DO NOT TAKE AWAY YOUR MERCY FROM US

If you ask for it, you will get it! If you don’t, you won’t! I am speaking of God’s mercy.  “Ask and you will receive, so that your joy may be complete”, Jesus said (Jo 16, 24). True, Jesus was not speaking about mercy here, but about anything we might want to ask of the Father in Christ’s name”.

“Why do we ask for God’s mercy so often and in every Mass?” God never gets tired of offering us his mercy; we easily get tired of asking for it. What we ask for, we are better prepared to accept!

In today’s first reading we read part of Azariah’s prayer while standing in the furnace into which he and two other young persons were thrown because they did not want to sacrifice to a golden statue king Nebuchadnezzar had set up. In his prayer Azariah asked God “Do not take away your mercy from us”.

Can God ever deprive us of His mercy? No, because if He did, we would cease to exist! And then, God’s mercy is an expression of His boundless love. Who can deprive us of God’s mercy? We can! Each one of us can! How?

I think there are two ways of depriving ourselves of God’s mercy. The first way is to refuse mercy to our brothers and sisters and the second way is to believe that our sins are greater than God’s mercy.

Peter asked the Lord: “How often must I forgive my brother?” Jesus answered with the parable of the two debtors. The first one was a wicked servant! Moved with compassion his master forgave him a huge loan, but he was unable to show the same compassion with his fellow servant who owed him a small amount. What his master said signed his condemnation. “I forgave you your entire debt because you begged me to. Should you not have had pity on your fellow servant, as I had pity on you?” the master said.

We need God’s mercy, so we should show it towards our neighbours. This is what Jesus taught us to say in the ‘Our Father’: “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them those who trespass against us”. It is a very serious thing to say, for through these words we are giving the measure by which we want God to measure us. When I think about it I am afraid and I ask myself: “Do I really forgive? Do I use mercy towards my neighbour?” And I ask God to help me open my heart to my brethren.

In Matthew Jesus says: “Whoever speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come”. (Mt 12:32) It might seem that, after all, there are sins that God does not forgive and he withholds his mercy! No, he does not! We can refuse His mercy; and Jesus alerts us to this possibility.

I found a convincing answer in the one given by God, the Father, to St. Catherine of Siena, which she reports in her Dialogue of the Divine Providence. The Father was speaking to the saint about those who until the end of their life do not repent and do not ask for mercy. This is what we read in the dialogue:

[The soul is condemned] “on account of the particular injustice and false judgment which she practices at the end, in judging her misery greater than My mercy. This is that sin which is neither pardoned here nor there, because the soul would not be pardoned, depreciating My mercy. Therefore this last sin is graver to Me than all the other sins that the soul has committed. Wherefore the despair of Judas displeased Me more, and was more grave to My Son than was his betrayal of Him. So that they are reproved of this false judgment, which is to have held their sin to be greater than My mercy” (Dialogue ch. 37).

There are two things then, which we should do: first, to treat our fellow creatures as we would like to be treated, as Jesus said at the end of his parable: “So will my heavenly Father do to you, unless each of you forgives your brother from your heart.” The second thing to do is to repent when we are aware of having sinned. The Father told Catherine: “My mercy is greater without any comparison than all the sins which any creature can commit; wherefore it greatly displeases Me that they should consider their sins to be greater”.

And there is a third thing to do: To pray for the salvation of sinners. The Father told Catherine: “I wish them to hope in My mercy at the point of death, even if their life have been disordered and wicked”… “while man lives is his time for mercy, but when he is dead comes the time of justice. He ought, then, to arise from servile fear, and arrive at love and holy fear of Me”. Because of this we should always preach hope and the breadth of God’s mercy.

Delivered on March 10, 2015,  Tuesday of the Third Week of Lent (readings Dn 3:25, 34-43 and Mt 18:21-35)