YEAR A: HOMILY FOR 2ND SUNDAY OF EASTER (DIVINE MERCY SUNDAY)

YEAR A: HOMILY FOR 2ND SUNDAY OF EASTER (DIVINE MERCY SUNDAY)

HOMILY THEME: MERCY OF GOD

BY: Fr. Cyril Unachukwu CCE

HOMILY: Through the Paschal Mysteries of Christ, God has reconciled the whole world to Himself and opened the Door of Mercy upon all those who seek to reform and renew their lives after the pattern left for us by Christ. Through the power of the Holy Spirit, this abundance and inexhaustible ocean of Divine Mercy from on high abounds in the souls of all those who seek God in spirit and in truth. In fact, the Easter Feast is a Feast of the superabundance Mercy of God and the Easter Joy is the inner spiritual movement of those who have become victims of this Divine Mercy. May the mercy of God never depart from the doorpost of your soul; Amen.

To be merciful is God’s categorical demand of each and every one of us as His sons and daughters; “be compassionate just as your Father is compassionate” (Luke 6:36). His demand of a merciful and compassionate attitude from us derives from His ever merciful and compassionate disposition towards us. Creating us in His image and likeness, this merciful and compassionate disposition is our default configuration. Even though the fall of our first parents did reset us to the contrary, the totality of the life and mission of Christ, most especially His Passion, Death and Resurrection, opened the door for us to turn back to God in the manner He willed us to be; making us not just victims of the mercy of God but also bearers and givers of this mercy to our brothers and sisters in our relationships with them. In other words, we received mercy from God so as to become merciful to those around us. This is the foundation of the spirituality of and devotion to the Divine Mercy. This is the background of the Celebration of the Divine Mercy Sunday instituted to take place on every Second Sunday of Easter by the then Pope, Saint John Paul II on the 30th of April 2000, in honour of the devotion to the Divine Mercy revealed to Saint Faustina Kowalska. This is an invitation to always contemplate the face of God. God is love (I John 4:8), and “mercy is the true face of love; mercy towards a human life in a state of need is the true face of love.”

The Easter Feast is properly the Feast of Mercy, the Mercy that is the fruit of love; borne out of the unquantifiable love God has for all of His creatures. In love, He sent His only begotten Son, who out of the same love stretched out His hands on the wood of the Cross from where exudes God’s eternal Ocean of Mercy. It is indeed fitting to praise God in the words of Saint Peter in the Second Reading of today (I Peter 1:3-9), “blessed be God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who in His great mercy has given us a new birth as His sons and daughters, by raising Jesus Christ from the dead.” We come to experience and drink from this Ocean of Mercy by the power of the Holy Spirit through the varied ways the Spirit makes the Mercy of God available and accessible to us. An experience and a taste of the Mercy of God change the entire perspective of our lives. This was the case with the early Christian communities as we heard in the First Reading of today (Acts 2:42-47), “the whole community remained faithful to the teaching of the apostles, to the brotherhood, to the breaking of bread and to the prayers.” An encounter with the Mercy of God breeds in us the capacity for selfless and mutual coexistence. It makes to grow within the hearts and minds of the faithful people of God the disposition to reconciliation and peace. This is seen in one of the central post-resurrection gifts of our Lord Jesus Christ to His disciples; the gift of peace as we saw in the Gospel Reading of today (John 20:19-31), “peace be with you.” An experience of mercy not only brings us peace of mind and of our entire being, but also makes us peaceful wherever we find ourselves. Mercy opens us up to reconciliation and peace and to the contribution of our quota to the establishment of a just social order. To have received mercy from God is to be merciful to those around us. This merciful attitude is one of the central marks of the true sons and daughters of God.

On this day that we liturgically profess, proclaim and celebrate the Divine Mercy, we claim for ourselves and for our families the benevolence and graciousness of the Mercy of God and that our experience of the Mercy of God may bear within us the fruits of reconciliation, love and of peace. And in a most special way, I pray that the mercy of God may be superabundantly manifest in the life of My Father, My Founder and My Professor, the Very Rev. Fr. Prof. John Okoro Egbulefu CCE, as he marks his 70th Birthday today. The 70 years of your beautiful and grace-filled life has borne many fruits and I am one of such many fruits. I am very grateful and greatly indebted. May the years to come be most gracious, magnificent and beneficent. Happy Birthday to you Dearest Father Founder!

Happy Divine Mercy Sunday.

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