2nd Sunday of Easter (Sunday of Divine Mercy) – April 27, 2025

St. Paul – Lyons, KS

Acts 5:12-16; Psalm 118:2-4, 13-15, 22-24; Revelation 1:9-11a, 12-13, 17-19; John 20-19-31

The Legacy of Pope Francis

Even though it seems like it was weeks ago—or maybe that’s just how the news cycle makes things feel, just an overload of information—I think it is important to begin today with a word about the passing of our beloved Holy Father, Pope Francis—his funeral just yesterday morning and now as we enter these (what’s called the) novemdiales, these nine days of mourning. I was in my first year of seminary when Pope Francis was elected, and so he has very much shaped my formation and priesthood. But especially the early years of his pontificate—those early years changed me. One of the most important being his insistence on a common theme from the previous popes (from Paul VI, John Paul II, Benedict XVI)—the insistence on a new evangelization.

But what struck me the most (and I think it is providential, especially for this Sunday of Divine Mercy)—what struck me the most—it was his insistence on mercy. Soon after his election, he was being interviewed and the interviewer asked him, “Who is Jorge Mario Bergoglio?” And Pope Francis replied, “I am a sinner.…I am a sinner whom the Lord has looked upon with mercy.” Mercy. A while later the story came out about the moment he was elected. So during the conclave when a cardinal receives the number of votes needed to be elected he is formally asked, “Acceptasne?”—which is Latin for “Do you accept?” And the normal response is “Accepto”—“I accept.” But Jorge Mario Bergoglio, when he was asked, “Acceptasne?”—he responded, “I am a sinner, but having relied upon the mercy and infinite patience of our Lord Jesus Christ and in a spirit of penance, I accept.” Mercy. We are in the Jubilee Year of Hope right now, but even before this, out of the blue, ten years ago, Pope Francis announced a different Jubilee Year—the Jubilee Year of Mercy. Mercy. What struck me the most about the pontificate of Pope Francis was his emphasis on mercy, divine mercy, mercy as the essential content of our faith. 

And today, on this octave day of Easter, this culmination of our Easter celebration—today our attention is called to the simple fact that mercy… mercy is the cornerstone of the new narrative, the new story begun on Easter morning with that simple announcement: “He has been raised.”

The Limit of Death vs. The Infinite Horizon of Mercy

As I started talking about last Sunday, on Easter, we all live our lives according to a narrative, a story. Each and every one of us has a narrative in our lives, that we are either conscious of or not—but we have this narrative that gives meaning and purpose to our lives. Maybe that’s the American dream, maybe it’s our own hopes and dreams, whatever. And again, these are usually full of good things, beautiful things. But what is the problem we run into? Exactly, we run into a problem, our limits. We run into the limits of our careers, our money, our time, our patience, our health, our ability to control the situations and circumstances of our lives. We run into these limits. Ultimately we run into the limit of death. Even if everything in life goes according to our wildest hopes and dreams—our life is still haunted by the limit, the problem of death.

But with the announcement, “He has been raised”—that announcement opens a new horizon in our life, a new destiny, a new “narrative” that can never be threatened. And—to skip over all of the boring theology that you would fall asleep during if I tried to explain it—to sum it up, the announcement is the announcement that there is something that knows no limit! And that is the mercy of God. Mercy—mercy knows no limit. Mercy is infinite. Mercy and mercy alone opens up a new horizon, a new destiny.

It is no coincidence that the very first thing that Jesus does (we hear this in our Gospel today)—the very first “marching orders” that Jesus gives to the Church, the Church represented by the gathering of the Apostles, the Apostolic Church—Jesus commands them, “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” Ok, sent to do what? “Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them.” The forgiveness of sins, mercy. The first “marching orders” to the Church are that the Church be a place, a concrete expression of mercy. The mission of the Church is a mission of salvation, a mission of mercy, a continuation of the mercy of Jesus Christ. Again, what was one of Pope Francis’ favorite images of the Church? Famously he said, “I see the church as a field hospital after battle.” In other words, the Church is not a places where all of the perfect people hang out, a “museum of saints,” he would say. No, the Church is a hospital for sinners, a place where mercy, salvation, healing is given.

The Challenge: Embrace Our Belonging to the Church Whose Content Is Mercy

So like I said last week, a lot of us show up on Easter with a simple faith: we believe that this man rose from the dead. The challenge—the challenge, though, is to allow this pure and simple faith to shape our lives, to continue to shape our lives, to shape every part of our lives. Like Bernanos wrote, “Faith is not a thing which one ‘loses,’ we merely cease to shape our lives by it.” And so that, I think, is the question we need to explore—today and over the next few weeks. How does this faith, our faith that this man rose from the dead—how does this faith shape our lives? How are we going to let it shape our lives? How will we allow it to be more than just one more holiday that comes and goes?

And today, step one—I think our first point of allowing this faith to shape our lives is this: we have to embrace our belonging to the Church whose very content and life is mercy. What do I mean by that? Well, let me just say it briefly.

For most of us, we think of our faith as a personal relationship with Jesus—and that’s ok, we should have a “personal relationship” with Jesus. But first and foremost, our faith is larger, it is a belonging, a belonging to the Church, to the body of Jesus Christ. And a body is not ideas and spirit and prayer—a body is real, and tangible and physical. And as our patron St. Paul made quite clear in his letters, the body is the Church. We belong to Jesus Christ not in some isolated, personal, “me and Jesus” sort of way, no. We belong to Jesus in and through the Church by the power of the Holy Spirit. And so that is the first part: do we allow the Church to shape our lives by embracing, first and foremost, our belonging to the Church? Martin Luther—Luther’s key point in the Protestant Reformation was, “I have me, I don’t need you.” In other words, I can just have a direct relationship with God through faith and the Bible—I don’t need the Church, I don’t need to belong, I can just be me. Again, think of how many of our family and children and friends—even though they are Catholic, and still claim to be Catholic—how many of them live like this, saying that they have faith in Jesus’ resurrection, they believe in God, they are good people, but they reject the need to belong to the Church? To belong to Jesus Christ concretely in and through his body, which is the Church?

But also—before we get judgmental and pompous and “holier than thou”—how many of us, who are here, and are striving to belong—how many of us forget that the content, the essential content of our faith, is mercy? As many of you know I spent nine weeks during seminary in the Holy Land. And while we were there, one of the people told us about one of the Christian families living there. They were Christian Arabs, four daughters. Well, one of their daughters began secretly dating a Muslim boy—which was a big “no no.” But in the course of this, this boy secretly filmed them in their indiscretions, shared this with all of his friends. And when this became well known, this family, this Christian family … the family killed this daughter. Ok. Why do I bring that up? Because even though this family was Christian, even though they were part of the Church and striving to belong to Christ through the Church—on that day, in those events, their identity as Arabs, their cultural foundation as Arabs, their response to a situation like this was shaped by their Arabic culture. Mercy was not their response. At the end of the day, when push came to shove, they were Arabs, not Christians.

Ok. For us—now, we wouldn’t dream of responding that way in that situation. But that’s because that’s not how we would respond culturally. But think: how many times does our American and our Protestant culture (because we are a lot more Protestant than we think, it’s just the air we breathe as Americans, like it or not)—how many times does our Protestant-American culture win out in us? We don’t like the priest, so we go somewhere else? We don’t like the people, or someone in the parish makes us mad, and so we leave? We only come to Mass when we feel like it, because we think that we can just read our Bible at home and that’s enough? How many of us act one way on Sunday, but then once we leave we act a different way, judge others, exclude others, are cold to others? (Did you know that the number one accusation people have against us is that we are hypocrites? Facebook exploded with posts during Holy Week from people saying, “Oh look, here come all of these Christians pretending that Holy Week is so important but then they go around town acting like hypocrites.”) In other words, yeah, we aren’t going to “kill our daughter”—yeah, because that’s not the culture we live in. But how many of us struggle to live our belonging to the Church (because our Protestant-American culture says we can do this alone), and how many of us struggle to live mercy (do people in our community experience us as people of mercy, or just as hypocrites)?

The Easter Challenge

Like I said, Easter has opened up for us a new horizon, a new destiny. But the challenge for us now is to allow this new destiny to truly and radically shape our lives: belonging to this new narrative in and through the Church, and extending the mission of mercy to everyone. And especially as we remember Pope Francis, I think this is what we can’t let go of: mercy, our mission or mercy, to receive the mercy of God and to extend that mercy to everyone we meet.