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Divine Mercy Sunday

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Fr. Tom Wilson, Pastor April 8, 2018

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I did something this week that I have never done before in my life, part of that by the grace of God, but I was invited by an owner of an auto body shop to come in and to bless his new shop. I went in there and we blessed the shop and we took a little tour around the shop. I was grateful that I’ve never actually had to take a car to a body shop because I have never had an external serious accident in a vehicle by the grace of God.  But as I walked through I saw a number of cars in various stages of disrepair and repair and I have to admit looking at some of these vehicles I wondered, are these things really ever going to be roadworthy again? They were in some very, very tough shape. The owner of the shop actually said, no, they are very close. These vehicles are very close. And therein lies the difference between somebody who knows what they are doing in terms of fixing a car and me. He is able to see that these vehicles are actually very close to being roadworthy.
But as I thought about it, when I left the shop, who has cars in a body shop – who brings them in? I kind of put them into a few different categories. I suspect the first category are people who have been in some sort of accident, had some sort of serious damage to their car. It’s their primary mode of transportation. They really have no choice – they have got to get this vehicle fixed and on the road, so that they can do the things they need to do. Get from point A to point B, get to their kids’ activities and work and all that sort of thing.
The second group of people that I suspect that have their vehicles in the shop are people who have made a decision. They have made a conscious decision, it could have gone one way or the other and probably financially they made a decision that it was worth putting the money into get fixed and extend the life of the car. Rather than going out and getting a different vehicle.
Then there is a third category I think of people that have their cars in, in fact it looked like there were maybe a couple of vehicles in there in this category in the shop. Those are people that see something in a vehicle that may be damaged, that may be quite old, that see something worth fixing. They see something worth restoring and trying to get it as close to what it was in its original form as possible. I suspect these people are collectors and really like cars and have a hobby and probably kind of share that and some of the things they have to contract out to have done and some of the things they do themselves. But they see something in that vehicle that they want to restore and take it back to its original form. So, there are different reasons that people are in there getting their car fixed and I suspect that right about now 2/3 of you are wondering what in the world do broken down cars have to do with the second Sunday of Easter and our celebration of Divine Mercy? And that would be a fair question.
The truth is it’s not that big a leap. We know that on the second Sunday of Easter we celebrate now universally the Feast of Divine Mercy declared by Saint John Paul II. If you are not completely familiar with the history of how the feast was established, it began with a private revelation to a simple polish nun just outside of Krakou in Poland near the same place where St. John Paul II served and grew up. This revelation to sister Faustina, now Saint Faustina in the image that we have up in the sanctuary today. Jesus came to Faustina with an image of his merciful love pouring out of his heart. 
The timing of it was no accident, it was no coincidence. It happened right between World War I and World War II. It was a time of tremendous darkness in the world. A time of obviously great evil, and wars, and people not getting along and all the death and destruction that went with it. I really do believe that as history looks back on our particular era, they will look at that spot, that era from World War I to World War II and they will say that was the beginning of a long period of unbelief. A long period of people wondering whether God was really around, whether the God they had heard about in terms of love and mercy was really there. And I suspect that will happen at some point in the future.
The truth is in the midst of the darkness of the world, Jesus comes to this simple nun and says the world needs my mercy and I desire the world to have my mercy. St. John Paul declares this a universal feast of the church on the second Sunday of Easter tied directly to our Gospel reading especially, precisely because the Lord’s desire that the world experience His mercy. That the world experience His forgiveness. He could very well have been in a position where the thing had gone so dark and people had rejected Him so badly that He would just back off, but instead He enters even more deeply into it, into the spiritual life of this holy nun and wants everyone to make a claim on that mercy. 
As I was prepping for the homily and prepping to spend a few minutes on the radio on Friday talking about this reading, the guy I was working with pointed something out that I had never really heard before. He said, you know Jesus could have walked into that upper room and met the apostles and the first thing He could have easily said and frankly probably a lot of us might have said it if we were in the same position, Where in the world were you on Friday? Where in the world were you on Friday? He could have easily said that because they had run away. They had abandoned Him in his time of trial.
But he didn’t say that, the first thing he says is , “Peace be with you.” Peace be with you – he desires them to have his peace. And then says Whose sins you forgive are forgiven whose sins you retain are retained. He announces then the primary mission of the church and the apostles is to bring His mercy to the people. Bring His mercy into the world, bring forgiveness of sins into the world. He could have easily said, where were you on Friday, but He doesn’t. 
When I thought about the reality of people putting their cars into the shop and comparing it to this. People have their cars in the shop for different reasons. Some of them are in there because of distracted driving. They made a serious mistake. It was their fault that their car got crunched enough that it had to go into a body shop. A lot of people with cars in there maybe had just a bad day of driving, with ice and things that people might have little or no control over. But the truth is whether it was their fault or not the car is being fixed. 
And the same thing is true with the reality of our own souls. As Jesus comes into our life, seeing souls that need to be fixed. Seeing souls that need to be healed with His merciful love. He does not categorize them. He does not say okay you come to the front of the line because you need this mercy because of some situation you are in that is no fault of your own. It is not something that you did that it was life in a dark world that surrounds you that happened. Or you have to go to the back of the line because it was your own darn fault. You made a bad decision. You knew what you should have done but you didn’t do it anyway. But He doesn’t do that, He simply offers His mercy. The only price is that we recognize that we need it and we ask. 
Because the truth is the Lord looks into the reality of our souls, the darkness of our souls and sees something worth fixing. Sees something valuable, sees something that needs to be restored to its original plan and design that he had created in the first place and says here it is.  Just like the person who looks at that old car, that broken-down car and says it is worth fixing, it’s worth doing, it’s worth putting something into. Of course, we are far more important to the Lord than any car could be to any of us and today as we celebrate the gift of Divine Mercy we celebrate a Lord who doesn’t give up on us, who doesn’t look at it and say it’s too broken down, forget it’s over. He never says that, even though we might do that in our own lives with people and relationships. But the truth is we have a Lord that looks into our hearts and sees the reality of something broken, something that needs to be fixed and fixed desperately. All he says and all he does is look into our eyes, look intoour hearts, look into our minds and says you are worth fixing. You are worth fixing.  And that is what we celebrate today. That’s what we celebrate on this gift of divine mercy, the merciful love that envelopes the world even in its darkness and a Lord that loves us so much that he died and rose again and walks into the upper room of our hearts and says, “you are worth restoring you are worth fixing.”

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