Archbishop of Sydney

Second Sunday of Easter

St. Mary’s Cathedral, Sydney
Acts 5:12-16; Apoc 1:9-13, 17-19; Jn 20:19-31

By + Cardinal George Pell
Archbishop of Sydney
15/4/2007

Today in an increasing number of churches throughout the world, the Second Sunday of Easter is known as Mercy Sunday, when we remember in particular how the fruits of Christ’s victory at Easter are dispensed to the world.  Mercy is another name for love, for grace, which bring forgiveness and healing.

Pope John Paul II did much to publicise the writings of the Polish nun Saint Faustina, whose visions brought us this particular devotion.  I suspect that all of us now would have seen the image of Divine Mercy, where a great shower of love descends on us from the heart of Jesus.

The readings of today show us God’s mercy at work, first of all in Jerusalem’s Portico of Solomon, where believers were gathering after Pentecost, hoping that at least the shadow of Peter would fall on them to cure their diseases of body and mind.  It was a good time of signs and wonders as the number of Christians increased.

John’s gospel recounts a couple of earlier post-Resurrection appearances by Our Lord to his frightened disciples, who gathered behind locked doors because of Jewish hostility.

His first greeting brought them peace and he repeated this as he showed them his wounded hands and side.  So today, one of the consequences of following Christ should be a spiritual, inner peace.  Accepting Christ does not bring us automatic healing of any psychological pathology, but love, meaning and forgiveness do enhance personal equilibrium and help us to find and retain balance in the normal range of human mood swings.  Christian peace is real and often powerful.

Jesus commissioned those disciples to go out and witness to God’s love, just as He himself had done and then He gave them the power to forgive sins or withhold forgiveness.

Lifelong Christians often do not appreciate the enormity of the gift in God’s forgiveness.  This is not a formality, not something automatic and unimportant, provided we make a semi-respectful nod in the direction of the one true God.  We are required to repent, to be genuinely sorry for our sins, with a real desire, based on personal decision, to improve, to amend our lives and struggle against at least our serious sins.  When our life is also rolling along easily, we often forget the enormous challenge that is sometimes presented by the Christian obligation to forgive others.  To take one of the most extreme examples, the obligation of next of kin to forgive those who killed a child, a parent or a spouse.

Earlier this afternoon I visited the Jewish Museum for the Holocaust Memorial and was shown around by two survivors of the camps, who lost many family members.  Up to six million Jews were killed in more than 2000 Nazi camps.  Millions of other different victims also were killed in the Soviet Gulag and a smaller number, more than a million Cambodians under Pol Pot.  Only God can forgive such crimes and give the strength for the victims’ families to forgive.  I remember talking with a French Catholic, who was working in Rwanda where tens, if not hundreds of thousands, were killed in racial strife.  He explained that victims there had to recommit themselves to forgiving the murderers, because their decisions to forgive would sometimes almost be submerged by their memories and by the temptation to hate, which rose with this bitterness.

It is an enormous claim, as we Christians do claim, that murderers can be forgiven in God’s eyes, because the victim is gone, no longer able to speak.  What right have we to speak for any, much less every, deceased victim? We can make this claim because Christ, the risen One, the Alpha and Omega has given the Church this power and told us of it.

Today and for the next five weeks before we celebrate the feast of the Ascension, the second readings will be taken from the Book of Revelation, or Apocalypse, the strangest work in the New Testament, which spells out in exotic symbols, usually taken from the Old Testament, the theological significance of Christ’s life, death and resurrection.

Here we have the figure of Christ, as Son of Man, dressed in a long robe with a golden girdle.  The seven golden lamp stands which surround him are symbols of the seven churches, or local Christian communities to whom John is writing.  These recall the golden lamp stands with seven cups, which Moses built to burn in the presence of God (Exodus 37:17sq)

Because Jesus is the central figure in our redemption, the First and the Last, the Living One with the keys that control both death and the underworld, he is described with the features ascribed to God the Father in chapter seven of the Book of Daniel.

Obviously there is a symmetry between this apocalyptic imagery and the passage from today’s gospel of John about the Holy Spirit’s power to forgive or withhold forgiveness and yet another rough parallel with Jesus giving Peter the power of the keys as recounted in chapter sixteen of Matthew’s gospel. 

In today’s gospel we also have Thomas’ encounter with the risen Christ, after he had missed earlier appearances.  He refused to believe until he could put his hand in the wounds of the risen Lord.

In many ways, but not entirely, Thomas is a symbol of our age, where we have a strong minority of unbelievers.  But Thomas is not typical of everyone today because he was an idealist, a joiner, a searcher for truth.  Many today are so thoroughly confused, or so frightened by the cost of conversion, or simply lazy and indifferent that they put the religious question into the too hard basket.  To stop searching is a big mistake, but not as bad as despairing.

Let us pray today that we shall always appreciate the great gift of God’s forgiveness, never presume easily that we will always forgive (that is one reason why we pray not to be led into temptation, not to be put to the test) and let us pray that we shall always acknowledge the centrality of Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God, Son of the Father, the Beginning and the End, in our search for truth.

In name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.