2nd Sunday in Easter - Divine Mercy Sunday

In today’s gospel, we see Jesus giving the Holy Spirit to his disciples and giving them the power to forgive sins: “whose sins you forgive are forgiven, whose sins you retain, they are retained.” Pope Francis loved reminding us that mercy is the most powerful aspect of Jesus’ mission. Jesus now entrusts this mission of witnessing to the mercy of God to us as a Church. As a Church, when we read this verse, and when we think about how the mission of the forgiveness of sins is carried out, we immediately think of the sacrament of confession. Now we all know the way that the sacrament of reconciliation is celebrated, the normal manner for the celebration of this sacrament is for one person to go to a priest in a private confessional, confess their sins and then receive absolution. However, I think that it is instructive for us to learn that this is not the way that the sacrament was initially celebrated. In fact, the sacrament of reconciliation only began to be celebrated in the way we know it today from about the 5th century onwards, initially in Ireland as part of the practice of spiritual direction given to individual members of the faithful by Irish monks in monasteries. This practice of private individual confession then began to spread to other Christian countries gradually until it became the dominant way of celebrating the sacrament of reconciliation.

However, before the 5th century the celebration of this sacrament was very different. Indeed it might shock you to know that for pretty much the first century of the Church’s existence, the sacrament of reconciliation did not exist under any form whatsoever, let alone the form that we know it today. For the first century of its existence, the Early Church only knew of one way to forgive sins, namely the sacrament of Baptism. In Baptism, both original sin and any sins committed during one’s life up till the day you were baptized were forgiven. But after baptism, that was it, you now had to stay on the straight and narrow, or else it was hell-fire. For this reason, many Christians delayed baptism until they lay on their death-beds, in order to be sure of being able to get to heaven.

Gradually though, the need for some other form of forgiveness of sin began to become apparent. What brought things to a head was the case of apostasy. Under the numerous persecutions that the Early Church suffered, many Christians apostatized and renounced their faith in order to escape punishment by death that the Roman authorities inflicted on those who remained resolute in their faith. At the end of the persecutions, many of these Christians who readmitted as members of the Church. The bishops were now in a quandary: on the one hand, it was the Church’s established position that it was only through baptism that sins could be forgiven, and so they could not re-baptise these people wanting to be readmitted to the Church, because baptism was a once-in a lifetime sacrament. It could not be repeated. On the other hand, they also wanted to witness to the mercy of God who would forgive even those who, faced with the threat of death has experienced a moment of weakness and renounced their faith, but who were now repentant and wanted to worship with the rest of the family. Eventually, for many bishops the side of mercy won over the rigorism of sticking to Church doctrine, and they decided to organize ceremonies where those who had apostasized would come before the whole gathering of the Church presided over by the bishop and publically confess to their sin of apostasy – of course they were not revealing anything that nobody already knew, apostasy was a matter of public record, and they were then given a penance to perform by the bishop, which could last anything from a few weeks to a few years, at the end of which they were welcomed back by the whole Christian community as full members of the Church.

The point that I wish to make here is how the Church gradually “discovered” its mission to forgive sins from God and how this discovery was mediated by welcoming back into the Church people who had renounced their faith. Being reintegrated into the community was the sign that they had been forgiven by God. I think that the sacrament of reconciliation where we confess our sins privately to a priest is a beautiful and very spiritually nourishing way to experience God’s mercy. But I think that there is also need for us to recover the communal dimension of the sacrament of reconciliation. Just as the community of the Early Church, presided over by the bishop, discovered together that they had the mission to welcome back sinners, and be the means by which God restored a person to wholeness, I think that we too, in our day, are called to make this collective discovery. We need to realize, just as the Early Church did that there is both a vertical and a horizontal dimension to reconciliation. Jesus came to reconcile both with God the Father and with one another, both vertically and horizontally. Now it is clear that the sacrament celebrated individually with a priest who acts in persona Christi remains a powerful experience of vertical reconciliation. But I think that we can all witness to the horizontal reconciliation of the sinner with the rest of the community, by the way we forgive one another and restore especially those who are most broken amongst us to right relationship with the communities that we belong to. The Church is just one among many communities we belong to. I think that just as we are called to witness to God’s mercy in the Church itself by welcoming back those who have left the Church, I think we are also called to witness to God’s mercy by being agents of reconciliation also in the other communities we belong to, whether that be in our families, at our work-places or in our friend groups.

One of Pope Francis’ most insistent messages was that we cannot simply wait in our Churches for people to come to us – rather we must go out and find people where they are. So how do people who are outside the Church experience the mercy of God? I think that one of the big ways that such people can experience the mercy of God is through us. If someone in our friend circle or at work has been excluded from the group because of something terrible that they did to the group or to one of the members of the group, then it should be our task to encourage the group to welcome them back. If what I hear in confessions is anything to go by, one of the things that really gnaws away at people is situations of being alienated and unreconciled with a family member or a close friend. This is perhaps where people are most in need of God’s healing and mercy, but just can’t seem to manage to find a way back to reconciliation and right relationship. It often needs a neutral third party to intervene and broker some kind of reconciliation. I think that as people who have experienced the completely free grace of God, we are in an ideal position to be such agents of reconciliation in the various communities that we belong to. Let us ask this day then that God might give us the grace to be witnesses to God’s mercy in the midst of the world we live in.

Questions for reflection

1. In my own life, are there any communities or groups where I have been excluded and then welcomed back into the group? How did this make me feel? How can I share this same feeling with others?
2. When have I felt most powerfully the experience of the vertical mercy of God in my life?