St. Pope John Paul II dedicated this Sunday to Divine Mercy. The Gospel is about the risen Jesus coming to the disciples on both Easter Sunday night and this second Sunday. He says “Peace” to them. He is not chiding them for their abandonment of him, but telling them, “I am at peace with you.” The peace Jesus is talking about is the peace of being “at one” or “atoned” that is a gift of God. It was this peace that Jesus prayed for them as part of his Farewell Discourse on Holy Thursday (John 14:27) He initiates the gift of it to the disciples and continues to initiate it to us today. It is the peace of Divine Mercy.
Devotion to Divine Mercy is essentially the same as devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. It is a recognition of God’s capacity and desire to approach our sins with his mercy, as well as the ability of the Church through its priests to forgive sins and reconcile God and humanity.
As I have prayed with our readings this week, a phrase from the reading in 1 Peter has resonated with me, “safeguarded through faith.” It provides a clarifying lens for looking at all three readings.
1 Peter 1:3-9
Peter begins his letter: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who in his great mercy gave us a new birth to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you who by the power of God are safeguarded through faith, to a salvation that is ready to be revealed in the final time.”
This new birth is Baptism with its gift of Faith. And this gift of Faith is meant to be a safeguard for our salvation. Let’s look at that for a moment.
Faith rests on belief, but it is much more than being able to say the Creed on Sunday or answer a poll “I believe in the Divine Presence in the Eucharist.” Faith begins as a gift of God. At baptism we receive this gift of faith. THEN, “By faith man completely submits his intellect and his will to God. With his whole being man gives his assent to God, the revealer. Sacred Scripture calls this human response to God, the author of revelation, “the obedience of faith.” (CCC 143)
For most of my life I did not realize that if I have supernatural Faith, my response will be to OBEY what faith calls me to do when it comes to how I live. Faith isn’t meant to stay in our intellects. It is meant to translate into atonement (being as one) with God–which requires I do my best every day to match God’s nature and ways.
Faith is a gift—that we receive with the invitation to live by it. When we receive and live by it, it is a safeguard—a fence of God around us—to protect us, lead us, and guide us.
Back when seatbelts in cars were a new thing, there was an advertisement, “Seat belts don’t work unless you use them.” Faith is a seat belt gift for us from God to keep us safe. But we must use it. 1 Peter was written several decades after Jesus’ resurrection. Christianity was encountering resistance from the culture of the day. It was creating rejection, persecution, and suffering. St. Peter, through this epistle, seeks to guide struggling Christians to maintain a life of obedience to faith.
Acts 2:42-47
I love the first line of this selection, “They devoted themselves to the teaching of the apostles and to the communal life, to the breaking of bread and to the prayers.” In that sentence you have the core parts of living a life of faith:
- “The teaching of the apostles”—eventually the Bible, the Creed, and Part 1 of the catechism, God’s Word through both Scripture and Magisterium.
- “The communal life”—living in close community with other believers—probably house churches at this point, but eventually parishes, religious orders, and the moral theology of Part 3 of the catechism.
- “To the breaking of bread”—doing what Jesus did when he said, “This is My Body,” eventually the Mass and all the sacraments, our lives of worship, Part 2 of the catechism
- “And to the prayers”—from the beginning, faith included “the prayers,” ways of keeping relationship with God at the forefront, Part 4 of the catechism.
This reading describes the church in Jerusalem right after Pentecost. Not only were there many who had seen Jesus risen from the dead, but the fire of the coming of the Holy Spirit on both apostles and ordinary folks was front row center in peoples minds and hearts.
And so they even had all things in common, did many wonders and signs, ate meals in exultation and sincerity of heart, and adding “to their number those who were being saved.” The emerging Christians were safeguarded well by how fully they lived their faith.
John 20:19-31
And so we come to the centerpiece—Jesus offering atonement to his disciples. By offering the gift of peace, Jesus did the forgiveness that could not only bring them back into his friendship, but also, now that he had arisen, make their lives and his intimately “at one” through his giving his life to them. He breathed on them to give them his Divine Life.
As he talked about all that with Thomas, he demonstrated the effects of genuine confession (Thomas’s) and God’s offer of atonement: an increase in Faith in Thomas.
Then, Jesus extended the offer of atonement through the centuries: he gave the disciples-soon-to-be-apostles the ability to forgive sins via reconciliation, another word for atonement. This Scripture is the foundation for the Sacrament of Reconciliation—of Confession. Reconciliation is an interesting word. Let’s look at it:
Re-a prefix that means again
Con-together
Cilia—the tiny hairs that move food along in our digestive system
-ation—an action
A former pastor broke the word reconciliation down that way and said, “Reconciliation is the action that pulls us into the body of God again and moves us along within Him. It puts us in the inner workings of God’s Being and makes us at-one with God.”
Wow!
I love that meaning, that perspective. Reconciliation–accepting God’s invitation to receive Divine Mercy–is the action of returning us to the gift of faith we had at Baptism. Through Confession, our common name for the Sacrament of Reconciliation, we can come again to a fullness of the safeguard of faith.
Applications
Jesus renewed his promise and desire to reconcile all to himself through visions and locutions to a nun in Poland in the 1930s. St. Faustina was a country girl, born in 1905 near Krakow. She died there in 1938, less than a year before German armies invaded Poland. Not far away, also in Poland, the future St. Pope John Paul II was born in 1920 in Wadowice—only 19 miles from the infamous Auschwitz Concentration Camp.
God put two saints in the middle of the evils of World War II–years before that war began. It was as if they were sentries to protect his Kingdom–from within the middle of the awfulness of the evil.
Just like he put the apostles in the Upper Room on these Easter Sunday nights—right in the middle of the Jewish-Roman world that had just crucified Jesus. Just like he put the Christians Peter addressed in his letter.
Just like he puts me and you. Jesus “did not come to condemn the world, but that the world through him might be saved.” (John 3:17) He reconciled his disciples on two Easter Sunday nights. He gave them peace, forgiveness, and healing which could only come from Faith born through the Holy Spirit.
He gives all that to us through Faith, sacrament, moral communal living, and prayer today. He still gives us safeguards to preserve us, albeit through repeated times in the confessional, study of a much more complicated catechism, and membership in a still far from perfect Church.
Prayer:
Lord, I am grateful for your gifts of Faith and Atonement. In my life I have been too often dependent on your Divine Mercy. And, too often, I still desire to run away when you make me a means of atonement for others from inside the middle of human evils. Forgive me again, Lord, and let the gift of Faith you give me sustain me, lead me, and comfort me when you put me in the middle of suffering and evil. Lead me, guide me, Lord.
