2nd Sunday of Easter, Cycle A (2026)

We’re a week removed from Holy Week, from all that went wrong: Jesus’ friends abandoning him, his arrest, suffering and death. Today’s Gospel follows that mess, as Jesus suddenly appears to his friends, gathered like frightened bunnies. Instead of anger or assigning guilt, he simply says, “Peace be with you….Receive the Holy Spirit”. This is the definition of mercy: receiving something good, even when it’s not deserved.

It’s a curious thing that Jesus shows them his wounds. These are not his wounds, as we contemplated them on Good Friday, wounds borne of our sins. As Jesus was Resurrected, so his wounds were also transformed.

In the year 2000, Pope John Paul II established this as Divine Mercy Sunday. Born and raised in Poland, he knew the story and the writings of Sister Maria Faustina Kowalska, a Polish nun and mystic who lived during his lifetime. Her writings describe that when she was 25 years old, one Sunday night, alone in her cell, she saw Jesus before her, the first of what would be many occasions. Jesus’ right hand was raised in blessing, and his left was placed just above his heart. Red and white rays emanated from his heart, symbolizing the blood and water that had flowed from his side. As Jesus had shown her this image of himself, he wanted the world to know about God’s mercy, to change hearts, to change the world. He directed her to have someone paint this image.

She followed his instruction, describing to the artist what she had seen, as best she could. When Faustina saw his finished painting she cried, because it wasn’t nearly as beautiful as what she had seen. Jesus later consoled her, "Not in the beauty of the color, nor of the brush is the greatness of this image, but in My grace."

Faustina also wrote a diary of all that Jesus revealed in that image about God’s mercy: our need for it, our need to trust in it, and our need to be merciful to others. To be clear, it’s not that nobody ever knew of God’s mercy before Jesus spoke to Faustina, but he clearly wanted us to experience it in a new way.

Moved by all this, Pope John Paul II wanted the world to truly know what God’s mercy means for us. In 1980 in his second encyclical, Dives in Misericordia (Rich in Mercy), he echoed what so many theologians before him had proposed: that of all the attributes of our infinite and perfect God, mercy is the greatest, and we are proof of it. Pope John Paul II said that the Church is authentic in her mission when she proclaims God’s mercy, when she brings people close to the sources of His mercy.

And as he says in Dives in Misericordia, “Therefore, the Church professes and proclaims conversion. Conversion to God always consists in discovering His mercy…” (DM, 13). That’s the primary reason there is a Christian Church, and it’s the primary reason for this parish—to help us receive and be transformed by God’s Divine mercy.

The Eucharist and the Sacrament of Reconciliation are two of the most powerful ways of receiving and living in that mercy, but we can partake of either, without actually receiving it. As John Paul II said, the only thing that can keep us from God’s mercy is our unwillingness to give ourselves over to it, to allow it to change us. We must have a true intention and desire to be affected and changed, recognizing it as a gift greater than we deserve.

Some of us are haunted by past sins. Some of us are trapped in patterns of sin that we either can’t leave behind or aren’t quite ready to leave behind. Some of us are too distracted in life to even bear in mind our sins and how we need God’s mercy, ignorance that serves as a barrier, keeping us from his mercy.

But our task is also to make it known to those around us, by proclaiming it, but also by modeling it. We receive God’s mercy so that we can learn to be more merciful ourselves. So as a disciple of Jesus, do the people around you—strangers, people in traffic, your siblings, your coworkers, your difficult family members—do they see God’s mercy in you? Do they get better than they deserve, or do you tend to merely mirror the behavior of those around you? We all want things to be better—for our families, for our world. It begins with you. “Be merciful, just as also your Father is merciful” (Luke 6:36). And so we pray…

For the sake of His sorrowful Passion…have mercy on us and on the whole world.