2nd Sunday after Easter (A):Divine Mercy Sunday 27th April 2014

Fr. Noel Connolly

This is Divine Mercy Sunday. Mercy has long been a neglected theme in theology but is a key theme in Old and New Testaments. "Mercy is the name for our God, and without mercy we are lost." Rules alone can make us harsh judges and rules were certainly not Jesus’ major concern. Jesus loved according to our need and not according to the amount of effort we put into being virtuous. Witness the prodigal son and the elder brother.

We must remember Jesus’ context. He was born into a Galilee trapped in debt. Most of the people he lived with were poor peasant farmers living on extremely small blocks of land that were barely able to support them and their families. Farming was always risky and then they were cruelly exploited by the landowners who demanded an excessive amount of the crop and by the Romans and the local ruler, Herod Antipas who taxed them to build the cities of Tiberias and Sephoris. They were extremely poor and tried to survive with some dignity and honour as many poor people still do today. A drought or sickness could easily cause these farmers to lose their land and then they were forced to become day-labourers and if that didn’t work beggars or prostitutes. These were Jesus’ friends and acquaintances and that is why they figure so frequently in the Gospels.

Much of their Jewish religion did not help because it concerned the Temple which they would not have had the money to visit or purity laws which they were too poor to keep. They often “sinned” and were strictly speaking untouchable. Yet Jesus often dined with “sinners”, touched and was touched by them. He doesn’t demand formal rites of repentance before they can join him. He understands that those who lack everything are also being condemned to live in shame and without even some honour and dignity. This does not mean that commandments are unimportant, but Jesus understands that spiritual progress takes time and right now they need acceptance, love and confidence. Grace and mercy come before judgement in the Kingdom of God.

Jesus’ experience of God was a God of life, mercy and healing not of worship and law. “I have come that you may have life and have it to the full.” [Jn. 10:10] Impelled by the God of life, Jesus went to those whom religion had forgotten, illness had marginalised and poverty dehumanised. Jesus’ God was a God of Life, so a God not of the righteous but of the suffering. Jesus loved according to need not according to effort, virtue or achievement. He didn’t try to reform their religious life but to help them live a healthier life, free from the power of evil and all that dehumanised them.

Sickness was common in Galilee in Jesus’ time. His neighbours and friends suffered many of the diseases of the poor. They were blind, paralysed, had skin diseases or were mentally ill. And as everyone was living on the edge of survival, the sick were often abandoned by neighbours, society and their religion and with no means to earn a living, reduced to begging. Jesus saw them by the roadside and loved them. Abandoned by God and humanity, stigmatised and excluded from community life, they were probably the most marginalised sector of Galilee society. That is why Jesus loved them. His highest concern was for the suffering and most unfortunate. He wanted to show them that God was especially with those who were suffering and abandoned.

Jesus’ healings were the practical demonstration of everything he preached. He not only healed the sick but restored them to relationships, to their families and their community. Jesus was contagious with health and life. The sick and abandoned no longer felt alone and he awakened previously unrecognised energy in people. He revolutionised their understanding of God and of themselves.

That is why Pope Francis insists that, “mercy is the greatest of the virtues, since all the others revolve around it and, more than this, it makes up for their deficiencies. This is particular to the superior virtue, and as such it is proper to God to have mercy, through which his omnipotence is manifested to the greatest degree”. Pope Francis uses the word “mercy” 32 times in his exhortation, The Joy of the Gospel and insists that what “the church needs most today is the ability to heal wounds and to warm the hearts of the faithful; it needs nearness, proximity. I see the church as a field hospital after battle.”

He wants us Christians to have warm, joyful, merciful hearts capable of going out into the world, getting dirty and dialoguing with all people especially those who are sick, poor and marginalised. His challenge to us all is, “are we a church capable of warming and healing hearts”. Do we have the compassion that Jesus was famous for? Are we individually and as a community contagious with life?

Easter Sunday 20 April 2014

Fr. Gerard Kelly

We have arrived at Easter after six weeks of Lent.  Finally, over the last three days we have celebrated the Last Supper on Holy Thursday and the Passion and Death of Jesus on Good Friday.  So we should be very ready to celebrate Easter and the resurrection of Jesus.

If that is what we have been through, imagine what the followers of Jesus had experienced as they watched him carry his cross, saw him nailed to a tree and then stood back as he was taken down from the cross and buried in a new tomb.  Their world was shattered; his message seemed to have been defeated.  They weren’t expecting anything else to happen.  So when Mary Magdalene goes to the tomb early in the morning, she is probably going to anoint the body with spices as would have been the usual practice.  We are listening to St John’s gospel, and he sets the scene by telling us that it was dark.  The darkness probably captured Mary’s mood.  Then when she arrived she saw that the stone had already been rolled back.  Her first thought is that someone has broken into the tomb and stolen the body.  She runs back to tell the Peter and the other disciple, who both run out to the tomb to see what is going on.

What happens next is also surprising.  When Peter arrives he goes into the tomb and sees that the cloths in which the body of Jesus had been wrapped are lying there.  He must have been puzzled, because this would hardly have seemed the way a person stealing the body would act – why would they unwrap the body?  The mystery only deepened.  Then St John tells us that the other disciple goes into the tomb and that seeing things the way they are, he believed.  This is really the first indication we have that what had happened to Jesus was something quite extraordinary.  The beloved disciple believed that Jesus had been raised from the dead.

After this experience the disciples have to work out what this means.  I think we all have to work it out.  We need to ask what it means for us.  This was such an unexpected experience that those first disciples struggled to make sense of it.  Their early experience told them that what happened to Jesus was something very different to what had happened to Lazarus.  A couple of weeks ago we heard the gospel where Jesus called the dead Lazarus to come out of the tomb.  He came out still bound in the burial cloths and Jesus had to tell some people to unbind him.  There were plots to kill Lazarus, and of course, he would die again.  Jesus is different.  He hasn’t simply been resuscitated.

In the gospel scene there are other hints as to the meaning of resurrection.  The emphasis on darkness at the beginning of the story would have reminded the hearers of the darkness and chaos that set the scene for the creation of the world in the Book of Genesis.  Even the reference to the first day of the week, which of course is the day after the seventh day – in other words an eighth day – would have reminded the people of the days of creation.  It is as though this is the first day of the new creation.  The new creation is the completion of God’s creative action.  The new creation represents God’s victory over darkness, chaos and sin.  The new creation represents the beginning of a new way for all of creation to live in relationship with God.  It means the beginning of a new type of relationship between human beings – where the peace and justice, which are fundamental gifts of God, will permeate the whole created order.

Just as the disciples of Jesus had to learn the meaning of this, so too do we.  It is still unfolding!  The resurrection is still taking effect in our world, even when we might see very few signs of it.  The question for us is: how might we live as the Easter people.  How might we live in this time of the first day of the new creation, even while creation is still waiting to be perfected?

The beloved disciple may offer us a clue.  He saw an empty tomb and some linen cloths, and he believed.  These became signs for him that God had raised Jesus from the dead.  The signs that we have are the sacraments, particularly baptism and the Eucharist.  St Paul reminds us that in our baptism we died with Christ so that we might live with him.  Our life is now hidden with Christ in God.  Through our baptism the resurrection takes effect in our lives; we are part of the new creation.  Likewise, when we celebrate the Eucharist we celebrate the death and resurrection of Jesus.  In receiving communion we are drawn into his new life.  Very shortly we will renew the promises of our baptism and we will be sprinkled with the Easter water.  We will then receive communion.

Like the first disciples of Jesus we are called to live in such a way that the new life we have received in these sacraments becomes a reality in our day-to-day lives.  We live in a world that is still being created anew in the resurrection.  Even in the midst of the world’s imperfections, we are witnesses to the effect of the resurrection.