Mercy Is a Way of Life, or It Is Not Mercy

Second Sunday of Easter

I want to talk to you about the people in your life who do not believe in God, those who lack faith, maybe those who have left the Church; the people you worry about and for whom you pray. Do you think those people know who God is? Do you think those people know the God they are rejecting, or is the ‘god’ they reject a fiction, a caricature, of the real God? A ‘god’ who hates or kills or condemns or lets people die and suffer needlessly?

Maybe we need to start with a different question: Who is God? God is love, says St. John. What is love? The dictionary says that love is a deep feeling of affection. Maybe we can do better. St. Thomas says that to love is to will the good of the other, to make a choice to will what is best for another person, to pattern your life around working for the good of someone else. Maybe we can say more. St. Paul says that God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. There, I think, is a good definition of love: Love is willing the good of the other in a way that requires self-sacrifice, giving yourself away. To love is to give yourself away, maybe to the point of death, for the good of someone else.

You probably know these truths already. You know that Christ died for you. You probably know that God is love and that love is to give yourself away for the good of someone else. But do you live differently because of your knowledge of the truth? Is the Christ you know a fact, the kind of fact you can commit to memory but that never really impacts your life, or is your life different because you have met the Christ who died for you?

Something fascinating happens in the Gospel today. Thomas touches the wounds of Christ and then claims that Christ is God. “My Lord and my God,” he says. Thomas makes a movement from human woundedness—nail marks in flesh of the palm, a laceration from a spear in the flesh of the torso—and comes to know who God is. Who is God? God is love. And what is love? Giving yourself away, giving your life away, for the sake of someone else. From wounds to God through Christ. That is the essential movement of Christian faith, the essential connection. The wounded flesh of Christ, there is the proof that God is love.

Most of the people you know who do not believe in God, I would wager, have not encountered the wounds of Christ and then rejected God. Most of the people you know who lack faith or who have left the Church never make the movement from wounded human flesh through Christ to God. The essential connection—that Christ is God and that the wounds of Christ reveal the deep truth that God wills our good through self-gift and self-sacrifice—is a connection that is ignored or forgotten by too many in the world today. The ‘god’ who is rejected by unbelievers is a disincarnated caricature of ‘god’, an image of a ‘god’ who has never existed, a ‘god’ who is an abstraction, a mental fiction, a ‘god’ who judges and condemns and hates and kills; not the God of history; not the God who suffers and dies for us.

The essential connection between Christ and God is lost on many today, even on those who believe. The theologian Romano Guardini once wrote:

If anyone should ask: What is certain in life and death, so certain that everything else may be anchored in it? The answer is: The love of Christ. Life teaches us that this is the only true reply. Not people, not even the best and dearest; not science, or philosophy, or art or any other product of human genius. Also, not nature, which is so full of profound deception; neither time nor fate. Not even simply ‘God’; for his wrath has been roused by sin, and how without Christ would we know what to expect from him? Only Christ's love is certain. We cannot even say God's love; for that God loves us we also know, ultimately, only through Christ.

Only Christ’s love is certain. We cannot know God if we do not know Christ. And we cannot know that God is love unless the Christ we confront is the Christ with nail marks in the flesh of his palms and a laceration in the flesh of his torso. That is the Christ who wills our good to the point of death. That is the Christ who is our Lord and our God, the Christ who reveals to us that God is love.

I don’t think that most people who do not believe in God know that God is love. And if those who do not believe in God do not know that God is love, how could they ever come to recognize the reality of God’s mercy? St. Thomas gives a definition of mercy that comes so near to his definition of love that there can be no doubt that mercy has everything to do with the identity of God. He says that mercy is “the compassion in our hearts for another person's misery, a compassion which drives us to do what we can to help him.” Love and mercy are God, are who God is, and the person who does not know that God is love cannot know the reality of God’s mercy.

There, then, is another question for us: How is someone who does not know God supposed to learn that God is love and discover the mercy that is offered to us in Christ?

The other day I asked a friend what I should know about Divine Mercy. Here is the answer I received:

I don’t have any wild insight.

I think the greatest thing I’ve learned from St. Faustina and St. Therese about why devotion to divine mercy is so important, is because it is so rejected by the world. God’s mercy is one (if not the most) gentle and generous and completely unnecessary things he gives to us and is to us. But people turn their nose up to it and reject mercy deeply and often.

We have an ability to not only accept God’s mercy, but to live as intercessors for those who reject mercy. And, also, to live as conduits of God’s mercy.

Maybe those last words are worth repeating: We can live as intercessors for those who reject mercy, and we can live as conduits of God’s mercy.

My guess is that most of you, because you are here worshipping, know that God is love and that through Christ we receive the gift of divine mercy. My question is: What are you doing with the mercy you have received? Are you keeping it to yourself, or is the mercy you have received reflected in how you live? Are you a conduit of divine mercy for others? Is your experience of divine mercy something that drives your prayer life only, something that fills your heart with a desire for greater devotion, or is your heart also filled with divine compassion for the misery of others, a compassion that drives you to live differently, to love and to serve and to will the good of others and to give yourself away through sacrifice so that someone other than yourself might be healed and restored and behold the wounds of Christ and come to know that Christ is God and that God is love?

More and more, I am not so certain that Christians want to live a life of divine mercy. We know the basic facts—God is love, and through Christ we have received the gift of mercy—but we are not living differently because we have met the Christ who died for us. The knowledge is there in our heads, but our hearts remain unconverted. We see the poverty of others, their sin and their brokenness and the evil there in their lives, and we do not respond with the compassion that caused Christ to die for our sake. The sin of others does not cause us to love more; the brokenness of others does not fill our hearts with the mercy that is God; the evil there in the lives of others does not overwhelm us with a desire to sacrifice for their good. How do we respond? With judgment and condemnation, and then we go to pray.

And what is the consequence? Now, we who believe have turned God into a disincarnated caricature, the image of a ‘god’ who never existed, a ‘god’ who is a mental fiction, a ‘god’ who tells us that those who seek to save their lives must . . . save them by way of prayer and devotion. And this is not the God of history, the God who suffers and dies for us, the God seen through the Christ who reveals to Thomas the wounds in his hands and side. The God of history tells us that to save our lives we must lose them.

The reality of divine mercy is more than a devotion; the reality of divine mercy cannot be reduced to holy hours and rosary beads and chaplets; it is a way of life, or it is not mercy. No one who keeps the mercy of God to themselves has really accepted the mercy that God bestows; no one who limits the reality of divine mercy to pious practices and private prayer has experienced the kind of conversion that mercy works on the woundedness of our broken human nature.

The people in your life who do not believe in God, who lack faith, maybe have left the Church, these people need to see God in the world; they need to know who God is. Christ tells Thomas in today’s Gospel: Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed. What do those words mean? To my mind, those words mean that most people will not receive the opportunity to touch the wounds in the flesh of Christ and come to believe in God. So, how is anyone supposed to discover that God is love, and that God is mercy? How is anyone supposed to come to know who God is? How is anyone supposed to believe in God’s mercy without seeing Christ in the flesh? Through us, is the answer I want to give; they will see the mercy of God in how we live, the members of his body, or they might never see Christ at all. The divine mercy of God, the love we see there hanging on the Cross, the sacrifice glimpsed by Thomas in the wounded flesh of Christ, is that the mercy you reveal to the world? Is that the God you reveal to the world with your life? 

Homily preached on April 15th/16th at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary