April 11 - 2nd Sunday of Easter

(Acts 4:32-35; 1 John 5:1-6; John 20:19-31)

Divine Mercy Sunday is a day when the Lord chooses to remind us of His merciful love in a profound way. Today we are called to embrace the gift of His mercy and remember the heart of the Gospel message- that God loved us so much that He sent his only Son to save us. The Good News is we have a merciful God who loves us in the midst of our darkness and draws us into his everlasting light. As St. Paul told the Romans, where sin is increases, grace abounds all the more.

To embrace God’s mercy is to embrace the Gospel message. In his encyclical Dives in Misericordia, Pope St. John Paul II taught that “Believing in [God’s] 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-à-vis the reality of the evil that is in the world” (7). To truly live the Christian life, we have to embrace a life of mercy.

Jesus once told St. Faustina that “your duty is to trust entirely in My Mercy, My duty is to give you all that you need. I am making Myself dependent upon your trust: if your trust is great, then My generosity will be without limit.” Without trust, we shut our hearts to the Lord, and he is unable to give us all that he desires. In fact, the Catechism teaches that at the Fall, “Man, tempted by the devil, let his trust in his Creator die in his heart and, abusing his freedom, disobeyed God’s command. This is what man’s first sin consisted of” (CCC 397). Lack of trust is at the heart of all of our sins.

• What are ways we can increase our trust in God’s mercy? Have you experienced God’s generosity when you increase your trust?
• If you have prayed the Divine Mercy Chaplet, share your experience with this particular prayer. Did you see God’s mercy in a new way?
• Embracing God’s mercy should also change our interactions with others. Return to the phrase, “There was no needy person among them” from the First Reading. This requires us to have hearts that aren’t indifferent to others’ pain, but rather suffer with them and seek to relieve it. How have you “suffered with” another person and attempted to relieve their pain?