Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Second Sunday of Easter (A), Vigil
April 18, 2020
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. It’s a dialogue that happened on the night Jesus 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 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. 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 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 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, because 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 today, 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.
- We don’t have time to cover this devotion, approved by the Church, in depth, but it features five elements: stopping each day at 3 pm, when Christ breathed his last on Calvary, to implore his mercy and bring him our prayers; venerating him in the image of Divine Mercy, by which he, risen from the dead, blesses us and asks us to trust in him; praying 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; praying a novena, starting from Good Friday, in which we bring to Jesus various groups of people in need of his mercy; and finally Divine Mercy Sunday, when we celebrate the end of the Easter Octave and ponder in the Gospel Jesus’ establishment of the Sacrament of his Mercy on Easter evening.
- It’s a devotion that can be applied powerfully to different aspects of the coronavirus pandemic
- First, with regard to the praying for the end of Covid-19, Jesus made an extraordinary promise about the hour of mercy. “In that hour,” he said, “I will deny nothing to the soul that asks me in the name of my Passion.” Just like New Yorkers stop at 7 pm now to cheer on health care works, Catholics should stop at 3 pm to turn to Jesus and, on account of the merits of his suffering, death and resurrection, entreat him to free the world of this pandemic and to help those who have contracted the virus.
- Second, concerning those who are dying, Jesus similarly made an extraordinary promise about the chaplet. Jesus asked priests 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 priests have seen conversions at deathbeds during or after praying the chaplet. I’ve heard several similar stories during the pandemic.
- Third, regarding health care workers, who are courageously and generously caring for those who are sick, we can regularly be asking Jesus in the Divine Mercy image to pour out his mercy upon them and through them — and to help them entrust themselves, and their patients, to his merciful care.
- For all three of these intentions, it would be good to make together a perpetual novena of Divine Mercy, similar to the one Jesus asked for, praying that all concerned “draw from [the fount of his mercy] strength and refreshment and whatever graces they need in the hardships of life and, especially, at the hour of death.”
- Normally on Divine Mercy Sunday we celebrate God’s mercy understood principally as forgiveness of sin, but we know that Jesus’ mercy was similarly extended in healing the sick, which was a quasi-sacramental corporeal sign of what Jesus wishes to do for our souls.
- This Divine Mercy Sunday is an opportunity to implore, both as we give God thanks for his mercy that endures forever and avail ourselves more fully of the means he has given us to implore it. God bless you!
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