Peace Be With You!, Divine Mercy Sunday (B), April 7, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Divine Mercy Sunday, Year B
April 7, 2024
Acts 4:32-35, Ps 118, 1 Jn 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: 

• On Tuesday of Holy Week, as we were preparing to enter into the Sacred Triduum and then the Easter Season, Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at NYU’s Stern School of Business and one of the most influential scholars of contemporary society, published an important new book that has been the subject of copious commentary in the twelve days since. It’s entitled The Anxious Generation and is a deep examination into the struggles with anxiety being experienced above all by those born after 1995, the so-called Generation Z. Haidt documents how, since 2010, there has been a 134 percent increase in anxiety, and 106 percent increase in depression, among U.S. undergraduates. He shows how there have been enormous spikes, too, in various mental illnesses, including anorexia, substance abuse, addictions, self-harm and suicide, something that is mirrored in similar enormous upsurges throughout the main anglosphere countries and the western world. Certainly for those in Gen Z, and all those who love and care for them, like parents, educators, mental health professionals, Catholic university chaplains, and others, Haidt’s data and work cannot be ignored. In fact, when people ask me what the major pastoral problem I have as the Columbia Catholic chaplain, they normally anticipate I’m going to say something intellectual like the supposed conflict between faith and science, or a moral issue, like addiction to drugs or porn, or confusion what the Church teaches about human sexuality, immigration, the Sacrament of Holy Orders or other things. But I’ve never hesitated to say that the biggest pastoral issue I am confronting here is the anxiety from which so many students suffer from the new student orientation program (NSOP) for freshmen through graduation week for grad students. Haidt explores two possible explanations for the escalating anxiety: the decline of unsupervised play-based childhood, out of media-driven parental concerns for child safety; and the rise of phone-based childhood, where children began to live in a virtual world, which have had massive consequences in the lives of young girls, others in young boys, and a what he calls a gradual “spiritual degradation” for almost everyone. Now’s not the time to examine his analysis of the causes or his proposals to remedy this international epidemic, but it is opportune to focus on the problem of skyrocketing anxiety, not just among those in their teens and 20s — which is the most severe — but even among those in their 30s and 40s.
• To all of those in this anxious age, the Risen Lord Jesus in today’s Gospel twice enters the closed and locked doors of the Upper Room where the troubled apostles were huddling out of multiple fears and says to them, twice on Easter Sunday night, and a third time the following Sunday, the words, “Peace be with you!” The Hebrew word shalom, or peace, does not mean merely the absence conflict, the fullness of every blessing that flows from being grounded in a right relationship with God, something that can exist even in the midst of external vicissitudes. Everything Jesus did, from his incarnation, through his passion, death and resurrection, was to give us this rock-solid peace. During the Last Supper, Jesus told the apostles, twice, “Do not let your hearts be troubled or afraid” and then conveyed to them why: “Peace I leave with you. My peace I give you. Not as the world gives peace do I give it to you” (Jn 14:1,27). The peace Jesus leaves and gives us is not the mere absence of war, but harmony with God through the forgiveness of sins. Without this type of peace, no other form can endure, because it is sin and the lack of forgiveness and reconciliation that destroy interior peace, the peace of the home, the peace of friendship, the peace of communities, the peace of nations, as we see in so many conflicts, like in the Holy Land, Ukraine, racial and ethnic strife in so many regions of the world and more. And so Jesus, wasting absolutely no time to set the next stage of his divine 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 to pay very close attention to what Jesus does with the apostles on the night he rose from the dead. After twice wishing them, and imparting to them, peace, Jesus said to them, “Just as the Father sent me, so I send you!” The Father had sent the Son as the Lamb of God to take away the sins of the world — and to save us from the consequence of our sins, death and definitive self-alienation from God and others — and Jesus was going to be sending his closest collaborators to do the same. Since no one, however, can forgive sins against God except God alone (Mk 2:7), Jesus needed to impart to the apostles the power to forgive sins in God’s name. So he breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” He gave them God the Holy Spirit so that they might forgive sins, just as we hear every time the priest pronounces those beautiful words in confession, “God, the Father of Mercies… has poured out the Holy Spirit for the forgiveness of sins.” And then he said words that point to the essential structure of the Sacrament of Confession: “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 (for example, if they weren’t sorry for their sins or were not firmly resolved to stop the sinful behavior) would be if people told them. And that’s what happens in the Sacrament of Confession. Jesus was making them his ministers, his ambassadors, God as it were appealing through them, as St. Paul would later say, to “be reconciled to God” (2 Cor 5:20). Just as through the apostles in the Mass, Jesus himself would say, “This is my body, … this is the chalice of my blood,” so through them Jesus was going to say, “Your sins are forgiven; go in peace!” This was going to be the apostles’ most important mission, in which Jesus involved them intimately as his first action with them upon rising from the dead. This would be the mission of extending his peace, the fruits of his victory from Calvary and the empty tomb, to a world always in need of it, to men and women, boys and girls, who are troubled, afraid and anxious as a consequence of the lack of peace flowing back all the way back to the disorder flowing from original sin and from the sins we suffer or commit. What Jesus was saying and doing ought to startle us today just like it would have astonished the ten in the Upper Room on the evening of the Resurrection. If we want peace — and each of our hearts cries out for it! — then Jesus gives us the means and wants us to take Him and those means seriously. Jesus says that the most important factor in peace is not the number of diplomats. It’s not the strength of the United Nations. It’s not getting a two-state solution in the Holy Land, getting Russia or Ukraine to wave a white flag, or even getting Republicans and Democrats to work together in Washington. Jesus says that real peace is based, first and foremost, on being right with God and allowing that peace received to be paid forward through forgiveness and reconciliation with others.
• So today it’s fitting for us, therefore, to turn to the Risen Jesus as we did in the Sequence and pray, “Have mercy, Victor King, ever reigning!.” It’s right that we “offer thankful praises” because, as we joyfully sung, “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, not only peace in this world but 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, as we did in the Psalm, “His mercy endures forever.”
• 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 as 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 asks why his dad was pulling out all the stops at the return of his brother, the Father replies, “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 son or daughter, points to the truth that every reconciliation is a resurrection! Pope Francis has 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 love 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 other practices Jesus revealed to her are similarly meant to help us trust in his mercy, celebrate and share in the Victor King’s triumph, and be filled with the peace that comes from being in right relationship to God. He asked us to stop each day at 3 pm, the hour on which he mercifully died on Calvary, to entrust ourselves and others to his merciful love. He asked us to pray a novena from Good Friday through yesterday for specific groups of people in need of his mercy, ourselves included. He asked us to pray the Chaplet of Divine Mercy, like a short Rosary, in which we offer him in the Eucharist to God the Father in atonement for our sins and those of others. And He asked us to venerate him in the image of Divine Mercy, in which we see him, risen from the dead, with his right hand perpetually raised to bless us with his mercy and his left hand 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 remission of sins. Each of these five practices is meant to help us grow in gratitude for the Lord’s mercy, to seek it, receive it, live in it and share it. Each of these practices is meant to help us advance in the school of mercy so that we, similar to the first apostles, might become in fact peacemakers in the world, imploring the gift of divine mercy without which peace is impossible, and then become those who practice the corporal and spiritual works of mercy that restore, build and sustain peace.
• I mentioned at the beginning of the homily, however, that Jesus said “Peace be with you” three times in the Gospel. The third time came when Jesus, out of mercy, came to reconcile the apostle who was infamously absent the night Jesus rose from the dead. Thomas was not able to share in the joy of the other apostles, of Jesus’ mother, of Mary Magdalene, or the disciples from Emmaus, because he was eaten alive by doubts. Doubts and confusion can rob us of peace, just like sins can. Doubts can make us anxious, afraid, unstable. We see that in the apostle Thomas. When the other ten joyfully told him, “We have seen the Lord!,” Thomas replied that unless he saw and probed the nail marks in Jesus’ hands and side, he refused to believe. Jesus didn’t want to leave him, however, in that state. He waited what must have been the longest week in Thomas’ life until the next Sunday, probably to underline Jesus’ desire to link his mercy to the day of his resurrection. Despite Jesus’ first appearance to them, all of the apostles were still afraid, evidenced by the fact that they were still locking the door of the Upper Room. But the Lord walked anew through the door, wished them “Shalom” once again, 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 not go on clinging to doubt but believing. It’s a pity, an historical injustice, that Thomas, who had left everything to follow the Lord Jesus, who would give his life for the Lord and die in witness to him, is called “Doubting Thomas” almost as much as he is called “Saint Thomas.” This apostle and martyr 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 someone they thought was an anonymous Wayfarer about a Jesus whom they believed was still dead. The apostles didn’t believe Mary Magdalene or the Emmaus disciples when they testified they had seen the Risen Jesus. That’s why Jesus, when he appeared to them, as St. Mark reminded us in yesterday’s Gospel at daily Mass, “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. The apostles had a double-distrust, a dual-doubt, that led to their lack of faith in Jesus’ resurrection: first, they distrusted and doubted the witness of Mary and the disciples on the Road to Emmaus; more importantly they distrusted and doubted Jesus’ words that he would rise on the third day. Thomas’ distrust was not qualitatively different from theirs at all, just quantitatively; he distrusted and doubted the testimony of the other apostles, too. But Thomas was obviously wrestling with Jesus’ words and those of his fellow disciples. He was trying to figure out by what criteria he’d be able to believe that Jesus had risen. He had somehow intuited that the criteria could not be Jesus’ physical appearance, or voice, or other physical attributes; it would be his wounds, which would be the sign of the continuation between Jesus’ earthly and risen body, the tangible link to his death and his love. He had somehow intuited that after the resurrection, Jesus would be recognized not by his face but by his wounds! 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.” When Jesus appeared to him, rather than castigating him, he lovingly invited him not just to see his wounds but put his finger into his hands and his hand into his side. That’s when all of St. Thomas’ doubts disappeared, as he 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 Catholics have been piously catechized 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 in the Vatican, 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, the friendship, the bond between the two. Pope Francis 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.” In the midst of our doubts and vexing questions, Jesus wants to meet us. He wants us to recognize that he, risen from the dead, is beside us, wanting to help resolve our doubts, wanting to extend to us one-on-one his mercy in whichever way we need it, wanting to give us his peace. And Jesus is hoping that we will entrust ourselves to him in return, just like Thomas did.
• At the end of the scene, Jesus alludes somewhat explicitly to us. He finishes the restoration and resurrection of the Doubting-Turned-Confessing apostle by stating, “Have you come to believe because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed.” Earlier 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 how lucky he was that he had “seen [Jesus] with his eyes.” There is indeed beatitude in beholding 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 has not seen him with physical eyes but still believes. The ultimate test of faith is when we don’t see with the eyes of our body or probe with our hands or index fingers, but make the same act of faith in Jesus as we see Thomas make. 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, “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 bring whatever doubts we have to Jesus in personal encounter, to confess him as not just “the” Lord and God but also “my” Lord and God, to grow in faith, hope and love in him, and, in the midst of all the anxieties that trouble our age, to trust in his divine mercy.
• Jesus said to St. Faustina during his appearances to her in the 1930s, “Humanity will not find peace until it turns trustfully to divine mercy.” As we, in this Mass, offer the Eternal Father in heaven Jesus’ body, blood, soul and divinity, we ask him, who is Rich in Mercy, to help us trust in that way so that we may lead the world on the path of lasting peace. We ask him to help us entrust ourselves fully to our Victor King, to the Lamb who redeems the sheep, to the sinless Messiah who reconciles us sinners to the Father. We beg for the grace to sing “his Mercy endures forever” and to become compelling, credible troubadours of the peace to which that mercy leads on our campus and beyond. We beg, on this Divine Mercy Sunday, for the grace 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,” the one who comes to us in this continuation of the Upper Room and says to us anew, “Peace be with you!,” to send 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!”

These were the readings for Mass: 

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.