One of the greatest effects of the Paschal Mystery of Jesus’s Death and Resurrection is our liberation from sin, making possible new life already here as we anticipate the fullness of that new life in Heaven. This liberation from sin was given to us despite humanity’s infidelity over and over again throughout history. Fittingly, the invocation from the Litany of the Sacred Heart that I have chosen for this Divine Mercy Sunday on which we celebrate this gift of liberation from sin is the following:
Heart of Jesus, patient and rich in mercy, have mercy on us
As we hear in the Gospel for today’s Mass, Jesus gave to His Apostles the ability to be instruments of this mercy when, after breathing on them, He says: “Receive the holy Spirit. Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, and whose sins you retain are retained.” (Jn 20:22b-23) We know all too well the sad reality that, after we have been liberated from sin through the Sacrament of Baptism, we still fall into sin. Over and over again, we stumble, but the Lord shows His patience toward us by inviting us to bring those sins to Him through His priests in the Sacrament of Reconciliation and to have that liberation renewed. There are no limits to this mercy. It is not as though we have a finite number of times that we can go to confession, or that there are only a certain number of times that we can confess the same sins before that mercy runs out. Quite the contrary! Jesus’s Sacred Heart is rich in mercy toward of all His children. All that He asks is that we ask for it, and He will surely give it to us.
Thanks be to God, this message of Divine Mercy has been very popular over the past few decades, especially since Pope St. John Paul II canonized St. Faustina Kowalska, the Apostle of Divine Mercy, in the Jubilee Year of 2000. So many of Jesus’s messages given to her highlight just how profound this gift of mercy is. One passage in particular from her Diary is one I love to meditate on:
Let the greatest sinners place their trust in My mercy. They have the right before others to trust in the abyss of My mercy. My daughter, write about My mercy towards tormented souls. Souls that make an appeal to My mercy delight Me. To such souls I grant even more graces than they ask. I cannot punish even the greatest sinner if he makes an appeal to My compassion, but on the contrary, I justify him in My unfathomable and inscrutable mercy. (Diary, 1146)
It is hard to for us to grasp how our appealing for His mercy as we acknowledge our sins brings delight to Him. After all, every sin we commit is an offense against Him and it can be very embarrassing to have to bring those sins to confession. On the other hand, our appealing to Him for His mercy in the Sacrament of Reconciliation is an affirmation and an act of thanksgiving for the gift of His sacrifice on the Cross, that it was not in vain. He willingly died for us, so that when we find ourselves separated from Him by sin, we have an outlet to be restored to that new life His Resurrection won for us. This indeed is the Good News of the Resurrection that we continue to celebrate with Easter!