The Path of Mercy
“O compassionate Jesus, look on me today with tenderness and give me the grace to walk on the path of mercy marked out for those who follow you. May all I do today reflect your merciful love.”
— Sr. Catherine McAuley
Since the year 2000 and a designation by Pope John Paul II, on the Sunday following Easter we celebrate the Feast of the Divine Mercy, partially in connection with the revelation of God to St. Faustina Kowalska. The feast presents a great opportunity to look at the “path of mercy,” in the words of Sr. McAuley, our journey toward acceptance of God’s love and forgiveness. This isn’t something we undergo just once and check off a list, but something that takes a lifetime — and even still, we can never wrap our heads fully around God’s mercy for us.
Along this path of mercy, the first stepping stone is simply to recognize our need for it. Not one of us is perfect — we all sin (Mary and Jesus of course as the notable exceptions). At some point, whether in the recent past or longer ago, we have all chosen to sin against God and against neighbor. However, we can think it’s in our interest not to admit this wrongdoing. We humans are prideful creatures. Why would I open myself up to the consequences —judgment, shame, regret, guilt, etc.? Wouldn’t it be better just to brush it all away? In hiding our sin, we actually reject that which makes us human: our capacity for God. We try to make ourselves as God, and what pathetic “gods” we are. Only in turning to God and to others in admission of wrongdoing and in search of forgiveness can we hope to open ourselves up to the love which makes us whole.
So, we’ve decided to recognize our sin and turn to God. Well, remember those “consequences” we were afraid of before? They don’t disappear now. In acknowledging our sin before a perfect, all-loving God, we recognize our deep imperfection and striking inability to right our wrongs. We have no choice but to stare helplessly at our errors. How can we truly make up for sin, offense against God? We can’t, no matter how hard we try — nothing is good enough. And really, how do we fix the ways we’ve hurt others? We can’t go back in time to undo our actions — the evil we’ve done is permanently a part of history. And so it unfortunately becomes very easy to fall into despair. We might think, “I have sinned against God, and therefore I am beyond God’s help.”
But here enters the utter scandal of God’s love. On our utterly broken behalf, God becomes one of us and dies a God-forsaken death for us: “For our sake he made him to be sin who did not know sin, so that we might become the righteousness of God in him.” (2 Cor. 5:21) In this Sunday’s Gospel reading, taken from John 20, Jesus reveals himself as the glorified and forgiving victim, saying to the disbelieving Thomas, in effect, “Look what you have done to me, and what I have done for you.” Faced with the depth of our sin and our inability to earn our way to forgiveness, we realize that the ability to forgive lies solely at the hands of the one who has suffered. Forgiveness is a beautiful gift, made freely by God, even at great cost.
And in this, we are forced to accept the death of God on our behalf. Really, take a minute to reflect on the agony of Christ’s passion, undergone because of our sin. Seeing the Cross for what it is, and having no say in its truth— we don’t get to tell Jesus, “no, don’t do it” — we have to come to terms with the reality that God has died for us and has forgiven us. Have we ever been angry with someone for forgiving us? Sometimes we want to just wallow in our wrongness, even wanting those we have harmed to still be mad at us — it’s easier that way.
Forgiveness is not a forgetting of the past, or even moving beyond it, but a complete acceptance of it and a choice to love anyway. Mercy is not separate from justice but deeply rooted in it, and this is the mercy God offers to us. What does Jesus reveal to Thomas but his wounds endured for love, the historical truth of what has been done by us? Only once we accept a shared sense of history can we move into acceptance of God’s mercy.
Now, once we have found ourselves in God’s good graces, it can be all too easy to forget where we’ve come from, almost returning to where we started. We can take God’s mercy for granted — “Yeah, God loves me, God has mercy on me, whatever” — and start to forget where we’ve come from. Claiming to accept God’s mercy, we again become incapable of accepting it by ungrounding ourselves from the inescapable reality of our sin, weakness, and brokenness. We can never move beyond our sin, even as we look to God’s forgiveness and mercy.
To know God’s mercy is to hold two truths in tension together, in the fullest sense of the word mystery: I am to say that I am a sinner, undeserving of God’s love, while coming to terms with the incredible reality that God chooses freely to love me to the point of death.
Now that is the path of mercy, and if we know its full gravity, or as well as we can as human beings, it is certainly not an easy path to walk. This journey of faith demands something from us: not only that we accept of God’s terms and our own lack of say in the Crucifixion, but also that we show others mercy as God does. We pray, “forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.” (Mat. 6:12). On this Feast of the Divine Mercy, let us seek God’s loving mercy and become ourselves signs of God’s mercy to others.
For the sake of His Sorrowful Passion, have mercy on us and on the whole world.
