On Mercy Sunday it is good to remember the words of the prophet Hosea and the addition that Jesus puts in these words “for I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners” (Mt 9:13). Asking for mercy and acting with mercy are two necessary actions for a healthy fraternal life. This Sunday’s readings invite us to reflect on community, truth and peace.
The first reading invites us to “enjoy great esteem among the people“. From the community and in synodality we can examine whether the people of God really esteem us and above all trust us. Faced with this situation and this reality, it occurs to me to reflect with you: are we credible in the face of this change of era we are living in? The apostles, faced with the experience of an encounter with the Risen Jesus, change their narrative, their way of feeling life. From uncertainty about the future to confidence, from being few to being fewer and supported by many lay people who belonged to the first community. From worrying about money to making available everything they had by distributing what everyone needed. When religious consecration becomes self-referential “the great signs of power” come from a different side, we cease to be in love with the Lord to become the accommodated of “our” Lord. The community is ideologized as a group and not as brothers. When mercy comes into our hearts we accompany with affection and tenderness: the brother who does not accept his illness, the person who looks for defects rather than goodness, the unaccompanied minor migrant, the searching mother, those who find themselves in the human trafficking network… The same s. Augustine in one of his sermons “One speaks of mercy when the misery of others touches and shakes your heart. Therefore, my brethren, consider that all the good works that we do in this life fall under mercy..” (Serm. 358A, 1).
Today the second reading invites us to act in truth from the love that overcomes the world. To speak of love in the midst of so many victims and so much injustice is an obligation. We have reached this scale of violence, perhaps because we are more occupied with personal rigidity that leads to spiritual mediocrity and ecclesial infighting than with the unjust suffering of so many people who are victims of war. Let us remember that love, charity is not a kind of social assistance activity that could also be left to others, but belongs to the nature of the Church and is an inalienable manifestation of her very essence. Let’s look for authentic love in the periphery that helps us to offer more participative and real solutions, less legal and rigid, feeling that the Spirit of truth is in the simple situations at the core of one’s life: “love and be loved“which is the pillar that supports a life full of mercy.
In today’s Gospel Jesus wishes us peace three times and a sending. Is there peace in your heart? Peace comes to the heart of each one of us when we make gestures of mercy. God knows that without mercy we are left lying on the ground, that in order to walk we need to be put back on our feet. Therefore, he first gives us peace, then the Spirit and then shows us his wounds. They are movements to be sent and to be stewards of his mercy. We receive this power not because of merits, studies, social recognition… it is a gift of grace, which rests on the experience of being forgiven. When we live the mercy of Jesus in our lives, the words we recite in the Liturgy of the Hours make sense: “his mercy endures forever“.
May this Divine Mercy Sunday remind us that we are artisans of peace, custodians of truth and creators of community.
Fr. Francisco Javier OAR