Homily for Divine Mercy Sunday 2021
Beloved:
Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ is begotten by God,
and everyone who loves the Father
loves also the one begotten by him.
In this way we know that we love the children of God
when we love God and obey his commandments.
For the love of God is this,
that we keep his commandments.
And his commandments are not burdensome,
for whoever is begotten by God conquers the world.
And the victory that conquers the world is our faith.
Who indeed is the victor over the world
but the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?-1 John 5:1-5
Today is the Feast of the Divine Mercy, established by request of Our Lord to St. Faustina, and finally recognized by the supreme authority of the Church. That is the way two other feasts in honor of the Lord were established: the Feast of the Sacred Heart, for which Jesus asked in his appearances to St. Margaret Mary, and also the Feast of Corpus Christi, which the Lord asked of St. Julianna of Mount Cornelion in the thirteenth century.
Well, there is nothing new under the sun, and so some people are critical of the Divine Mercy devotion, and don’t like it that St. John Paul II established its commemoration on the venerable octave day of Easter. These are the same types who had no use for the very novel devotion revealed by the Savior to St. Margaret Mary or to St. Julianna, or who thought the Lucia of Fatima or St. Bernardette had overactive imaginations.
Devout women can be a little crazy at times; they themselves will tell you. But it remains absolutely undeniable that the Lord has favored women, and often in preference to men; and this from the very beginnings of Christian revelation, with the intimate secrets of his Heart.
It was to St. Photina, the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well, that the Lord revealed that he was the Christ. It was to the Magdalene that he appeared before any of his apostles. And of course, it was into the heart of Mary that he poured the fullness of grace and understanding from the first instant of her existence.
Let’s take a look at why this may be.
Faith and love are the submission of the mind to and the union of the will with God. Which is greater: faith or love, the mind or the will? Well, let’s keep it simple and say that faith is the necessary foundation of any moral progress in the world God made, in which he did not determine that anyone should attain goodness without faith. The apostle tells us in the epistle to the Hebrews, “But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him.”
But wait a minute—isn’t pleasing anyone simply the equivalent of being loveable to him? Indeed, diligently or “zealously” as the Greek has it, means “intensely lovingly,” for zeal is a species of love.
“Faith without works is dead,” St. James tells us. The Savior says that not everyone who acknowledges him as Lord will enter the Kingdom of Heaven, but only those who do the will of his Father who is in heaven. The will! That’s the power whereby we love God and he loves us. We can be perfectly orthodox in declaring in that earliest creed, “Jesus is Lord,” but if we do not unite our wills with his Father’s in love, then we will fall far short of the goal. That is, if we believe, then we have to conquer the world by following his commandments, and this is the victory won by faith.
Now, what are his commandments? For us who have received the New Commandment from Jesus at the Last Supper, there is only one, which sums up all the others: “Love one another as I have loved you.”
Indeed, if we look carefully at St. John’s lovely words in today’s epistle lesson, we will see that the depth of our penetration of the mysteries of faith depends on the degree and intensity of our love. The divine scriptures also tell us that three things abide, faith, hope, and love, but that the greatest of these is love.
In his Summa, St. Thomas makes it clear with St Paul’s words that women cannot possess public, magisterial authority in the Church. But he goes on to say something very striking:
So far as the state of glory is concerned, the female sex shall suffer no hurt; but if women burn with greater charity, they shall also attain greater glory from the divine vision: because the women whose love for our Lord was more persistent—so much so that “when even the disciples withdrew” from the sepulchre “they did not depart” [Gregory, Hom. 25]—were the first to see him rising in glory.
In comparison to the state of glory, everything else in human life is relative indeed. The state of glory is the final word on our lives. And its intensity and depth depend, not on sex or office, but on love. In heaven there is neither male nor female, but all are one in Christ Jesus; that is, united in love, “which lasts forever.”
This seems to me to be the reason why the Lord favors so many women with personal insight into his mysteries and into the details of his incarnate life. The truest hierarchy, the eternal one that lasts forever, has only one standard of rank: the love of God, and in this all are free to progress and ascend to the heights.
Thus St. Bridget of Sweden, Margery Kempe (if you want some very devotionally entertaining reading, read about her!) St. Gertrude the Great, St. Joan of Arc, St. Hildegard of Bingen, Julian of Norwich, St. Catherine of Siena, St. Margaret Mary, Bl. Anne Catherine Emmerich, St. Gemma Galgani, Bl. Maria Bolognesi, St. Mary Magdalene de’ Pazzi, and of course St. Faustina and so many others known and unknown, are the women who bear witness to the life, death, and glory of their beloved Jesus.
And all this is, for us men, both a challenge and a consolation on this Feast of Divine Mercy.