The light of Easter reveals the mercy of God not as a distant promise to come but a gift offered to us even now, breaking into our lives through the Risen Christ. This has been a principal way in which Divine Mercy Sunday, celebrated on the first Sunday after Easter, has struck many devotees ever since its establishment.
With origins in the visions of St Faustina Kowalska—a Polish mystic of the Congregation of Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy—the day took on universal significance with the canonisation of St Faustina and announcement of the feast by St John Paul II in 2000.
This same pope would breathe his last on the vigil of the feast in 2005, a providence that would forever tie this devotion to John Paul II’s remarkable pontificate.
However, the significance of Divine Mercy is not merely as a private devotion or historical curiosity, cocooned within the past.
It is liturgically tied to the Resurrection for the whole church because it represents a deep unfolding of the Easter mystery—it is by Jesus’ triumph over sin and death that God’s mercy is poured out and offered to all humanity.
As John’s Gospel reveals, this divine mercy is not an abstraction but manifested concretely in the sacramental life of the church. On Easter evening the Risen Christ breathes upon the apostles and gives them the power to forgive sins; and so, it is in the Sacrament of Penance where mercy and resurrection meet.
The possibility of our reconciliation with God is a gift flowing from Easter which ought to renew and transform our discipleship.
The Risen Christ through the church, which is his body, offers us new life and invites us to share this abundant mercy we have received with others. In this way we know the faith is alive within us and we offer something new to the world.
In a powerful way the image of the Divine Mercy given to St Faustina in 1931 also underscores this concreteness of God’s mercy as a gift and missionary impetus.
The two rays emanating from the Risen Christ clothed in dazzling light denote blood and water, signifying the Eucharist and that baptism by which we enter the Paschal Mystery, die to our sins and rise in Christ.
As those who have entered this mystery of Christ by baptism, we have touched the Lord’s wounds and appreciated anew our lives as entirely dependent on the mercy shown to us in the Easter mystery and look outward, as Christ does, toward the world. We receive his gift of mercy time and again and seek to make it tangible in our families, relationships, workplaces and communities.
So, we see that when the church echoes the words of the Risen Christ, “Peace be with you” it is not merely a commemoration but a commission: having encountered the mercy of the Risen Lord each of us is sent to be ambassadors of the reconciliation Christ has made possible.
We go out as pilgrims of hope and witnesses to mercy in a fractured world too often marked by indifference and judgement. In Christ mercy has a face and in him we find our reconciliation, peace and unending hope.