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!
• 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 to save us from our sins and from the eternal death to which our sins lead. St. 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: 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, on account of his Son’s passion, begging him 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.
• Jesus wants us to enter into his mercy. At the end of this Sunday’s Gospel, we have the touching scene with St. Thomas the Apostle, who wasn’t present when Jesus first appeared in the Upper Room. When Jesus returned, he invited his doubting friend to bring his hand and put it into his side and not to go on unbelieving but believe. It’s the pierced side of Jesus from which flowed the water and blood that we see in the image of Divine Mercy, a sign, respectively, of the Sacrament of Baptism and of Jesus’ Precious Blood in the Eucharist. Jesus wanted Thomas to enter into the mystery of his divine mercy, first received in the Sacrament of Baptism that wipes away all our transgressions and reinforced in Eucharistic communion, when we received Christ’s blood poured out for the forgiveness of sins. Thomas, converted by that divine mercy shown to him by Jesus in the Upper Room, confessed him, “My Lord and my God.”
• On Divine Mercy Sunday, Jesus, our Lord and God, promised through St. Faustina that “all the divine floodgates through which graces flow” will be open and then specified two: “The soul that will go to Confession and receive Holy Communion shall obtain complete forgiveness of sins and punishment.” On this Divine Mercy Sunday during the ongoing Eucharistic Revival of the Church in the United States, it is a great time for us to recognize the intrinsic connection between the two sacramental floodgates of Confession and the Holy Eucharist and grow in gratitude, love and adoration for Jesus in both. As we offer to the Eternal Father this Sunday his dearly beloved Son’s Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity in atonement for our sins and those of the whole world, we thank him for his mercy that endures forever and ask him to pour out that much needed gift on us, on the Ukraine, on our culture, and on the whole world.

The Gospel on which the homily was based was: 

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