Divine Mercy Sunday, Conversations with Consequences Podcast, April 6, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Divine Mercy Sunday, Vigil
April 6, 2024

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 in the Gospel, as we enter into the scene of two dramatic dialogues, one that took place on the night Jesus triumphantly rose from the dead and the second a week later. Both have so much to teach us about growing in faith this Easter.
• On Easter night, 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 of nations, as we see in the mounting sins wreaking havoc in the Middle East, the Holy Land, Ukraine and various other conflicts. 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 the gift of his mercy, 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 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 only God can forgive sins against Himself (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 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, because, he says, 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, as we conclude the Easter Octave, that we celebrate Divine Mercy Sunday. Back 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 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. This Sunday is an opportunity for us to thank the Lord for the gift of his mercy, to come to receive it in the way he himself established and to be transformed by it such that we seek to share it. It’s also a time to get to know better, and do, the practices Jesus told us through St. Faustina, would help us grow to trust in his mercy more: 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, in which we see him, risen from the dead, blessing us and asking 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 make a novena, from Good Friday through this Sunday, in which we bring to Jesus various groups of people in need of his mercy; and finally to celebrate Divine Mercy Sunday itself, when we mark the end of the Easter Octave and ponder in the Gospel Jesus’ establishment of the Sacrament of his Mercy.
• When Christ had that dialogue with the apostles, however, one was famously absent. When the others told Thomas, “We have seen the Lord!,” he replied that unless he saw and probed the nail marks in Jesus’ hands and side, he wouldn’t believe. Jesus appeared to Thomas and the other apostles the following Sunday, wished them “Shalom” once more and then invited Thomas to put his finger and hands into his wounds and not to continue unbelieving but to believe. It’s a pity that Thomas, who left everything to follow the Lord Jesus, who gave his entire life for the Lord and died in witness to faith, is called “Doubting Thomas” almost as much as he is called “Saint Thomas.” He is the most famous doubter in history! But his doubts were not unique among the first disciples and apostles. With the exception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, none of the early disciples believed after the resurrection. The women on Easter morning went to anoint a corpse. The disciples on the road to Emmaus were talking to what they thought was an anonymous Wayfarer about a Jesus whom they believed was dead. When Mary Magdalene and these Emmaus disciples went to inform the other apostles that they had seen Jesus, the apostles didn’t believe them. That’s why Jesus, when he appeared to them as St. Mark reminds us through St. Peter, “rebuked them for their unbelief and hardness of heart because they had not believed those who saw him after he had been raised” (Mk 16:14). Faith, as we know, is the belief in something on the basis of a belief in someone giving witness. They had a double-distrust that led to their lack of faith in Jesus’ resurrection: first, they distrusted the witness of Mary and the disciples on the Road to Emmaus, thinking that they were just too gullible; more importantly they distrusted in Jesus’ words that he would rise on the third day. Thomas’ distrust was not qualitatively different at all, just quantitatively. Thomas was unwilling to accept the testimony of the other apostles, too, as if they, the women and the disciples from Emmaus were all together in a collective hallucination. But it wasn’t a general incredulity. He had obviously been struggling about the criteria to accept that Jesus had risen from the dead, almost certainly because he had been pondering Jesus’ words about his resurrection on the third day. Thomas had concluded that the criteria would be Jesus’ wounds, which were the sign not just of his death but of his love, of the connection between Jesus’ risen body and his earthly body. He had somehow intuited that after the resurrection, Jesus would be recognized not by his face but by his wounds! Jesus’ physical appearance might be different, his voice might different, almost everything else might be different — as we would see in some of his appearances that the disciples wouldn’t recognize either his face or his voice — but Thomas grasped that the wounds would have to be there. That’s why he said what he did: “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands and put my finger into the nail marks and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.” And when Jesus appeared to him and, rather than castigating him, lovingly invited him not just to see his wounds but put his finger into his hands and his hand into his side, St. Thomas dropped to his knees and burst out with the greatest theological confession of Jesus’ divinity recorded in Sacred Scripture: “My Lord and my God.” As he was pondering the criteria of the wounds, he recognized that if Jesus had risen with the wounds that he would absolutely have demonstrated his divinity. Normally when we focus on the expression, “My Lord and my God” that many of us have been piously trained to say during the elevation of Jesus’ Body and Blood at Mass, we focus on the titles of divinity. Six years ago, however, when I had the privilege to concelebrate Mass with Pope Francis on Divine Mercy Sunday in the Vatican, the Holy Father looked at this phrase from another angle and focused on the adjective “my,” which he noted was a possessive adjective. Jesus was not just the Lord and God, but Thomas’ Lord and God. It pointed to the personal relationship between the two. The Holy Father said, “Jesus wants us, too, to relate to him as ‘my Lord and my God,’ to belong to us as we belong to him, … That’s what St. Thomas can teach us.”
• Jesus finishes the consequential conversation with Doubting-Turned-Confessing Thomas by stating, “Have you come to believe because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed.” Earlier in the Gospel, Jesus had said to his disciples, “Blessed are your eyes that see what you see.” St. John the Evangelist in his first letter would announce what he had “seen with his eyes.” There is indeed beatitude in seeing God, because in order truly to see him we need to have faith, since Jesus Christ, having taken on our humanity, looks similar to other human beings. We need faith to be able to see behind the human face, to peer beyond the human body. But Jesus indicates a greater beatitude to one who does not see but still believer.  The ultimate test of faith is when we don’t see with our physical eyes or probe with our hands or index fingers, but make the same act of faith in Jesus. This is what led another Thomas, Saint Thomas Aquinas, the 750^th anniversary of whose death the Church marked a month ago, to write in his famous hymn Adoro Te Devote, “Plagas, sicut Thomas, non intueor, Deum tamen meum te confiteor. Fac me tibi semper magis credere, in te spem habere, te diligere,” literally, “Wounds, like Thomas, I do not see, nevertheless I confess you my God to be. Make be always more and more believe in you, have hope in you and love you.” That’s what Saint Thomas is interceding for us to do, to confess Jesus as God, to grow in faith, hope and love in him, and to trust in his divine mercy forever.

The Gospel passage on which the homily was based was: 

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