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MERCY
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IOANNES PAULUS PP. II V. THE PASCHAL MYSTERY |
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7. Mercy Revealed in the Cross and Resurrection The
messianic message of Christ and His activity among people end with the cross
and resurrection. We have to penetrate deeply into this final event-which
especially in the language of the Council is defined as the Mysterium Paschale - if we wish
to express in depth the truth about mercy, as it has been revealed in depth
in the history of our salvation. At this point of our considerations, we
shall have to draw closer still to the content of the encyclical Redemptor hominis. If, in fact,
the reality of the Redemption, in its human dimension, reveals the unheard -
of greatness of man, qui talem ac tantum meruit habere Redemptorem,70 at the same time the divine dimension
of the redemption enables us, I would say, in the most empirical and
"historical" way, to uncover the depth of that love which does not
recoil before the extraordinary sacrifice of the Son, in order to satisfy the
fidelity of the Creator and Father towards human beings, created in His image
and chosen from "the beginning," in this Son, for grace and glory. The
events of Good Friday and, even before that, in prayer in Gethsemane,
introduce a fundamental change into the whole course of the revelation of
love and mercy in the messianic mission of Christ. The one who "went
about doing good and healing"71 and "curing every sickness and
disease"72 now Himself seems to merit the
greatest mercy and to appeal for mercy, when He is arrested, abused,
condemned, scourged, crowned with thorns, when He is nailed to the cross and
dies amidst agonizing torments.73 It is then that He particularly
deserves mercy from the people to whom He has done good,
and He does not receive it. Even those who are closest to Him cannot protect
Him and snatch Him from the hands of His oppressors. At this final stage of
His messianic activity the words which the prophets, especially Isaiah,
uttered concerning the Servant of Yahweh are fulfilled in Christ: "Through
his stripes we are healed."74 Christ,
as the man who suffers really and in a terrible way in the Garden of Olives
and on Calvary, addresses Himself to the Father- that Father whose love He
has preached to people, to whose mercy He has borne witness through all of
His activity. But He is not spared - not even He-the
terrible suffering of death on the cross: For our sake God made him to be sin
who knew no sin,"75 St. Paul will write, summing up in a
few words the whole depth of the cross and at the same time the divine
dimension of the reality of the Redemption. Indeed this Redemption is the
ultimate and definitive revelation of the holiness of God, who is the
absolute fullness of perfection: fullness of justice and of love, since
justice is based on love, flows from it and tends towards it. In the passion
and death of Christ-in the fact that the Father did not spare His own Son,
but "for our sake made him sin"76 - absolute justice is expressed, for
Christ undergoes the passion and cross because of the sins of humanity. This
constitutes even a "superabundance" of justice, for the sins of man
are "compensated for" by the sacrifice of the Man-God.
Nevertheless, this justice, which is properly justice "to God's
measure," springs completely from love: from the love of the Father and
of the Son, and completely bears fruit in love. Precisely for this reason the
divine justice revealed in the cross of Christ is "to God's
measure," because it springs from love and is accomplished in love,
producing fruits of salvation. The divine dimension of redemption is put into
effect not only by bringing justice to bear upon sin, but also by restoring
to love that creative power in man thanks also which he once more has access
to the fullness of life and holiness that come from God. In this way,
redemption involves the revelation of mercy in its fullness. The
Paschal Mystery is the culmination of this revealing and effecting of mercy,
which is able to justify man, to restore justice in the sense of that
salvific order which God willed from the beginning in man and, through man,
in the world. The suffering Christ speaks in a special way to man, and not
only to the believer. The non-believer also will be able to discover in Him
the eloquence of solidarity with the human lot, as also the harmonious
fullness of a disinterested dedication to the cause of man, to truth and to
love. And yet the divine dimension of the Paschal Mystery goes still deeper.
The cross on Calvary, the cross upon which Christ conducts His final dialogue
with the Father, emerges from the very heart of the love that man, created in
the image and likeness of God, has been given as a gift, according to God's
eternal plan. God, as Christ has revealed Him, does not merely remain closely
linked with the world as the Creator and the ultimate source of existence. He
is also Father: He is linked to man, whom He called to existence in the
visible world, by a bond still more intimate than that of creation. It is
love which not only creates the good but also grants participation in the
very life of God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. For he who loves desires to
give himself. The
cross of Christ on Calvary stands beside the path of that admirable commercium, of that wonderful self-communication of God
to man, which also includes the call to man to share in the divine life by
giving himself, and with himself the whole visible world, to God, and like an
adopted son to become a sharer in the truth and love which is in God and
proceeds from God. It is precisely beside the path of man's eternal election
to the dignity of being an adopted child of God that there stands in history
the cross of Christ, the only - begotten Son, who, as "light from light,
true God from true God,"77 came to give the final witness to the
wonderful covenant of God with humanity, of God with man - every human being
This covenant, as old as man - it goes back to the very mystery of creation -
and afterwards many times renewed with one single chosen people, is equally
the new and definitive covenant, which was established there on Calvary, and
is not limited to a single people, to Israel, but is open to each and every
individual. What
else, then, does the cross of Christ say to us, the cross that in a sense is
the final word of His messianic message and mission? And yet this is not yet
the word of the God of the covenant: that will be pronounced at the dawn when
first the women and then the Apostles come to the tomb of the crucified
Christ, see the tomb empty and for the first time hear the message: "He
is risen." They will repeat this message to the
others and will be witnesses to the risen Christ. Yet, even in this
glorification of the Son of God, the cross remains, that cross which-through
all the messianic testimony of the Man the Son, who suffered death upon it -
speaks and never ceases to speak of God the Father, who is absolutely
faithful to His eternal love for man, since He "so loved the world"
- therefore man in the world-that "he gave his only Son, that whoever
believes in him should not perish but have eternal life."78 Believing in the crucified Son means
"seeing the Father,"79 means believing that love is present
in the world and that this love is more powerful than any kind of evil in
which individuals, humanity, or the world are involved. Believing in this
love means believing in mercy. For mercy is an indispensable dimension of
love; it is as it were love's second name and, at the same time, the specific
manner in which love is revealed and effected vis-a-vis the reality of the evil that is in the world,
affecting and besieging man, insinuating itself even into his heart and
capable of causing him to "perish in Gehenna."80 |
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8. Love More Powerful Than Death, More Powerful
Than Sin The
cross of Christ on Calvary is also a witness to the strength of evil against
the very Son of God, against the one who, alone among all the sons of men,
was by His nature absolutely innocent and free from sin, and whose coming
into the world was untainted by the disobedience of Adam and the inheritance
of original sin. And here, precisely in Him, in Christ, justice is done to
sin at the price of His sacrifice, of His obedience "even to
death."81 He who was without sin, "God
made him sin for our sake."82 Justice is also brought to bear upon death,
which from the beginning of man's history had been allied to sin. Death has
justice done to it at the price of the death of the one who was without sin
and who alone was able-by means of his own death-to inflict death upon death.83 In this way the cross of Christ, on
which the Son, consubstantial with the Father, renders full justice to God,
is also a radical revelation of mercy, or rather of the love that goes
against what constitutes the very root of evil in the history of man: against
sin and death. The
cross is the most profound condescension of God to man and to what
man-especially in difficult and painful moments-looks on as his unhappy
destiny. The cross is like a touch of eternal love upon the most painful
wounds of man's earthly existence; it is the total fulfillment of the
messianic program that Christ once formulated in the synagogue at Nazareth 84 and then repeated to the messengers
sent by John the Baptist.85 According to the words once written
in the prophecy of Isaiah,86 this program consisted in the
revelation of merciful love for the poor, the suffering and prisoners, for
the blind, the oppressed and sinners. In the paschal mystery the limits of
the many sided evil in which man becomes a sharer during his earthly
existence are surpassed: the cross of Christ, in fact, makes us understand
the deepest roots of evil, which are fixed in sin and death; thus the cross
becomes an eschatological sign. Only in the eschatological fulfillment and
definitive renewal of the world will love conquer, in all the elect, the
deepest sources of evil, bringing as its fully mature fruit the kingdom of
life and holiness and glorious immortality. The foundation of this
eschatological fulfillment is already contained in the cross of Christ and in
His death. The fact that Christ "was raised the third day"87 constitutes the final sign of the
messianic mission, a sign that perfects the entire revelation of merciful
love in a world that is subject to evil. At the same time it constitutes the
sign that foretells "a new heaven and a new earth,"88 when God "will wipe away every
tear from their eyes, there will be no more death, or mourning no crying, nor
pain, for the former things have passed away."89 In
the eschatological fulfillment mercy will be revealed as love, while in the
temporal phase, in human history, which is at the same time the history of
sin and death, love must be revealed above all as mercy and must also be
actualized as mercy. Christ's messianic program, the program of mercy,
becomes the program of His people, the program of the Church. At its very
center there is always the cross, for it is in the cross that the revelation
of merciful love attains its culmination. Until "the former things pass
away,"90 the cross will remain the point of
reference for other words too of the Revelation of John: "Behold, I
stand at the door and knock; if anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I
will come in and eat with him and he with me."91 In a special way, God also reveals
His mercy when He invites man to have "mercy" on His only Son, the
crucified one. Christ,
precisely as the crucified one, is the Word that does not pass away,92 and He is the one who stands at the
door and knocks at the heart of every man,93 without restricting his freedom, but
instead seeking to draw from this very freedom love, which is not only an act
of solidarity with the suffering Son of man, but also a kind of
"mercy" shown by each one of us to the Son of the eternal Father.
In the whole of this messianic program of Christ, in the whole revelation of
mercy through the cross, could man's dignity be more highly respected and
ennobled, for, in obtaining mercy, He is in a sense the one who at the same
time "shows mercy"? In a word, is not this the position of Christ
with regard to man when He says: "As you did it to one of the least of
these...you did it to me"?94 Do not the words of the Sermon on the
Mount: "Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy,"95 constitute, in a certain sense, a
synthesis of the whole of the Good News, of the whole of the "wonderful
exchange" (admirable commercium) contained
therein? This exchange is a law of the very plan of salvation, a law which is
simple, strong and at the same time "easy." Demonstrating from the
very start what the "human heart" is capable of ("to be
merciful"), do not these words from the Sermon on the Mount reveal in
the same perspective the deep mystery of God: that inscrutable unity of
Father, Son and Holy Spirit, in which love, containing justice, sets in
motion mercy, which in its turn reveals the perfection of justice? The
Paschal Mystery is Christ at the summit of the revelation of the inscrutable
mystery of God. It is precisely then that the words pronounced in the Upper
Room are completely fulfilled: "He who has seen me has seen the
Father."96 In fact, Christ, whom the Father
"did not spare"97 for the sake of man and who in His
passion and in the torment of the cross did not obtain human mercy, has
revealed in His resurrection the fullness of the love that the Father has for
Him and, in Him, for all people. "He is not God of the dead, but of the
living."98 In His resurrection Christ has
revealed the God of merciful love, precisely because He accepted the cross as
the way to the resurrection. And it is for this reason that-when we recall
the cross of Christ, His passion and death-our faith and hope are centered on
the Risen One: on that Christ who "on the evening of that day, the first
day of the week, . . .stood among them" in the
upper Room, "where the disciples were, ...breathed on them, and said to
them: 'Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are
forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.'"99 Here
is the Son of God, who in His resurrection experienced in a radical way mercy
shown to Himself, that is to say the love of the Father which is more
powerful than death. And it is also the same Christ, the Son of God, who at
the end of His messianic mission - and, in a certain sense, even beyond the
end - reveals Himself as the inexhaustible source of mercy, of the same love
that, in a subsequent perspective of the history of salvation in the Church,
is to be everlastingly confirmed as more powerful than sin. The paschal
Christ is the definitive incarnation of mercy, its living sign in salvation
history and in eschatology. In the same spirit, the liturgy of Eastertide
places on our lips the words of the Psalm: Misericordias
Domini in aeternum cantabo.100 |
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9. Mother of Mercy These
words of the Church at Easter re-echo in the fullness of their prophetic
content the words that Mary uttered during her visit to Elizabeth, the wife
of Zechariah: "His mercy is...from generation to generation."101 At the very moment of the
Incarnation, these words open up a new perspective of salvation history.
After the resurrection of Christ, this perspective is new on both the
historical and the eschatological level. From that time onwards there is a
succession of new generations of individuals in the immense human family, in
ever-increasing dimensions; there is also a succession of new generations of
the People of God, marked with the Sign of the Cross and of the resurrection
and "sealed"102 with the sign of the Paschal Mystery
of Christ, the absolute revelation of the mercy that Mary proclaimed on the
threshold of her kinswoman's house: "His mercy is...from generation to
generation."103 Mary
is also the one who obtained mercy in a particular and exceptional way, as no
other person has. At the same time, still in an exceptional way, she made
possible with the sacrifice of her heart her own sharing in revealing God's
mercy. This sacrifice is intimately linked with the cross of her Son, at the
foot of which she was to stand on Calvary. Her sacrifice is a unique sharing
in the revelation of mercy, that is, a sharing in the absolute fidelity of
God to His own love, to the covenant that He willed from eternity and that He
entered into in time with man, with the people, with humanity; it is a
sharing in that revelation that was definitively fulfilled through the cross.
No one has experienced, to the same degree as the Mother of the crucified
One, the mystery of the cross, the overwhelming encounter of divine
transcendent justice with love: that "kiss" given by mercy to
justice.104 No one has received into his heart,
as much as Mary did, that mystery, that truly divine dimension of the
redemption effected on Calvary by means of the death of the Son, together
with the sacrifice of her maternal heart, together with her definitive
"fiat." Mary,
then, is the one who has the deepest knowledge of the mystery of God's mercy.
She knows its price, she knows how great it is. In
this sense, we call her the Mother of mercy: our Lady of mercy, or Mother of
divine mercy; in each one of these titles there is a deep theological
meaning, for they express the special preparation of her soul, of her whole
personality, so that she was able to perceive, through the complex events,
first of Israel, then of every individual and of the whole of humanity, that
mercy of which "from generation to generation"105 people become sharers according to
the eternal design of the most Holy Trinity. The
above titles which we attribute to the Mother of God speak of her
principally, however, as the Mother of the crucified and risen One; as the
One who, having obtained mercy in an exceptional way, in an equally
exceptional way "merits" that mercy throughout her earthly life
and, particularly, at the foot of the cross of her Son; and finally as the one
who, through her hidden and at the same time incomparable sharing in the
messianic mission of her Son, was called in a special way to bring close to
people that love which He had come to reveal: the love that finds its most
concrete expression vis-a-vis
the suffering, the poor, those deprived of their own freedom, the blind, the
oppressed and sinners, just as Christ spoke of them in the words of the
prophecy of Isaiah, first in the synagogue at Nazareth106 and then in response to the question
of the messengers of John the Baptist.107 It
was precisely this "merciful" love, which is manifested above all
in contact with moral and physical evil, that the heart of her who was the
Mother of the crucified and risen One shared in singularly and exceptionally
- that Mary shared in. In her and through her, this love continues to be
revealed in the history of the Church and of humanity. This revelation is
especially fruitful because in the Mother of God it is based upon the unique
tact of her maternal heart, on her particular sensitivity, on her particular
fitness to reach all those who most easily accept the merciful love of a
mother. This is one of the great life-giving mysteries of Christianity, a
mystery intimately connected with the mystery of the Incarnation. "The
motherhood of Mary in the order of grace," as the Second Vatican Council
explains, "lasts without interruption from the consent which she
faithfully gave at the annunciation and which she sustained without hesitation
under the cross, until the eternal fulfillment of all the elect. In fact,
being assumed into heaven she has not laid aside this office of salvation but
by her manifold intercession she continues to obtain for us the graces of
eternal salvation. By her maternal charity, she takes care of the brethren of
her Son who still journey on earth surrounded by dangers and difficulties,
until they are led into their blessed home."108 |
I. HE WHO SEES ME
SEES THE FATHER
IV. THE PARABLE
OF THE PRODIGAL SON
VI.
"MERCY...FROM GENERATION TO GENERATION"
VII. THE MERCY
OF GOD IN THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH
VIII. THE
PRAYER OF THE CHURCH IN OUR TIMES
>>DIVINE MERCY APOSTOLATE
Diary Come Back To Me Rich in Mercy
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