This week we Lectio the Liturgy with the Collect for the Second Sunday of Easter. This weekend, we have much to celebrate. Not only is it the Second Sunday of Easter, it is the last day of the Octave of Easter, which means that we’ve celebrated Easter Sunday for eight days, and it is also Divine Mercy Sunday.
God of everlasting mercy, who in the very recurrence of the paschal feast kindle the faith of the people you have made your own, increase, we pray, the grace you have bestowed, that all may grasp and rightly understand in what font they have been washed, by whose Spirit they have been reborn, by whose Blood they have been redeemed. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever.
The prayer this week is divided into two topics: mercy and grace.
The “who” phrase of the prayer is addressed to God of everlasting mercy who kindles the faith of His people when they celebrate the paschal feast.
The Catholic Dictionary defines mercy as the disposition to be kind and forgiving. Mercy is not giving someone what they deserve.
Every sin we commit is against God. While all sin is against God, some are more serious than others, and yet all sins demand a penalty. We often read in scripture about someone being stoned, and next to Jesus on the Cross, two others died as a punishment for theft. However, in His mercy, God does not give us what we deserve.
In the Latin form of the prayer, for people you have made your own, we find the words sacratae tibi plebis, or the people made sacred to You. Instead of punishment, He made us His own. When we celebrate the Passion and Resurrection of Jesus in a proper disposition, it reminds us of what He has done for us.
In a way, grace is the opposite of mercy. While mercy is not giving someone what they deserve, grace is giving someone what they don’t deserve. Grace is a free and underserved gift.
In the prayer, we ask for grace to grasp and understand
-in what font we have been washed
-by whose Spirit we have been reborn
-by whose Blood we have been redeemed.
The font in which we have been washed has brought us new birth through the Sacrament of Baptism. Baptism is essential for salvation because the waters of baptism symbolize the washing of original sin (not what we did, but sin we inherited, and it incorporates us in to the Church. Holy Mother Church is our source of new life as the Sacraments have been entrusted to the Church to give grace to the faithful and make them holy.
The Spirit through which we have been reborn is the divinity of Jesus and the Blood that redeemed us is His humanity. The union of Jesus’ divinity and humanity is an incredible mystery and while God could have saved us any way He wanted, this is what He chose. God became man.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church paragraph 176 teaches, “His humanity appeared as ‘sacrament’, that is, the sign and instrument, of his divinity and of the salvation he brings: what was visible in his earthly life leads to the invisible mystery of his divine sonship and redemptive mission.”
When Jesus died and He rose from the dead, He conquered sin and death. What we see in the visible realm is what happened in the invisible realm. We have been reborn. We were redeemed, or bought with a price.
It is worth our time to meditate on what Jesus has done for us. Sometimes we tend to focus on our faults, just like the portrait mode setting on a camera. When we do that, we blur the mercy and grace that are there in the background.
While it’s good to be aware of the weight of our sin, we should not let that be the focus. God’s mercy and grace are always greater. Being one of “His own” is the greatest gifts we could receive. In His mercy, God didn’t leave us in our sin, He made us His children. With His grace, He redeemed us. When you sit and reflect on that for a while, don’t be surprised when very soon, you will fill the kindle of the fire He’s creating in you.