Coronavirus Talk 6
Begin with an Our Father
I hope you are all enjoying a great Easter Sunday and that you are sharing this great feast with loved ones. I hope I can continue to contribute to your joy with tonight’s talk as I put a period at the end of this series on Holy Week and Easter.
Above all, what I have wanted to communicate to you is that everything we talked about last week is about God’s mercy, the mercy that, once more, as Pope Francis teaches us, God extends “always, everywhere, in every situation, no matter what.” I think you could boil down our whole faith to that one word: mercy.
But mercy is both a gift and a duty. Most of last week we reflected on the gift: being forgiven of our sins, first, and then remembering that God has always been there for His people from the crossing of the Red Sea to the empty tomb to these days of the coronavirus.
But it’s really the duty of mercy that begins to come into the focus on Easter day; we begin to concentrate on our response to the love God has shown us, and simply put, it comes down now to the one command Jesus gave the disciples at the Last Supper: “Love one another with the fullness with which I have loved you.” Mercy becomes powerful and transformative only when the one who has received mercy extends mercy to others. More than anything else, extending mercy to others is what it means for you and me to be a disciple of Jesus. Always, everywhere, in every situation, no matter what.
In Thursday’s talk, we looked at what happened on that first Easter day and Jesus’ appearance to Mary Magdalene. We saw the effect that meeting Jesus alive had on her, how he changed her sorrow to joy, how she recognized him when he called her by name, and how she accepted the mission He gave her to spread Easter Joy to the disciples. Here is what else happened on that same day and then a week later.
And so it was late on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors were locked where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews. Jesus came and stood in their midst, and says to them, ‘Peace be with you.’ And saying this, he showed his hands and his side. And so the disciples rejoiced seeing the Lord. And so Jesus said to them again, ‘Peace to you. As the Father sent me, I also send you.’ And saying this, he breathed on them and says to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them – if you hold them bound, they are held bound.’
Now Thomas, one of the Twelve, known as ‘Twin,’ was not with them when Jesus came. And so the other disciples said to him, ‘We have seen the Lord.’ But he said to them, ‘Unless I see in his hands the mark of the nails and thrust my finger in the mark of the nails and thrust my hand into his side, I shall never believe.’
And after eight days, again the disciples were inside, and Thomas was with them. Jesus comes, the doors being locked, and stood in the middle and said, ‘Peace to you.’ Then he says to Thomas, ‘Bring your finger here and see my hands and bring your hand here and thrust it into my side, and don’t be an unbeliever, but a believer.’ Thomas replied and said to him, ‘My Lord and my God.’ Jesus says him, ‘Do you believe because you have seen me? Congratulations to those who did not see and believed.” -John 20:19-29.
So, Mary Magdalene immediately performed the task that Jesus gave her. she went to the disciples and told them: Jesus is alive! How did they react? They were so joyful, so ecstatic, so over the moon that they went and locked themselves together in a room. They didn’t lock the doors because they were afraid of being arrested by the Jews, they locked the doors because they were afraid that what Mary Magdalene said was true, that he was alive. All of them, except for John, had deserted Jesus after was arrested. They were in hiding when he died. They had no idea what excuse they could possibly give him for their cowardice, so they hid.
So, Jesus takes the initiative and appears to them in the middle of the room they had locked to keep him out, saying simply: “Peace be with you.” There had to be a collective :”Whew” that went around that room and, slowly, after he had shown them his hands and his side, they recognized him and rejoiced. And then Jesus gives them their mission: forgive sins, have mercy. He explains to them that when they forgive sins, sins are forgiven; and when they retain sins, the destructive, corrosive power of sin remains. Most people interpret the instruction to forgive sins to mean the empowerment of our priests to give absolution in the sacrament of reconciliation. I certainly agree with that, but I also believe that the mandate to forgive sins, to extend mercy, is given to every sincere disciple of Jesus, down through the ages. The key to transformation of life, the key to reconciliation in our personal relationships and throughout the world, they key to being able to meet Jesus alive and to enter the kingdom of heaven is whether you and I will choose to become involved in the dynamic of forgiveness, extending mercy.
We need to ask forgiveness from those we have sinned against, we need to grant forgiveness to those who have sinned against us, and we need to forgive ourselves for our sins if we are ever to experience the grace of Jesus’ resurrection.
Every day, it is important for us to ask ourselves: From whom do I need to ask forgiveness? Whom do I need to forgive? What do I need to forgive myself for? Asking these questions daily will help us develop the habit of mercy which is the sign of the presence of the Holy Spirit and the most effective and obvious proof that Jesus Christ has been raised from the dead, is alive, and is present in the world today. Forgiving sin, extending mercy, is the mission Jesus gave to the entire church and to each member of the church. If you and I aren’t forgiving sin, our faith is merely nice words and empty ritual.
Having been given the gift of mercy ourselves, mercy is now our duty.
Now Thomas wasn’t there on that Sunday night and, when his colleagues shared the good news with him, he refused to believe it. “I need to see it with my own eyes, I need to feel those wounds with my own hands. The only way I will ever believe this is if I see it for myself.”
A week later then, Jesus comes back and, once again, the doors are locked. (What’s with the disciples and those locked doors?) At any rate, Thomas is there, and Jesus invites him to examine his wounds so he can see for himself. The gospel doesn’t tell us whether Thomas takes Jesus up on the offer, but what it does tell us is that whatever happened was enough for Thomas to accept him as: “My Lord and my God.” And then Jesus speaks the only beatitude in the Gospel of John: “Congratulations to those who did not see and believed.”
You and I are among those who did not see but believe.
Thomas had it backwards. His faith comes down to: “If I don’t see it, I won’t believe it.” But our faith, when we spell faith r-i-s-k, is exactly the opposite: “If we don’t believe it, we will never see it.”
The writer Franz Werfel, closed his book on the apparition of Jesus’ mother, Mary, at Lourdes with this wise observation: “For those with faith, no explanation is necessary; for those without faith, no explanation is possible.”
Bottom line about Easter: what resurrection means is that mercy is both a gift and a duty. God forgave our sins: that is the gift. And, empowered by the Holy Spirit, we forgive the sins of others: that is the duty.
There is a legend which tells about when Jesus ascended into heaven. It says that the people in heaven were shocked at his terrible wounds, the signs of how much he had suffered. In the legend, Gabriel is supposed to have said to Jesus: “Lord, do all the people on earth know how much you suffered for them and how much you love them?” “Oh no,” Jesus answered, “only a tiny few in Palestine, in fact only eleven, but they’ll tell the rest.”
But Gabriel looked confused. He knew how fickle humans can be. He knew how forgetful they can be, how distracted they can get, how prone to doubt they can be, so he turned to Jesus and said: “But, Lord, what if people begin to get too busy to remember all you’ve done for them? What if they forget everything this cost you? What if they begin to have doubts about you? Don’t you have a backup plan, just in case? And Jesus said: “No, I don’t have a backup plan. This is my only plan. I am counting on my friends.”
For twenty- one centuries, Jesus has counted on his friends. Tonight, during these days, Jesus is counting on us, his friends.
So, for the remainder the rest of these twenty days together, that would be 14, my hope is that we can continue to get to know Jesus more intimately, love him more ardently, and follow him more courageously. Beginning tomorrow, I want to have look at Jesus through three different lenses so we can appreciate the facets of his personality and gifts the Scriptures tell us about. We will look Jesus as healer, as teacher, and as a worker of wonders. Hopefully, these will help us see ourselves more clearly as his friends. You are all most welcome to join us. Bring your bibles if you want so we can share the treasures that are in there.
Let us say a Hail Mary together.