Divine Mercy Sunday, Year A
First Reading: Acts 2:42-47
Second Reading: 1 Pt 1:3-9
Gospel Reading: Jn 20:19-31
In 2000, the Vatican decreed that next Sunday be designated Divine Mercy Sunday, “a perennial invitation to the Christian world to face, with confidence in divine benevolence, the difficulties and trials that mankind will experience in the years to come.”
In the Old Testament, the concept of mercy “has a long and rich history,” Pope John Paul II said in his 1980 encyclical Dives in Misericordia (“Rich in Mercy”). “In the preaching of the prophets, mercy signifies a special power of love, which prevails over the sin and infidelity of the chosen people.”
Christ revealed God as “rich in mercy” through his parables about the prodigal son, the good Samaritan, and the merciless servant. He compared himself to a good shepherd who searches for a lost sheep or a woman who sweeps the house to find a lost coin. He said, “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.”
However, it was on Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter Sunday that he fully revealed God’s mercy. During those days, God not only brought justice to bear upon the sin of the world, but also restored our access to holiness and supernatural life. It is appropriate, then, that Divine Mercy Sunday be the Sunday after Easter.
“Believing in the crucified Son means seeing the Father, believing that love is present in the world, and believing that this love is more powerful than any kind of evil in which individuals, humanity, or the world are involved,” the Pope said.
Indisputably, the virus now sweeping the world is a great physical evil, perhaps the greatest for some decades. Believing in God’s love and mercy at a time like this means believing that if he permits it, it is for the sake of some greater good.
As J.R.R. Tolkien said in a letter to his son, “Evil labours with vast power and perpetual success – in vain; preparing always only the soil for unexpected good to sprout in.”
Believing in God’s love “means believing in mercy, for mercy is an indispensable dimension of love; it is, as it were, love’s second name,” the Pope said. Mercy is “the specific manner” in which love is revealed and actualized in view of “the reality of the evil that is in the world.”
“Illness and suffering have always been among the gravest problems confronted in human life,” says the Catechism of the Catholic Church. “In illness, man experiences his powerless, his limitations, and his finitude. Every illness can make us glimpse death.”
Illness “becomes a way to conversion,” the Catechism says. Very often, it “provokes a search for God and a return to him.” It makes us “more mature,” helping us discern “what is not essential” in our lives so that we can “turn toward that which is.”
The present pandemic invites us to meditate on death, the immortality of the soul, God’s judgment, hell, purgatory, and heaven. At a Mass in November 1997, Pope John Paul called these realities “fundamental truths, which many try to hide today, when they are not able to place them in doubt or deny them completely.”
God cares for everything, “from the least things to the great events of the world and its history,” says the Catechism. However, much of the time, his ways are hidden from us. Only at the end of the world will we see the whole of his loving plan, and know fully how he has guided creation to its perfection, even “through evil and sin.”
Notice: “even through evil and sin.” As Jesus said in his parable, God does not uproot the weeds, but uses them to help the good seed to grow.
In the meantime, the Church continues to proclaim God’s mercy, which the Pope called his most “stupendous” attribute, and to bring mankind to its sources, of which she is the trustee and dispenser: principally God’s word, the Eucharist, and the sacrament of reconciliation.
