the power of
by John Kuckelman
As we enter the Extraordinary Jubilee Year of Mercy proclaimed by the Holy Father, I am struck by the radical power of God’s mercy for each one of us. Indeed, God is revealed to us, very personally, in His infinite acts of mercy which, by their very nature, are incomprehensible to us. Radical? Personal? Incomprehensible? YES! If we prayerfully discern how God’s mercy has been shown to us individually, words like radical, personal and incomprehensible are particularly fitting because His mercy makes no sense. After all, why should we, in our fallen state, receive God’s mercy? The truth is we don’t deserve it. Yet He offers us His mercy anyway, just as He offers so many other blessings that we have not earned and do not deserve. Indeed, the very nature of His mercy is that He is sparing us from what we have earned and do deserve. All that is asked of us when we are offered His mercy is to accept it. But accepting God’s mercy is not as easy as it sounds. Accepting God’s mercy requires the humility to recognize that we need it and we are not entitled to it. For an example of this humility, we can look to how Pope Francis answered the question “Who is Jorge Mario Bergoglio?” The Holy Father responded, “I do not know what might be the most fitting description. I am a sinner.” Even the Pope is in need of God’s mercy! We are then called to go beyond accepting God’s mercy; we must follow the example of Jesus Christ, God and man, to show mercy on one another just as God the Father has had mercy on us. The Gospels are replete with examples of Jesus showing mercy on those whom he encountered. Sometimes those individuals had terrible illnesses or disabilities, but it seems that more often those who were shown Christ’s mercy were most in need of spiritual healing. It doesn’t seem so radical that Christ healed the lepers from their unimaginable suffering or that He restored sight to the blind. But beyond His physical healing, he spent his hours spiritually healing tax collectors, prostitutes and adulterers, simultaneously loving them and commanding them to stop their sinful ways. He even begged from the wood of the Cross that his executioners be forgiven because they didn’t know what they were doing! True mercy, however, requires that we forgive or forgo action that we are justly entitled to take. If we occupy an unjust position and then relent, we cannot congratulate ourselves for showing mercy. One of the many remarkable scenes in the movie Schindler’s List involves Oskar Schindler cleverly influencing the brutal camp commandant to show “mercy” on some of the prisoners, if only for a short while. Schindler accomplishes this by invoking the imagery of a majestic emperor of ancient Rome – telling the commandant that what made the Caesars so powerful wasn’t their ability to sentence a man to death – but rather the special power they held to pardon someone whom they could have sentenced to death. The camp commandant later lingers in front of a mirror for a moment and even practices a gesture with his hand, reciting the words, “I pardon you.” While the camp commandant may have felt powerful offering pardon, his actions were not genuine mercy because he had no right in the first place to imprison and torture the people in the camp, much less to take target practice at them from the balcony of his quarters. So where we are unjustly withholding forgiveness to others, let us not fool ourselves into believing we are being merciful when we finally do forgive. Indeed, when we unjustly withhold forgiveness, we are the ones who are in need of God’s mercy, as we surely will beg of Him that He not withhold His forgiveness of our sins. To bring us back to the radical and incomprehensible notion of God’s mercy, would God show mercy to someone like the commandant in Schindler’s List? Rudolf Hoess was the real-life commandant at the Auschwitz extermination camp, where as many as 2.5 million people were ruthlessly murdered under his direction. He pioneered the use of Zyklon B, enabling the murder of 2000 people per hour at Auschwitz. It is reported that, before he himself was executed, Hoess requested a meeting with a priest and that in that meeting he confessed his sins. We will never know what Hoess said during that confession, but if he truly repented for the horrors he committed, is it incomprehensible to believe that God’s mercy was offered to him? It is certainly radical. It is also personal to Josef Hoess, just as it will be personal for each one of us as we face final judgment and ask for God’s mercy.
mercy
mercy
the year of mercy
19
