Today is the Octave of Easter, meaning that it has been Easter Day all week long, culminating today. This Octave Day has lately been given the name Divine Mercy Sunday as a way of attesting to the fact that the Easter Resurrection is the epitome of the Divine Mercy revealed to us in the Paschal Mystery of our redemption: the Passion, Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. We need not look to the writings of St. Faustina or to a somewhat recent liturgical directive for the origin of the name for this Sunday: it is rooted in the New Testament, most explicitly in the First Epistle of St. Peter, our first pope. He writes, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who in his great mercy ( IN HIS GREAT MERCY!) gave us a new birth to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.”
We hear in this passage the resurrection of our Lord Jesus as the manifestation of the the Divine Mercy. This outpouring of the Divine Mercy upon all humanity began two thousand years ago in the mysteries of Christ that we celebrated in Holy Week and the Paschal Triduum. It is radically applied to each of us by the Holy Spirit's work in the Church at our baptism and confirmation. That new birth is nourished through the Word of God and the Eucharist and other sacraments: among those other sacraments particularly the sacrament of Reconciliation. As the Lord's Paschal Mystery began he instituted the Eucharist at the Last Supper in which he stated upon taking up the chalice, “Drink from it all of you, for this is my blood of the New Covenant, which will be shed on behalf of many for the forgiveness of sins.” Then, days later, as Easter Day of the Lord's Resurrection was drawing to a close, the risen Christ appeared among the apostles and instituted the sacrament of Reconciliation with the words, “Receive the Holy Spirit. Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, and whose sins you retain are retained.” There is, thus, an arc of Divine Power stretching from one sacrament of Mercy to another—from the Eucharist to Reconciliation—an arc of sacramental power that is generated by the saving events of the Passion, Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior.
The apostles had locked themselves up in a state of fear. The Divine Mercy in the person of the risen Christ came miraculously into the room to mercifully free them from fear through the gift of His Peace and to give to them a share in the Father's love and mercy towards us. Jesus says to them, “As the Father sent me, so I send you.” I think that if you put the emphasis on the word “As” in this sentence you can interpret it to mean, “The intention with which the Father sent me is the intention with which I send you and empower you in turn to have.” What is that intention? The Gospel of John spells it out very clearly at John 3:16-17, “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.”
We, all of us Christians, are sent by our merciful Father through his Son, who poured out his love for us. With that, we ourselves become for the world vessels of divine mercy. Too often in the past and at times still in the present, we Christians have been vessels of wrath and condemnation. We see the witness of Pope Francis to reconcile the Church with marginalized, alienated groups and peoples throughout the world—efforts that are sometimes highly scorned. We hear in the Gospel this morning how Our Lord approaches Thomas the Doubter so gently as to help him to come to belief in the risen Jesus to the point that Thomas makes the most explicit, the strongest statement in the whole New Testament about who Jesus really is: “My Lord and My God!” Again, as St. Peter writes in the First Epistle, “Always be ready to give an explanation to anyone who asks you for a reason for your hope, but do it with gentleness and reverence, keeping your conscience clear...”
When I was a kid, I had the Sisters of Mercy in Our Lady of Mercy School in Our Lady of Mercy Parish in East Greenwich, R.I. I suppose you could call that “Mercy upon Mercy upon Mercy.” They taught us to say as a silent prayer in our adoring hearts the exclamation of St. Thomas the Apostle at the moment in the mass when the priest held up the host after the consecration: “My Lord and my God!” May our reception of the Holy Eucharist transform us into apostles of Divine Mercy in this world that God loves so much as to send his Son to die for us that we might live His risen life.
