Dom 2 post Pascha
Evening, 9 April
Church of St John the
Evangelist / Agawam
The earth is
filled with the mercy of the Lord (Ps 32:5).
All of us here know that the Holy
Father has declared this Extraordinary Jubilee Year of Mercy. All sorts of
things are being said about it, and that will continue till the Jubilee year
runs its course. However, it might be helpful for us—by way of trying to
appropriate the graces being offered to us—to uncover what might be the
doctrinal foundations of this Year of Mercy. To be sure, we could never quite
exhaust those foundations here: but at least we can try to say something that
might bring us a little more deeply into the mystery of God.
When we identify someone as merciful,
sometimes we do so because this person has a sympathetic way about them: he or
she can feel the miseries of others and is moved by a kind of sorrow in order
to attempt to remove those miseries. But that is not the way God’s mercy works,
because God does not have emotions like you and me.[1] So when we look for mercy,
it will not be found in feeling or sympathy.
However, God does alleviate misery,
not in feeling, but in fact. Aquinas tells us that mercy belongs to the
goodness of God, and that goodness communicates itself under various aspects;
it does different things. The good that remedies defects is mercy.[2] Mercy is the work of God
that gives some perfection where there is a lack. Given that, forgiveness is the greatest expression
of God’s mercy, which we rightfully celebrate. The human race sins, and these
sins leave us with a profound defect: the loss of the friendship of God.
However—thanks be to God—the forgiveness that God gives through the Blood of
his Son marvelously supplies for that defect by restoring the friendship that
was once lost. “The earth is filled with the mercy of the Lord.”
Theologically, this is what rests
behind the discourse we heard in today’s Gospel,[3] about Christ the Good
Shepherd. “Ego sum pastor bonus. Bonus
pastor animam suam dat pro ovibus suis.”
But how does mercy relate to justice?
This is an important question, because there are some who would turn mercy into
an attitude of permissiveness. For some, mercy is simply a kind of universal
overlooking of sin; and justice is passé, some antiquated concept that existed in
the dark ages before 1965. Anyone who holds such a view is deeply, dangerously
mistaken. Rather, if mercy is, first and foremost, God’s offer of the
forgiveness we so badly needed, then there is one essential element that must
accompany this forgiveness: namely, the
recognition that there is something to be forgiven in the first place.[4] Mercy can never be the
denial of sin, because without the acknowledgement of sin, there is nothing for
mercy to heal and remedy. As proof of this, for instance, we know that a
sacramental confession is invalid without true contrition from the penitent.
In this way, mercy in no way
contradicts justice. Aquinas says this. First, he objects: “Mercy is a
relaxation of justice . . . . Therefore mercy is not becoming to God.”[5] He responds by saying,
“God acts mercifully, not indeed by going against his justice, but by doing
something more than justice; thus a man who pays another two hundred pieces of
money, though owing him only one hundred, does nothing against justice, but
acts liberally or mercifully.”[6] The punishment we might
receive for sin is in accord with perfect justice; God would be neither cruel
nor unreasonable to exact it. However, as Aquinas continues, “God out of the
abundance of His goodness bestow[s] upon creatures what is due to them more
bountifully than is proportionate to their deserts . . .”[7] In other words, “The earth
is filled with the mercy of the Lord.”
Regardless of what we hear and read
in the media, the Church and her greatest pastors have long understood the
nature of mercy. Remember, Aquinas teaches that mercy “is especially to be attributed to God”[8] (albeit in his effects not
in himself.) We live in tumultuous times, and it is usually a good idea to take
very lightly the things we hear from abroad. Christ is our Master, Christ the
Good Shepherd—every good thing comes from him. As St Paul says, “it is in him
that we live, and move, and have our being.”[9] In that way, then, our
Introit today could not be more correct—the earth is quite literally filled
with the mercy of the Lord, to whom belongs glory, honor, and praise forever
and ever. Amen.
[1] STh Ia, q 21, art 3, res. God is
truth; God is goodness; but he is not mercy, strictly speaking. The function of
mercy is to supply a deficiency, and there is no deficiency in God. However,
mercy is an effect of his goodness.
[4] For a more extensive discussion of this
point, see: Fr James Schall SJ, “On Mercy and Mercilessness,” weblog The Catholic Thing, 2 February 2016:
https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2016/02/02/on-mercy-and-mercilessness/ “Thus, God does not just ‘forgive’ sins
because He is merciful. He forgives them in the context of our realizing and
acknowledging their disorder. Mercy is designed to encourage virtue, not to
undermine it.”
No comments:
Post a Comment