Immaculate Heart of Mary Catholic Church

Homily for March 30, 2008
Liturgical Year A- Cycle II
2nd Sunday of Easter
By Fr. Tom Frnaxman
 Topic: Divine Mercy
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I am taking Father Carney’s place because he asked me to so that he could go away.  As most of you know, at least some of you, I’ve been here before and my name is Father Thomas Franxman  I’m a Jesuit of the California Province.  I work at Hebrew Union College and I live in northern Kentucky.  For two weeks, I am here visiting friends but also allowing Father Carney to take the two weeks off to go play golf with his friends.

This is not really the second Sunday of Easter.  It is something more than that.  It is the Sunday that closes the octave of Easter.  We don’t just celebrate Easter on one day alone.  We celebrate it for a whole week, as we do the Feast of the Nativity.  One of the reasons why we do make this attempt every year to spend more time on this is because it plays such an important part in our daily lives, not just once a year.  After all, every time we say Mass, we are commemorating the sacrifice of Calvary.  Why be so dramatic about it every year?  Why spend three days, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday of Holy Week, building up for this triumphant statement of our faith?  Moreover, what is the effect of that?  The effect of it should be over the years that although when we are small, up to the time maybe when we are 15 or 16, this is just another feast of the Church.  However, as adults, we know better.  Because if Christ is not risen, as Paul says, we are the most unfortunate of men.  In addition, we want to think more about that every year of our lives.  Because it is precisely that Christ is risen that we are risen.  It is because Christ is risen, that it is false for me to say, “I believe in life after death,” because I am alive right now with the life of Christ in such a way that my physical dissolution will make no change.  We simply go where we have already been for so long.  Now that is what we believe as Christians.  That is the level of our faith: to work with anything else, to commit ourselves to anything else, to by neglect or simply carelessness that we turn our backs on that and think that this is just some figurative speech.  Let’s get down to the business of biological dissolution, then we know what we’re talking about.  Well, our Christian faith says, “No we don’t.”  In fact, if you say that, you don’t know what you believe as Christians.  Therefore, that is why we spend a whole week every year thinking about this.

The vulnerability of Christ on the cross is kind of a mirror image of the vulnerability of Christ lying in the manger.  When He is lying there in the manger, it’s sweet and inviting and loving and we all enjoy every year contemplating that but not thinking about the implications of it too much.  At Easter, we cannot escape the implications because it is no longer the vulnerability of a baby.  It is the vulnerability of a person who has been beaten, crowned with thorns, nailed to a cross and dying from loss of blood.  Now that is not pretty but that is what we believe.  Here is the turning point, not in Christ’s live, but of our own.

Therefore, it is important that every year we do this.  The Holy See, under the direct aegis and inspiration of John Paul the Great, (might as well get used to calling him that) when he actually wanted this feast to be called the Feast of the Divine Mercy, it’s not pointing at something that we are unfamiliar with.  He is not inventing something.  But all the concreteness of what he is talking about because in general, theological language that is talked in sermons and in general, high-toned religious conversation, fills the atmosphere with –tions, redemption, salvation, all the ways that English has of constructing abstract thought.  When we hear those words, ah, yes, that’s the way it should be.  That’s Church talk.  We talk that way at Church.  But in fact, that’s not the way Divine Mercy touches any of us.  Divine Mercy touches us first and foremost in existence itself.  If we have never sat down and realized that that is a gift, then we have a lot of thinking to do.  In adult life, if we don’t come to the solid conclusion that somehow or other we can’t put ourselves into life, then we can’t put ourselves there.  We can’t do a thing to bring ourselves into existence.  Yet, something has been going on for as long as there has been a human race.  Time after time, the necessary elements come together.  All of the decisions are made.  Time after time, generation after generation, things have been done.  People have been born.  People have been born because people made decisions to get married, to mate, to come together, to produce back to the beginning of the human race and generation after generation after generation until the one just before us.  Our parents then become part of that chain.  We can’t do a thing, just as we couldn’t have done a thing for the thousands and thousands of years that had gone before.  If this has not struck us that existence itself is a gift, then we have a lot of thinking to do.

The Divine Mercy includes that and the second great gift, the gift of faith, which gives meaning to all life because it sublates the fear of dissolution.  All life is rooted in our faith.

Finally, the gift of friends.  The gift of friendship which will bring home to us as clearly as anything can, the love that God can have for us and does.  All of the things that we find good about our friends, the things that we admire, the things that we love, the things that we cherish are there because they are just part of the ultimate and complete goodness which is Christ Himself. 

All of these things come together:  existence, faith, and love.  That is Divine Mercy.  Not spoken of in terms that really allow us to depart from the day-to-day realities of life but down in the nitty gritty of our own souls.  There is where Divine Mercy has placed its finger in order that we might spring up, and through the Grace of God and in the full flower of the Son of Righteousness.  This is what we think about today as we close our yearly commemoration of the death, resurrection, and glorification of the Lord.