Divine Mercy and the Fatherhood of God
Posted On April 4, 2006
Greetings & blessings!
We’ve reached the end of Lent, and for the next few weeks we will be immersed in a steady succession of activities as we move from one Holy Day to the next: Palm Sunday, Holy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, Easter Sunday, and the great octave day of Easter, Divine Mercy Sunday. With all the remembrances, services, and celebrations, it’s easy to “miss the forest through the trees,” easy to miss what it’s all really about. It’s all about mercy. And mercy is all about the Father.
In his encyclical letter, Rich in Mercy, Pope John Paul II writes that the cross of Christ is “a radical revelation of mercy,” and that it “speaks and never ceases to speak of God the Father, who is absolutely faithful to his eternal love” for you and me. “Believing in the crucified Son,” the pope continues, “means seeing the Father.” If you remember nothing else, remember this: that God is your Father, and all He wants to do is bless you and restore you in His Image.
All the elements of the Divine Mercy message given to us in the Diary of St. Faustina (the Divine Mercy Image, the Chaplet, the Novena, the Hour of Mercy, the Feast of Mercy) point to this basic reality. Anyone familiar with the Divine Mercy message knows the prayer “Jesus, I trust in You.” Why can we trust in Him? Because He is the faithful Son of the Father. “I do nothing on my own,” Jesus explained, “but I say only what the Father taught me. The one who sent me is with me. He has not left me alone, because I always do what is pleasing to him” (Jn 8:28-29). Everything Jesus says and does is in obedience to the Father to fulfill the Father’s will for us. What’s the Father’s will? To restore. That’s the whole function of mercy. In St. Faustina’s Diary we read that God’s will is “mercy itself.”
What does that mean? Mercy is love that reaches down to the undeserving. You don’t deserve God’s love; you can’t earn it; and there’s nothing you can do to become worthy of it. But it’s always available to you, because God wills it so. He has fathered you and will always be faithful to His fatherhood. You don’t exist because of a decision your mother and father made. And you don’t exist by accident. You exist because God wanted you born. And right now (and at every other moment of your life) He wants to reach into your woundedness and restore everything that has been lost through sin and pain. The essential truth of Divine Mercy is that God the Father is always loving you. Every time you say “Jesus, I trust in You,” you are saying yes to that love, allowing Him to bless and heal and restore you in Jesus, through the power of His Holy Spirit, so that you may receive the fullness of life as His child and become like Him.
We are such foolish children. Like Martha, we are “busy about many things,” when “only one thing is necessary”: to focus on Jesus and see the Father, receiving His love with trust, gratitude, and joy, and seeking to please Him in all we say and do.