Loving Much: Receiving and Sharing Jesus’ Five-Fold Mercy, National Gathering of Missionaries of Mercy, January 22, 2020

Father Roger J. Landry
National Gathering of the Missionaries of Mercy
Griffin Gate Marriott Resort
Lexington, Kentucky
January 21-23, 2020

To listen to an audio of this brief talk to fellow Missionaries of Mercy from the U.S., please click below: 

The notes/outline for the talk is below: 

• Introduction
  • Very honored to be here!
  • This Sunday is the inaugural Sunday of the Word of God. Pope Francis has asked priests to give particular focus on preaching as we prepare to celebrate it. He’s done a lot to try to reform preaching. He gave us an extensive primer in Evangelii Gaudium.
  • But if there’s one area in which the whole Church needs to excel in preaching well, it’s in preaching about God’s mercy.
  • Pope Francis told us back in Misericordiae Vultus, the bull of indication for the Jubilee of Mercy, that we are to be “above all, persuasive preachers of mercy,” “heralds of joy and forgiveness” who remind everyone in the Church that God desires mercy” and “rejoices more for one repentant sinner,” and who summon people to trust in God’s mercy, recognize their need for it, and come to receive it, and “confidently approach[ing] the throne of grace to receive mercy and find grace for timely help” (Heb 4:16).”
  • This is not a novel concern. Immediately before the Ascension, when Jesus was giving his valedictory address and great commission, he instructed the apostles that “repentance and the forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem” and called them “witnesses of these things.” Together with the Holy Spirit, we are meant to be witnesses of the power of conversion and mercy.
  • Mercy is an essential part of the kerygma, of our preaching Jesus’ passion, death and resurrection. Jesus founded the Sacrament of Penance and Reconciliation on Easter Sunday evening so that the connection between mercy and his resurrection would be plain, since, as he told us in Luke 15, every reconciliation is meant to be a resurrection, when a son who was dead is brought to life again.
  • So it’s key during these days together to ponder a little the graces God is giving us to be “above all persuasive preachers of mercy.”
• I have entitled this brief reflection “Loving Much: Receiving and Sharing Jesus’ Five-Fold Mercy.”
  • This is the title of a new book I’ll have coming out this year, which is a fruit of my preaching and writing during the Jubilee of Mercy.
  • The “loving much” comes from the scene in Simon the Pharisee’s house in Jesus’ interaction with the sinful woman who washed his feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. Jesus communicated that we will love to the extent that we are forgiven. “The one to whom little is forgiven loves little,” he said. To love much, we must grow in appreciation of mercy. This is essential to the thought of Pope Francis, even from before his papacy. In the book length interview El Jesuita, which I read the night he was elected for some media hits in Rome the following morning, he said, commenting on mercy and the “felix culpa,” that “Discovering oneself a sinner is one of the greatestthings that can happen to us, if it leads to its ultimate consequences,” meaning to go to the Lord and receive forgiveness. But he commented, “It’s only we great sinners who have this grace” of knowing it. We need to be sinners who recognize we need a Savior to grasp it.
  • The “five-fold mercy” comes from the realization I had about the synoptic evangelists’ use of the verb splangchnizomai, a word that’s normally translated in English as Jesus’ “heart was moved with pity.” It’s used to describe Jesus’ mercy. And after the Gospel writers tell us that Jesus was “sick to his stomach” or his “bowels were bursting” with compassion, it describes his doing five different things:
    • Teaching
    • Healing
    • Feeding
    • Forgiving
    • Having them pray to the Harvest Master for laborers and then calling them to be laborers.
  • These are the five principle ways, I argue, Jesus expresses his mercy. These are the five ways we’re called to receive his mercy. These are five ways the Church is supposed to continue Jesus’ mission of mercy. These are the five ways each Christian is supposed to love others as Christ has loved us first.
  • I’ve found preaching on these five themes very fruitful, because they give a compelling, solid and very practical Christology, ecclesiology, and moral theology. They relate us to Christ. They show the Church at her best. And they orient all the faithful, and in particular priests, in our completing the mission of Mercy Incarnate.
• This session is dedicated to “Witnessing to the Gospel of Mercy through Word.”
  • The importance of preaching people to Christ’s mercy
    • JP II, Reconciliation and Penance 24: “In order to promote penance and reconciliation, the Church has at her disposal two principal means which were entrusted to her by her Founder himself: catechesis and the Sacraments.”
    • Jesus was constantly preaching mercy. His first homily, all 19 words, was: ““The time is fulfilled. The kingdom of heaven is at hand. Repent and believe in the Gospel.
    • He preached it in from the Cross, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they’re doing” and extended it to one penitent in particular, “Amen, amen I tell you today, you will be with me in paradise.”
    • He preached about it in parables, he taught us how to pray for it, he showed it in his actions, all meant to form us to be mercy as our heavenly Father is merciful.
  • The means
    • How do we preach it?
      • Every way we can.
      • The pulpit. The bulletin. Social media. Pastoral letters. Articles. Videos. Podcasts. Television. Radio. Uploaded homilies. Movies. Billboards.
    • Style and message
      • Pope Francis gave us a primer in Evangelii Gaudiumthat I think pertains very much to this context.
        • The preacher should be close, approachable, welcoming, warm, joyful, unpretentious, ready for dialogue, patient. He should enjoy passing on the faith. He should love those he addresses. He should strive for the holiness he should be trying to inspire in others. ,
      • We ought to stress God’s mercy more than man’s sinfulness.
        • John Vianney: “My children, we cannot comprehend the goodness of God towards us in instituting this great Sacrament of Penance. If we had had a favor to ask of Our Lord, we should never have thought of asking Him that. But He foresaw our frailty and our inconstancy in well-doing, and His love induced Him to do what we should not have dared to ask”
        • This doesn’t mean we neglect the negative. St. John Vianney had the courage to denounce evil out of love for his people, as St. John Paul II wrote in the bicentennial of his birth in 1986. But the pontiff said, “he preferred to show the attractive side of virtue rather than the ugliness of vice,” and if he spoke – sometimes in tears – about sin and the danger for salvation, he insisted on the tenderness of God who has been offended, and the happiness of being loved by God, united to God, living in his presence and for him.”
        • Tim Gallagher,Handbook for Spiritual Directors, which I was reading on the plane coming here, made this point in a very powerful way with regard to Ignatian meditation in the context of discernment: “I believe it wisest not to attempt Ignatius’ direct approach to prayer for this purification: review of sin in salvation history, of sin in my own life, and of eternal punishment for unrepented serious sin. A gentler approach to this same issue will allow these discerners to profit in the measure of their readiness. In this approach, the same truths are presented but less directly and through scriptural texts that emphasize God’s mercy toward sincere but struggling human hearts. Examples include Jesus’ encounter with Zacchaeus, the healing of the paralytic, the parables of mercy in Luke 15, and many similar texts. Throughout the same call to purification is present, but in a way these discerners can absorb. This approach will not cause them anxiety and will lead them toward purification.”
        • In RP 26, JP II talked about various elements of that preaching: on reconciliation, conversion and penance, conscience, temptations, almsgiving, fasting and mortification, the four necessary reconciliations with God, self, others and creation, the four last things, and on the Sacrament itself. People are hungering for formation in this area!
        • Divine Mercy Devotion.
          • Jesus made a great promise to priests who preach on his divine mercy, that if we do, great sinners will come. That’s been my experience every Divine Mercy Sunday.
        • Our preaching on mercy can not only help bring people back, but hopefully be a leaven among the entire clergy to be able to preach more persuasively in these areas as well.
      • Final words
        • Pope Francis. In his first Sunday as Pope, Pope Francis proclaimed the beauty of God’s undying mercy as not only Jesus’ most powerful message but the Church’s most powerful continued message to the world: “Jesus has this message for us: mercy. I think – and I say it with humility – that this is the Lord’s most powerful message: mercy. It was he himself who said: “I did not come for the righteous”. The righteous justify themselves. Go on, then, even if you can do it, I cannot! But they believe they can. “I came for sinners” (Mk 2:17).… The Lord never tires of forgiving: never! It is we who tire of asking his forgiveness. Let us ask for the grace not to tire of asking forgiveness, because he never tires of forgiving.”
        • We’re called to be heralds of the Lord’s most powerful message. May we never tire of preaching of this gift that the Lord, through us as his instruments, never tires to bestow!