Homily for April 16, 2023
Divine Mercy Sunday
Breathing New Life
When
Jesus rose from the dead, He wasn’t merely resuming His old life. He could walk
through locked doors; His wounds could no longer cause Him pain. It was, as
Pope Benedict XVI put it, “an entirely new mode of being” – He is still human,
but living a life that is truly exalted and no longer subject to the vagaries
of this world.
For you
and I who are “in Christ” through grace, we too are invited to live a new kind
of life. Jesus greets His Apostles twice with the word “Peace” which in Hebrew
would have been “Shalom” – which means far more than just peace. It meets
“wholeness, fulfillment, restoration.” When He lives in us through grace, it’s
not just “life-as-usual-with-Jesus-sprinkled-on-top.” Rather, we are changed
from the inside out – our entire orientation is directed Heavenward.
The
Protestant reformer Martin Luther used to use the faulty image of a
snow-covered dung hill. He would say that due to our sins, we were no better
than a pile of manure, but that Christ’s holiness covers over us like snow
covers a pile of dung, so that when God looks down He only sees the brilliant
white of Christ and not our misery. But that is NOT what we believe as
Catholics. We believe that Christ’s mercy doesn’t cover us from without, but
transforms us from within. We are really restored to that original holiness,
fulfillment, wholeness that we had in the beginning, before sin enslaved the
human race.
Consider:
when Jesus appears to His disciples, He breathes on them. I don’t know how good
His breath would smell – after all, He had been dead for three days. But why
does He do such a seemingly strange action?
Well,
when is the other time that God “breathes” in Scripture? It was during the
Creation of Adam – He formed Adam from the clay of the ground and “breathed”
the breath of life into his nostrils. So the breath of God brings us to life.
Hence, when Jesus imparts to His Apostles the power to forgive sins, He is
giving them the power to bring the spiritually dead back to life!
But as He
does so, He gives them the Holy Spirit. In Hebrew, the word “ru’ah” means both breath
and spirit – so to restore sinners, spiritually dead, to life requires
that the Spirit of the Living God return to their soul! He is inviting us to
breathe the air of Heaven with the life of the Spirit within us.
After
breathing on them and imparting His Spirit, Jesus gives His Apostles – the first
priests – the ability to forgive and retain sins. If we have become a new
creation in the Image of Christ, we must abandon the old creation in the image
of sinful Adam.
But wait,
why did Jesus give His Apostles the ability to retain sins? Can a priest
refuse to forgive a sin? Yes – but only if a person is unrepentant. I have
refused absolution four or five times in my priesthood, but only when a person
was clear that they didn’t want to change their life. For example, if a person
were to say, “Yeah, I got drunk last weekend at a party…but I’ll probably do it
again at the party next weekend,” then the priest would usually ask, “Are you
really sorry, then?” Or if a person is living with their boyfriend/girlfriend
outside of marriage and has no plans to change the situation, then one might
wonder if they are truly contrite. Repentance is the necessary prerequisite to
the forgiveness of sins and the new life of grace. Confession is not a “get-out-of-Hell-free”
card, but a chance to become a new creation in Him – and this requires a desire
to live like a new creation.
And this
is precisely the power of God’s mercy, which we celebrate this weekend. Mercy takes
an old creation and, through the Sacraments, breathes the new life of grace
into them, that they may live like new creations, redeemed in Christ. Being a
new creation in Christ doesn’t mean losing our personality, our gifts and
talents and passions, or even our struggles – it means that we offer all of
those things to Christ for Him to live and move through us.
I think
of the great example of St. Ignatius of Loyola, who struggled greatly with sin
but whose mercy turned Him into an instrument of grace for millions. As a young
man growing up in Spain, Ignatius was fascinated with tales of knighthood and
daring. He became a knight, mainly to win the ladies, and fought valiantly –
and even arrogantly. Not an evil man, but one who was completely wrapped up in
his own vanities and pride. One day in battle, his leg was shattered by a
cannonball. It was a long recovery, but when he finally got better, he found
that his one leg was shorter than the other, so he walked with a limp.
Concerned that he could no longer dance well – and therefore couldn’t win over
the ladies – he asked the doctors to re-break his leg (without anesthesia!) so
that it would heal properly. This time, he was laid up in a hospital run by
nuns. Since this was the late 1500s and TVs hadn’t been invented yet, he was
bored with the endless days of recovery, so he asked the nuns for some romance
novels to pass the time. Obviously the nuns had no such thing, so they gave him
a book about the Lives of the Saints.
In
reading these lives, he was struck with amazement. St. Francis, St. Dominic,
the early martyrs – these lives were far more heroic than even his secular novels
about knights and adventures. It struck him that there was no reason why he
couldn’t follow their example and live completely for Jesus Christ. When he
finally left the hospital some months later, he was a changed man – so the
first thing he did was get to Confession, to put his worldly and sinful ways
behind him. Walking out of that Confessional, he was restored, changed,
transformed – by the power of God’s mercy.
He went
on to found the Jesuit religious order, which had a very military-like flair:
soldiers for Christ, to do battle against sin and Satan through discipline and
rigor. God had kept all of Ignatius’ unique gifts and purified them of his
selfishness and pride, and ended up using them for Christ’s Kingdom.
God
desires your shalom: your restoration, your healing, an abundant new
life in you. He arose from the dead to raise you from spiritual death; He
imparted the forgiveness of sins and the freshness of the Spirit so that you could
live as a new creation. All we need to do to obtain God’s mercy is ask for it
in Confession, and commit to living for Him Who lives forever and ever.
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