A Homily for the Second Sunday of Easter, Sunday of Divine Mercy
Readings: Acts 5:12-16 Revelation 1:9-11a, 12-13, 17-19 John 20:19-31
It is a video from April 1, 2023, Palm Sunday. Pope Francis is leaving Gemelli Hospital, where caregivers have done what God gave them to do: restore someone to health. Like any other patient, Francis must be delighted to leave. Once inside the car sent for him, perhaps he thinks, as many others have: “Let me out of here! I want to go home.”
But there is nothing private about the papacy, and Francis exits the vehicle to greet a circle of well-wishers. Leaning on a cane, he signs the arm cast of another patient, a young boy. Someone then identifies a grieving couple to him. They have just lost their 5-year-old daughter.
We cannot hear what Pope Francis says to them, but we can see Francis the pastor take the crying woman to his breast. She remains there, weeping, even as Francis extends his hand to the grieving father. The embrace ends with Francis blessing the couple. He then thumbs the sign of the cross onto their foreheads.
An appropriate gesture, for the woman and her husband have been given the heaviest of crosses to bear. Even the crucified Jesus seemed to think that his mother’s suffering needed more attention than his own. Mounted on the wood of the cross, he spoke to his Beloved Disciple, asking nothing for himself, only that John would care for his mother. “Behold your mother (Jn 19:27). He had always been with her, been her companion. The Beloved Disciple must now do the same.
The hospital video, and whatever pictures might have captured the event, did not become a happy memento of meeting the pope. If the couple even possesses such a photo, it pales before a memory of profound intimacy. A child is lost, but mother and father are held by Christ in the person of his vicar.
From start to finish, the ministry of Pope Francis has paralleled that of his Lord, for both were about intimacy. In both ministries, God drew to himself his own children of sorrow.
St. John tells us of Jesus, “He loved his own in the world and he loved them to the end” (13:1). Jesus came to care for them, to hold and to protect them. Indeed, he told the soldiers and guards who came looking for him in the garden: “I told you that I AM. So if you are looking for me, let these men go” (Jn 18:8).
To understand the resurrection, which we are still pondering two millennia later, on this Second Sunday of Easter, we must look to the ministry of Jesus, for it reveals its deepest meaning. In his resurrection, Christ does more than break the laws of biology. In him, intimacy is carried through death into life.
Do not reduce the resurrection to a question of credibility, thinking that Christ must prove himself. In fact, the Risen Jesus evinces no desire to confound his skeptics. He does not return triumphant to Pilate, Herod Antipas or the Jewish leaders who have sought his death. Skepticism is spawned in hearts that close themselves to wonder, to even the greatest of miracles. Jesus had already said of such: “If they will not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded if someone should rise from the dead” (Lk 16:31).
No, the resurrection is the great triumph of intimacy! Christ comes back to claim his loved ones. He revives his relationship with them: first Mary in the garden, and now the disciples in the upper room, later Peter and John by the shore of the lake. In each instance, intimacy proves stronger than death!
The French philosopher Gabriel Marcel, both existentialist and Catholic, once wrote, “Love is saying to another, you will not die.” Christ says the same to us. “You are mine. You will not die.”
The resurrection of Christ cannot be good news for lovers if it is limited to a place and time far removed from our own. No, Christ came back to his loved ones, so that we might know that we are also his and that in him we will never be separated from those whom we love. In his resurrection, Christ as incarnate, glorified love says to all of us, “You will not die.”
Eucharist is our great Communion, our deepest intimacy with Christ and with our loved ones. If we have been baptized into his death and called to his banquet, only our own outright refusal can rob us of our eternal place at the table. To know intimacy with Christ at this table is to know it as well with our departed loved ones. No one more poignantly expressed this truth than the youngest doctor of the church, St. Thérèse of Lisieux.
Thérèse was only a toddler when her mother died of breast cancer. When the time came for her to make her first holy Communion, Thérèse’s older sisters saw that she was crying as she approached the altar. They presumed that their baby sister was weeping because her mother wasn’t there to witness the day. What Thérèse later wrote shows that the perspicuity of a saint, even a young saint, is greater than that of any sage.
Oh! no, the absence of Mamma didn’t cause me any sorrow on the day of my First Communion. Wasn’t Heaven itself in my soul, and hadn’t Mamma taken her place there a long time ago? Thus, in receiving Jesus’ visit, I received Mamma’s. She blessed me and rejoiced in my happiness. On that day, joy alone filled my heart and I united myself to her who gave herself irrevocably to Him who gave Himself so lovingly to me (Story of a Soul, IV).
If the resurrection mistakenly can be reduced from the triumph of intimacy to the mere confounding of skeptics, the Eucharist can likewise be scaled down from immortal intimacy to the reception of some sacred object.
We call it holy Communion because in the Eucharist—the action before the object, for without the action the object has no meaning—we have communion with Christ and with his saints. We have intimacy with all those whom we have loved in this life.
Did the Holy Father quote Gabriel Marcel or St. Thérèse when he whispered into the ear of that grieving mother? Probably neither, but he surely said something to show that Christ came to live with us and that he died and rose so that we might never be separated from him or from those whom we love.
When we come forward to receive, we hear, “The Body of Christ. The Blood of Christ.” We respond, Amen. What we should also hear in our hearts is this: “For me, because of me, you and your loves will never die.”
