Fr. Roger J. Landry
Our Lady of Victory Church, Manhattan
Divine Mercy Sunday
Holy Hour Reflection
April 28, 2019
To listen to the reflection during the Holy Hour, please click below:
The following text guided the meditation:
How pleasing it must be to Jesus that we are here this afternoon for this Holy Hour celebrating his divine mercy. One of the requests St. Faustina described in her Diary that Jesus made of her was precisely 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.”
We come here to do so around the Hour of Mercy at 3 pm. Jesus said to St. Faustina, “At three in the afternoon, implore my Mercy, especially for sinners, or at least briefly reflect on my Passion, especially on the abandonment I felt at the moment of agony. This is the hour of great Mercy for the whole world. I will allow you to penetrate my mortal sadness. In that hour, I will deny nothing to the soul that asks me in the name of my Passion.”
We will make that reflection on his Passion imploring his mercy through singing together the Chaplet of Divine Mercy, which is normally prayed on Rosary Beads. St. Faustina heard an interior voice that taught her this prayer. On the larger beads of the Rosary, one says, “Eternal Father, I offer you the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of your dearly beloved Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, in atonement for our sins and for those of the whole world.” On the ten smaller beads, we pray, “For the sake of his sorrowful passion, have mercy on us and on the whole world.” You pray five “decades” in this way, after which, one prays three times the “Holy, Holy, Holy” from the Good Friday reproaches, “Holy God, Holy Mighty One, Holy Immortal One,” “have mercy on us and on the whole world.” What we’re doing in this beautiful prayer is offering Christ’s own sacrifice during the Triduum to the Father. We’re lifting up the Eucharist — Christ’s body, blood, soul and divinity — and making Christ’s prayer our own. There is no more powerful prayer! Jesus promised, “It pleases me to grant everything they ask of me by saying the chaplet… if it be compatible with my Will.” This is especially true of the moment of death. Jesus specifically asked priests — and I’m obeying him right now — to “recommend it to sinners as their last hope of salvation. Even if there were a sinner most hardened, if he were to recite this chaplet only once [with an attitude of trust, humility and sorrow for sin], he would receive grace from my infinite mercy.”
Many of us come here having prayed a novena since Good Friday, called the Novena of Divine Mercy, that Jesus himself had requested. Jesus said, “I desire that during these nine days you bring souls to the fount of my mercy, that they may draw from there strength and refreshment and whatever graces they need in the hardships of life and, especially, at the hour of death. On each day you will bring to my Heart a different group of souls, and you will immerse them in this ocean of my mercy, and I will bring all these souls into the house of my Father.” The groups, for each of the days, are all humanity, especially sinners; priests and religious; the pious and faithful; those who do not believe in Jesus and who don’t yet know him; our separated Christian brothers and sisters; the meek and humble and children; those who venerate the mercy of Jesus; those in Purgatory; and the lukewarm. And we pray for all of those groups today as we approach the hour of mercy on Divine Mercy Sunday.
And we make all of these prayers as we adore Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament and venerate him with special love in the Image of Divine Mercy present with us in the sanctuary that Jesus asked St. Faustina to have made. St. Faustina writes, “One night when I was in my cell, I perceived the presence of the Lord Jesus dressed in a white tunic. One hand was raised in blessing, the other rested on his chest. From an opening in the tunic in the chest, two great rays were coming out, one red and the other clear… After some time, Jesus said to me, ‘Paint an image in accordance with what you see, with the inscription, Jesus, I trust in you.’” A little later, Our Lord explained to her the meaning of the two rays: “The two rays represent the Blood and the Water. The white ray represents the Water [baptism] that justifies souls; the red ray represents the Blood that is the life of souls [the Eucharist]. Both rays flow from the depths of my Mercy when, on the Cross, my Heart in agony was opened by the lance.” As we behold this image, we see Jesus blessing us with his mercy and are reminded of how that mercy comes in the blood and water flowing from his side. St. John wrote the early Christians in his first Letter, “Whoever is begotten by God conquers the world. And the victory that conquers the world is our faith. Who [indeed] is the victor over the world but the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God? This is the one who came through water and blood, Jesus Christ, not by water alone, but by water and blood.” We enter into Christ’s victory by faith in the power of his water and blood, in the power of baptism and the Holy Eucharist, in the power of his divine mercy.
Today in this Holy Hour, we unite all five of the practices Jesus himself requested through St. Faustina that the whole Church make to grow in our receptivity to his mercy in our lives and to spread that mercy in the world.
It’s not enough for Jesus that we merely know from the Bible of the truths that we’re sinners in need of his mercy, that he came into the world to forgive us our sins, that he wants to help us forgive others’ trespasses just as he has forgiven us, that he wants us ultimately to be so transformed by his mercy that we will correspond to what he told us in the Sermon on the Mount, “Be merciful as your Father in heaven is merciful.” He wants us to do more than know it. He wants us to grow in loving devotion of him in how he mercifully loves us. Devotion means that something passes from our head, to our heart, to our knees and then to our hands and feet. We see what happened with devotion to the Holy Eucharist. It wasn’t enough for Jesus for us merely to know or even to assent intellectually that he is really and substantially present body, blood, soul and divinity in the Eucharist. Jesus himself came into the world, and through appearances to mystics and Eucharistic miracles, made clear his will that he wanted us to celebrate that gift with Eucharistic adoration, with Holy Hours, with processions with Him in the streets and more. This is what led to the Feast of Corpus Christi through his apparitions to St. Juliana of Liège and the Eucharistic miracle of Bolsena-Orvieto. Similarly, it’s not enough for us to know and assent intellectually that Jesus has the power to forgive us our sins and does so through the Sacrament of Penance. He wants us to express our love and appreciation for it, because then, like with Eucharistic adoration, we will be better able to receive the infinite graces he wishes to give us through it.
The truth is that toward both the Sacrament of the Eucharist and the Sacrament of Mercy, many Catholics are cold. Many take these sacraments for granted and sadly seldom receive them. Others receive them without passion. Jesus wants more. He wants us to grow in love of him loving us in this way. The Divine Mercy Devotion allows us to show our love and appreciation for this great gift of God’s merciful love and, as we do so, to be transformed by Him so that we might become merciful like God.
We all need this conversion. I remember my own conversion to Divine Mercy. It happened on the day St. Faustina Kowalska, the secretary of Jesus’ message of mercy in the 1930s, was canonized in St. Peter’s Square. I was a newly ordained priest finishing my studies in Rome. I didn’t know much about the devotion to Divine Mercy at the time. I remember saying to myself, more or less, “I’ll use my Rosary beads to pray the Rosary, thank you very much.” But after celebrating Mass inside St. Peter’s Basilica, I went out into the Square to get a good seat and pray my breviary in anticipation of the canonization ceremony. After I had finished morning prayer, a young man, one of the first people to enter the square after the gates were opened at 7:30, approached and asked me in Italian whether I would be able to hear his confession. “Certo,” I replied, as he knelt down on the hard stone of St. Peter’s square in front of me. After I had given him absolution, a young girl came and queried whether I spoke Spanish. I told her that I did, and she asked whether I would be willing to hear her confession, too. For the next two hours and 45 minutes, until literally the opening antiphon of the Mass, I heard confessions non-stop in the back-left corner of the front-right section from people all over the world in multiple languages as they all humbly knelt down on the stones of St. Peter’s Square and poured themselves out. I was blown away by the depth and tearful beauty of their contrition and appreciation for the gift of God’s mercy. As only a priest can see from the “inside” of people’s souls, I witnessed the profound fruits that the devotion to Divine Mercy had produced in Catholics from various countries, cultures and languages, taking ordinary people with “pasts,” restoring them to the great joy of God’s forgiven sons and daughters, and making them ambassadors of Christ’s healing love to others. As Mass began, I thanked the Lord for having moved me to go out to the square that morning and for having used me as his instrument to share his Divine Mercy with so many. During St. John Paul’s homily, I was surprised and thrilled when he said, “It is important then that we accept the whole message [of God’s merciful love] that comes to us from the word of God on this Second Sunday of Easter, which from now on throughout the Church will be called ‘Divine Mercy Sunday.… By this act I intend today to pass this message on to the new millennium.’” I knew that from that point forward, I was being summoned, as all priests were, to be a particular herald of that message, something that has been given me as a special office when Pope Francis appointed me in 2015, with about 1,000 priests in the world, a Missionary of Mercy with his own faculties in the Sacrament of Confession. I felt that the experiences of that morning were a gift from God to help me to see the greatness of the interior miracles that devotion to Divine Mercy could bring about in people. I remember rejoicing that I would have the opportunity, returning to parish work in Massachusetts, to bring this message and to Divine Mercy Sunday joyfully each year as the culmination of the Easter octave. I rejoice to be able to celebrate it with you today.
We all need a deeper conversion to Jesus’ mercy, because this is the heart of the celebration of Easter. In the moving Gospel Catholics around the world hear today, we witness what Jesus did on the evening of the day he triumphantly rose from the dead. He walked through the closed doors of the Upper Room where the apostles were huddling together out of fear and he said to them, “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.
It’s important for us to pay close attention to the various steps Jesus took in today’s Gospel so that we can understand better the divine foundation of the Sacrament of his Mercy, so that we can take better advantage of it and also explain it better to all those, Protestants and some Catholics alike, who say 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 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 … 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 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. 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! 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!
As we prepare in the Chapel to offer to the Eternal Father in heaven Jesus’ body, blood, soul and divinity, we ask God Father, who is Rich in Mercy, to grant us the courage never to tire of receiving what He never tires of giving and to come to receive regularly that gift of his love through the hands of those same priests through whom he gives us each day his Son’s body and blood. We ask Jesus, God the Son, Mercy Incarnate, for the grace to receive that gift so profoundly that we might, like him, become as “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 God the Holy Spirit to help us say with all our mind, heart, soul and strength, “Jesus, I trust in you!”
