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See also: The Image of Divine Mercy is a Living Image
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Divine Mercy and Our Church |
I received a letter a few weeks ago from a reader of this magazine in which he spoke of the deep pain in his heart caused by all the revelations of the sexual abuse in the Church and the way the whole thing has been so badly handled over the years. As I read the letter I could feel the anguish of a good Catholic trying to make sense of the terrible situation.
He wrote: “The first thought that came into my head when I tried to reconcile in my mind all the terrible things that had happened in our Catholic Church, but not of our Church, was that our allegiance as Christians is to Jesus Christ and not to any Institution.” He said he wanted to “separate the evil people in the Church who had done so much damage to it, from his belief in Jesus Christ and all that that entails.”
I can fully understand this good man’s reaction and he is not alone, we hear that people have left the Church but not left their love of Jesus.
While I fully understand this reaction I do not think that this is the correct reaction. We should never separate our love of Christ from our love of the Church. Christ Himself would never have done this.
When he spoke to St. Paul on the Road to Damascus he said “Saul, Saul why are you persecuting me”, he identified himself with his followers. He told the disciples on Holy Thursday night “as the Father sent me so am I sending you”. His group of disciples, the Church, is the continuing presence of Christ’s saving activity in the world. Again he said to his disciples “if they reject you then they are rejecting me and if they reject me then they reject the one who sent me”. In the mind of Jesus he is intimately one with his Church.
We must also remember that without the Church there would be no Bible, for how else was it preserved and handed down to us? Without the Church there would be no sacraments. So when we reject the Church how can we know Christ? To be in Christ is to be in His Church.
But I think there is a more fundamental problem in such talk of separating the Church with its sinful members from Christ. We think that God can have nothing to do with sin. It is as if we are trying to preserve Jesus, God, from our sins. We know that God is so good and holy that he could have nothing to do with the terribleness of sin. How can God have anything to do with such heinous sins and atrocious sinners?
One of the things that got Jesus into so much trouble when he was here on earth was his ministry to sinners and his eating with them. God in Christ Jesus comes to a sinful world and heals it, forgives sin and transforms a broken world into the Kingdom of God. He did this not by separating himself from this sinful world but by dying for it in love.
When God became flesh in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary he truly became one of us. His mercy is real it is not a pretense. But for it to be real it must truly touch our brokenness and the reality of our sin. In the early centuries of the Church there were groups of Christians who said that Jesus could not have been a real man, because the flesh was evil so it only “seemed” as if he was human. But the Church has always fought against any attempt to deny the humanity of Jesus. We don’t have to protect God’s holiness from sin. It is not our job to save God but rather God in Jesus saved us.
Sin is a terrible thing. If you want to know what it looks like, look at the crucifix. See the suffering, the anguish, the pain, the brokenness. Look at the heart of Jesus pierced and broken and see how this is all caused by sin. So I am in no way trying to excuse sin and what sinners have done and continue to do. There is no one more anguished and appaled by sin than the All Holy and the All Good God.
But the crucifix also tells us of love and mercy. Jesus was crushed by sin because it is such a terrible reality but sin does not have the last word. Love conquers sin. Because sin is real so is mercy. Jesus truly died on the cross and he is truly victorious in his resurrection.
When St. Peter said to Jesus “depart from me because I am a sinner”, Jesus did not. He told him to become his disciple and to follow him. We can all understand Peter’s shame faced with goodness and holiness. But Jesus alone is not ashamed to be known as our friend, as one of us. How can a God of such holiness have anything to do with us? The simple answer is mercy.
The image of the Divine Mercy is Jesus in his humanity. The blood and water are flowing from a human heart that is pierced by the spear of a Roman soldier. We can never deny Jesus’ true connection with humanity. How could God become one of us in our poor, sorry state? He did precisely that. Jesus is truly one of us, like us in all things but sin. God did not stay in his heaven, rather to save us he touched and suffered our broken humaness. We have to live with the scandal of the Cross, not to excuse sin but rather to defeat it.
The hope of the Church is not to separate it from Jesus but to see it only in relationship with Jesus. Rather than calling it “the” Church rather call it “His” Church. Our reaction to the present scandals is not to walk away from His Church but to renew it by the holiness of our own lives. We need to put Jesus back into the centre of everything that has to do with His Church. Even in our reaction to sin and sinners.
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