The Divine Mercy That Makes Our Sins Happy Faults, Divine Mercy Sunday, April 16, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx, NY
Divine Mercy Sunday
April 16, 2023
Acts 2:42-47, Ps 118, 2 Pet 1:3-9, Jn 20:19-31

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

The following text guided the homily: 

• Last Saturday night, in the Easter Vigil, the Church throughout the world solemnly sung something that at first hearing might seem to border on blasphemy, as deacons or priest-deacons, in the Easter Proclamation, chanted, referring to Adam’s and Eve’s sin in the beginning, “O Felix Culpa!,” “O happy fault, that earned so great, so glorious a Redeemer!” The idea behind calling any sin — Adam’s, Eve’s or ours — blessed is normally attributed to St. Augustine, but it’s a really a paraphrase of what St. Augustine said. The famous convert of Hippo had actually written, “For God judged it better to bring good out of evil than not to permit any evil to exist.” And it’s likely that he was influenced not only by his experience of the multitude of sins of his youth that eventually brought him such a great Redeemer and led him to write about it in his famous “Confessions,” but by the preaching of the saintly bishop who had helped bring him to conversion in Milan. St. Ambrose would often from different angles stress this theme, something that may have helped St. Augustine realize that God wanted to transform the manure of his past into fertilizer for new growth. “The Lord knew that Adam would fall and then be redeemed by Christ,” St. Ambrose declared. “O happy ruin, which has such a beautiful reparation!” (Commentary on Ps 39:20). Elsewhere he said, “We who have sinned more have gained more, because your grace [of mercy, Lord] makes us more blessed than our absence of fault does” (Commentary on Ps 37:47). And in one of the Prefaces of the Ambrosian Liturgical rite, the priest sings to God, “You bent down over our wounds and healed us, giving us a medicine stronger than our afflictions, a mercy greater than our fault. In this way even sin, by virtue of your invincible love, served to elevate us to the divine life” (Sunday XVI). So strong is this line of thought penetrating the Exsultet, that later the Church sings, “Our birth would have been no gain had we not been redeemed.” Were it not for Christ’s redemption, it would have been better for us — just like Jesus had said about the one who would betray him — never to have been born.
• But the roots of the shocking expression about the felix culpa of Adam and Eve go back far before Saints Ambrose and Augustine. There are deep Scriptural foundations for this profound Easter affirmation. St. Paul told us in his letter to the Romans, “All things,” and here can we think of our sins, faults and failings, “work together for the God for those who love God, for those who are called according to his purpose.” Jesus himself would say, in the great chapter 15 of St. Luke’s Gospel, about the Lost Sheep, Lost Coin and Lost Son: “Heaven rejoices more for one repentant sinner than for 99 who never needed to repent!” And we see that truth played out in Simon the Pharisee’s house when Jesus defends the sinful woman who washed his feet with her tears and dried them with her hair. Jesus affirmed that the one who has been forgiven little loves little, but the “one who has been forgiven much, loves much.” We grow to love Jesus in correspondence to how much we’ve experienced his mercy. And the more we receive his mercy, the bigger the celestial celebration.
• The future Pope Francis commented in a 2010 book-length interview about this central truth of the Catholic faith, when he declared, “For me, feeling oneself a sinner is one of the most beautiful things that can happen, if it leads to its ultimate consequences.” We sing “O Felix culpa” at the Easter Vigil, he said, because “when a person becomes conscious that he is a sinner and is saved by Jesus, he proclaims this truth to himself and discovers the pearl of great price, the treasure buried in the field. He discovers the greatest thing in life: that there is someone who loves him profoundly, who gave his life for him.” Unfortunately, Cardinal Bergoglio said, “There are people … who don’t want to see” this truth, and “who therefore lack the experience of who they are. I believe that only we great sinners have this grace.”
• That’s why today’s celebration of Divine Mercy is so important.
• In the moving Gospel we heard a few minutes ago, 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 said, “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 three nights prior. 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 salvific 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, better advantage of it and better explain it 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 … 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 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 mercy and Easter 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 has called confession “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 Christ Jesus!
• That’s why it’s so fitting today, as we conclude the Easter Octave, to celebrate Divine Mercy Sunday. 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.
• 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.”
• I was present the day of St. Faustina’s canonization in St. Peter’s Square as a newly ordained priest and it was one of the biggest conversion experiences of my priesthood. 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, in fact 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 made as a special task for me when Pope Francis appointed me in 2015 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 brings about in people. I rejoiced that I would have the opportunity, returning to parish work in Massachusetts, to bring this message and to celebrate Divine Mercy Sunday joyfully each year as the culmination of the Easter octave. I rejoice to be able to celebrate it with you today.
• What’s the Divine Mercy devotion all about? It’s about doing for Jesus’ love for us in the Sacrament of Confession what Eucharistic adoration has done for Jesus’ love for us in the Sacrament of the Eucharist. With the 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. 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.
• One of the great crises today is that many people have lost an awareness of the power of God’s mercy because they don’t think they need it. There’s an eclipse of conscience and a loss of the sense of sin that Pope Pius XII once said was the greatest sin of the twentieth century. Saint John Paul II commented that secularism — living as if God does not exist — eventually leads us to seek to eliminate all vestiges of God from our daily life. We reduce sin from what offends God to what offends man. We deny or relativize moral norms we don’t like. Rather than take responsibility for our free actions, we blame our failings on our upbringing, on society, on others or on the devil. Many are tempted, he wrote, “to replace exaggerated attitudes of the past with other exaggerations: From seeing sin everywhere they pass to not recognizing it anywhere; from too much emphasis on the fear of eternal punishment they pass to preaching a love of God that excludes any punishment deserved by sin; from severity in trying to correct erroneous consciences they pass to a kind of respect for conscience that excludes the duty of telling the truth.” The world wants various sins to be canonized, not confessed and absolved. But the Lamb of God came into the world to take away sin, not to hallow it. The truth is, as Jesus revealed in the Gospel, that only sinners need a Savior; only the sick need a physician (Mk 2:17). The only way we will appreciate the depth of the Lord’s merciful love is to grasp, as we confess at the beginning of each Mass, that “I have greatly sinned … through my own most grievous fault.” Jesus wants us to help us to grow in love of him loving us in this way. The Divine Mercy Devotion helps us to recognize our and the whole world’s need for his mercy, to ask for it, to receive it deeply, and to pay it forward. It transforms us so that we might become, like God, rich in mercy.
• When Jesus appeared to St. Faustina beginning in 1931, he sketched out for her as his “secretary” how he wanted us to trust in his mercy and ask for it, and how he wanted us to extend his merciful love with others. Jesus didn’t teach us anything new about his merciful love that he had not taught us in the Gospel, but he revealed to us five practices by which we could deepen our gratitude for and grow in his Divine Mercy.
  • The first is Divine Mercy Sunday, which we’re celebrating today for the 23rd time.
  • The second is a novena to prepare for Divine Mercy Sunday, beginning Good Friday and concluding yesterday. Jesus gave St. Faustina an intention for each day of the novena. He 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; those who have separated themselves from the Church; the meek and humble and children; those who venerate the mercy of Jesus; those in Purgatory; and the lukewarm.
  • The third is to pray to him through the image of Divine Mercy. As we see in today’s Gospel, St. Thomas was invited by Christ to touch his wounds, to put his hand into Christ’s side from which flowed Blood and Water as a sign of his merciful love. The Lord revealed to St. Faustina that he desired an image to be made in which the power of his wounds would be prominent: “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.” We come to Jesus in this image in order to immerse ourselves in the Living Water and Precious Blood that brings us to salvation.
  • The fourth is to pray the Chaplet of Divine Mercy. This is something that people can pray 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 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.”
  • The last and perhaps most important of all is to pray particularly at three in the afternoon, the time in which Jesus died on the Cross, invoking the Mercy of the Lord. 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.” Jesus gave three indispensable conditions to hear prayers made at the hour of Mercy: the prayer has to be directed to him, take place at three, and invoke the value and merits of his passion. It can be as simple as, “Jesus by the merits of your passion, have mercy on us and all the whole world,” or even, “Kyrie, eleison!”
• Each of these five practices is meant to help us grow in love of the Lord’s mercy, to seek it, receive it, live it and share it. Just like Eucharistic adoration prepares us better to receive the Lord Jesus and speak about the power of the Real Presence to others, so the Divine Mercy devotion helps us better to receive the “Sacrament of Resurrection” and to help others come to receive God’s forgiveness as well. It’s important for us to take advantage of the gift of this devotion to grow in holy appreciation of the immensity of what Jesus gives us. 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 become more like Christ and share his love and mercy. It’s through receiving his Divine Mercy in the Sacrament he established on Easter night lavishly to dispense it, that our sins, however scarlet, become white and our offenses become happy faults that deepen our bond with so great a Redeemer!
• 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 grant us the courage never to tire of receiving what He never tires to give 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, to send the Holy Spirit for the remission of our sins and those of the whole world and to help us 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, “Jesus, I trust in you!”

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download