Have Mercy Victor King, Ever Reigning!, Divine Mercy Sunday (B), April 7, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx, NY
Divine Mercy Sunday, Year B
April 7, 2024
Acts 4:32-35, Ps 118, 1 John 5:1-6, Jn 20:19-31

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

The following text guided the homily: 

• Pondering and preaching on Jesus’ last words from the Cross on Good Friday, I’ve always been moved by the first two things Jesus, through literally excruciating pain, said while dying at the Place of the Skull. These two things not only came first in time; but they seem to be first in priority, summarizing and synthesizing all Jesus was doing on Calvary and throughout his earthly life. The first was to turn to God the Father and make a cry not of pain but of mercy: “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” He wanted sinners always and everywhere to know he was thinking about them and begging the father to exculpate them, including those who that day were crucifying and mocking him, because they didn’t know the eternal consequences of what they were choosing. His second word was to a sinner dying alongside of him, who heard Jesus’ prayer, defended him against the derision of the thief on Jesus’ left and then decided to entrust himself to that mercy. When the Good Thief asked Jesus, who would die even before he would, to remember him when he came into his kingdom, it was a plea for mercy after death, somehow believing that Jesus would be able to remember him after he would breathe his last. And Jesus, out of merciful love, would do far more than remember him. He replied to this criminal, “Today you will be with me in Paradise.” Out of mercy, he would raise the Good Thief with him to life and to eternal joy. So first Jesus said a word for sinners in general and then another for one sinner in particular, so that each of us might learn from the Good Thief how to trust as he trusted and ask for what he asked.
• Jesus’ evident priorities on Calvary were recapitulated when the Risen Jesus walked through the locked doors of the Upper Room where the apostles were barricaded out of fear of the Jesus. As we see in the Gospels, on Easter Sunday night, Jesus spoke and acted first in favor of sinners in general; a week later, he spoke and acted in favor of one sinner in particular, so that we might all learn from that sinner how to eventually to trust in Jesus and proclaim what he proclaim. Today it is fitting for us, therefore, to turn to Jesus to whom we prayed in the Sequence and say, “Have mercy, Victor King, ever reigning!,” as we joyfully “offer thankful praises” because “a Lamb the sheep redeems, Christ, who only is sinless, reconciles sinners to the Father.” We beg to share in his victory of merciful love, conscious, as St. John says in today’s second reading, that “the victory that conquers the world is our faith” and “Who indeed is the victor over the world but the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?” Indeed, eternal triumph comes from trusting in God and in his mercy. It flows from echoing the house of Israel, the house of Aaron and all God-fearers in joyfully exclaiming, “His mercy endures forever.”
• We see that mercy first expressed for all sinners in general on the night Jesus rose from the dead. Jesus passed through the closed doors of the Upper Room where three days before he had given them his Body and Blood in anticipation of Calvary and said to them, twice, “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. 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 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.
• 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 committed 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 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 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 called confession simply “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 the risen Christ Jesus!
• That’s why it’s so fitting today, too, 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 lov that led him to stop at nothing 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. 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.”
• The entire message of Divine Mercy, as well as the practices Jesus asked her to convey to the world, are all meant to help us to trust in Jesus’ mercy and celebrate and share in the Victor King’s triumph. In addition to celebrating Divine Mercy Sunday, the practices are: to prepare for today by a novena in which we lift up to God different groups of souls in need of mercy; to pray at the hour of mercy, 3 pm each afternoon, the time in which Jesus died on Calvary to forgive us our sins, for mercy upon us and the whole world; to pray the Chaplet of Divine Mercy, in which we offer the Eternal Father the Eucharistic Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of his Son, in atonement for sins; and to venerate him in the image of Divine Mercy, in which we see him, risen from the dead, blessing us with his mercy and pointing to his wounded side, from which, as St. John told us in his Gospel and reminded us in today’s second reading, blood and water flowed out to heal us by the waters of baptism and the precious blood poured out for the forgiveness of sins. Each of these five practices is meant to help us grow in love of the Lord’s mercy, to seek it, receive it, live in it and share it. The joy that we have at Easter — and in life — is directly proportional to our entering into this mystery, because it’s through this devotion we receive the fruits of his victory and become more like the Victor through sharing his love and mercy.
• We know, however, that when Christ came for the first time to the Upper Room after the Resurrection to make the apostles capable of bringing his mercy and peace to the whole world, one of them was famously absent. When the other apostles joyfully 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 then extended his mercy to Thomas in particular. Evincing Jesus’ desire anew to link mercy to the day of his resurrection, Jesus appeared to him and the other apostles the following Sunday, wished them “Shalom” once more — a sign that he was giving him forgiveness and reestablishing the tranquility of order with God — and then invited Thomas to do what he insisted he had to do to believe: to put his finger and hands into his wounds and so that he would not continue unbelieving but believe. It was a great act of special mercy to someone so intimate to the Lord’s plans for the world’s salvation. We all have to admit that it’s a pity, it’s unjust, that Thomas, who left everything to follow the Lord Jesus, who gave his entire life for the Lord and would die in witness to Christ, 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 still 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 reminded us in yesterday’s Gospel, “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. Thomas had obviously been struggling about the criteria he’d need 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 as well as the witness of the others who had claimed to have seen him risen. 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 believed 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.” Normally when we focus on this expression, which many of us have been piously trained to say during the elevation of Jesus’ Body and Blood at Mass, we focus naturally on the titles of divinity. Six years ago on Divine Mercy Sunday, however, when I had the privilege, together with other Missionaries of Mercy throughout the world, to concelebrate Mass with Pope Francis, the Holy Father looked at this phrase from another angle and focused on the possessive adjective “my.” Jesus was not just the Lord and God, the Holy Father said, but Thomas’ Lord and God. The exclamation pointed to the personal relationship between the two. The Holy Father commented, “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 wants us to entrust ourselves to him like Thomas did, to entrust ourselves personally to his divine mercy.
• Jesus finishes Doubting-Turned-Confessing Thomas’ restoration and resurrection 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 Jesus 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, and in the Eucharist to see beyond the appearances of seeming bread and wine. But Jesus indicates a greater beatitude to one who does not see but still believes. 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 exactly 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 the Apostle 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.
• 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 help us to entrust ourselves fully to our Victor King, to the Lamb who redeems the sheep, to the sinless Messiah who reconciles sinners to the Father. We ask for the grace to give thanks to the Lord and to sing, “His Mercy endures forever.” We implore through the Divine Mercy devotion to become, like Christ, “merciful as our Father in heaven is merciful” (Lk 6:36). And as we prepare in just a few minutes to look upon 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, “My Lord and my God” and “Jesus, I trust in you!”

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

This is the one who came through water and blood, Jesus Christ,
not by water alone, but by water and blood.
The Spirit is the one that testifies,
and the Spirit is truth.

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