“This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad.” “ Jesus has risen as he said,” and has triumphed over sin and death. He has opened the floodgates of God’s mercy for us — and for all humanity. Our Savior has won our redemption and applies its fruits to us in baptism, through which we are washed clean, and are born to a new life as sons and daughters of God, sharing even now in the Divine life. All that is required is that we believe and that we come to Jesus to receive — and to keep coming to Jesus. Wow! Alleluia, indeed!

Jesus “descended into hell” to apply the Divine Mercy even to people of faith of the Old Testament. (Mary had already received God’s mercy, in anticipation of the merits of Christ, when “conceived without sin.”) For us in the New Testament, even our sins committed after baptism are not a permanent obstacle. On Easter Sunday, Jesus appeared to the apostles locked in the “upper room,” breathed on them and said: “Receive the Holy Spirit. Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them....Peace be with you.” (Jn 20: 21-23)

The joy of Easter is that we have new hope. Our sins do not define us. Our sins can be forgiven. If we keep coming to Jesus in the Mass and the sacraments, if we keep striving to live the “new life” with power and grace “from above,” we can gradually move toward holiness and to the fullness of life with God in heaven. This is because we have a mighty Savior, in whose mercy we can trust. In fact, Easter and the Paschal Mystery are all about God’s mercy.

In the encyclical, Rich in Mercy, Pope John Paul II tells us that God’s love for us “becomes visible in Christ and through Christ....God becomes especially visible in his mercy...Christ confers on the whole of the Old Testament tradition about God’s mercy a definitive meaning....He himself makes it incarnate and personifies it. He himself, in a certain sense, is mercy.” (No. 2, 1983)

The message of God’s mercy is like a seamless garment, revealed throughout the Old and New Testaments. God chose and befriended the people of Israel. He protected them, taught them, rescued them repeatedly. Throughout countless cycles of waywardness and repentance when God’s anger was thought to be flaring, God always relented and showed them mercy. Finally, in the fullness of time, he sent this own Divine Son to suffer and die for us, thus releasing unto us God’s infinite mercy.

What Jesus himself taught us built upon the Old Testament — that God is compassionate with us and full of mercy and that “his mercy is everlasting.” Think of the parables of the “Prodigal Son,” the “lost Sheep, the “Pharisee and the Publican,” the “Wheat Field with Thistles,” the “Good Samaritan,” and so many more. Think of Jesus’ outreach to sinners and outcasts, to the sick and the poor. Think of how, at the Last Supper, he washed the feet of the apostles. Ponder his passion. Ponder the cross.

“Christ, whom the Father ‘did not spare’ for the sake of man and who in his Passion and in the torment on the cross did not obtain human mercy, has revealed in his Resurrection the fullness of love that the Father has for him and, in him, for all people...Christ has revealed the God of merciful love, precisely because he accepted the Cross as the way to the Resurrection....The Paschal Christ is the definitive incarnation of mercy, its living sign.” (John Paul II, 1983)

Because of the Easter account about the forgiveness of sins, read on the octave of Easter and cited above, the Second Sunday of Easter was declared by Pope John Paul II to be “Divine Mercy Sunday.” Its purpose is to call attention to the fact that everything depends on the mercy of God and that God’s mercy is at the core of all revelation in both the Old and New Testaments, even as it is the very essence of the Paschal Mystery itself.

For this reason, every day and every celebration of Mass and the sacraments is all about God’s mercy (not just the Second Sunday of Easter) As the Easter season continues, let us redouble our efforts to open our lives to the outpouring of God’s mercy. Regardless of what may be our occasional waywardness, let us trust firmly in God’s mercy and keep returning to our Risen Savior to receive his Easter gift of Divine Mercy. We have good reason to “rejoice and be glad.” “Alleluia.”

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