Readings of the day: Ezekiel 34:11-16; Psalm 23:1-3a, 3b-4, 5, 6; Romans 5:5b-11; Luke 15:3b-7
What
is mercy? What images can we think of that express the mercy of God?
We
have prayed for the last nine days before a great image of God’s mercy, that of
Jesus’ Most Sacred Heart. At the conclusion of this novena we have been
celebrating here at St. Kateri Parish, in this St. Margaret Mary Church, named
for one of the most important promoters of the worship of the Sacred Heart, we
celebrate this Solemnity of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus with this Eucharist.
The image of the Most Sacred Heart is most often that of the heart of Jesus,
crowned with thorns, topped with a cross and burning fire, wounded and bleeding
out of loving mercy for us.
This
past week, my brother Basilian Fr. Kevin Mannara, Director of Campus Ministry
at St. John Fisher College, took me on a tour of the lovely new Hermance Family
Chapel of St. Basil the Great on campus. One of the too many highlights to
count of the new chapel at Fisher is the large cross behind and above the
sanctuary: Seven feet from the top of Jesus’ head to his toes, and seven feet
from fingertip to fingertip, with Jesus’ arms spread wide on the cross. But it
is Jesus’ gaze from the cross upon us, either the people who approach to
receive communion at the foot of the sanctuary steps or priests, deacons,
servers, or anybody preparing to enter the sanctuary at the beginning of Mass
or exit it after Mass, that perhaps most strikingly expresses the Lord’s mercy.
It is as though Jesus, crucified but still alive as he is shown on the cross in
the Chapel of St. Basil the Great, is at the moment of saying, “Father, forgive
them, for they know not what they do,” before he gives up his spirit.
Jesus’
gaze of mercy from this cross is so intensely beautiful as to be unnerving to
anybody who should look up at Jesus’ face. There is nothing quite like a penetrating
stare-down of mercy from our crucified Lord to express the depth of God’s
saving love for us and all creation. The gaze of Jesus from the cross in the
Hermance Family Chapel of St. Basil the Great is also inspired by and meant to
evoke Pope Francis’ motto as a bishop, in turn derived from a text by the
Venerable Bede: Miserando atque eligendo,
literally, “By having mercy and by choosing.”
Our
readings today propose for us yet another image of God’s mercy, that of a
shepherd. Compared to a bleeding, wounded heart crowned with thorns and topped
with a cross and flames, or a giant sculpture of the crucified Jesus gazing
intensely into our eyes when we look up at him from in front of a church’s
sanctuary steps, shepherds may not necessarily have the same unnerving quality
to them. But then when was the last time anybody here has seen a shepherd?
Shepherds may not be as unnerving an image to us as a bleeding, wounded, thorn-crowned,
flame-and-cross-topped heart, or a sculpture of a crucified man gazing right
into our eyes, but shepherds still share a strange, mysterious quality with these
other depictions of God’s mercy.
And,
if we listen more attentively to our readings today, a shepherd, or at least
Jesus depicted as a shepherd, can be just as unnerving as Jesus’ wounded heart
with thorns, a cross, and fire, or Christ crucified gazing into our eyes. In
Luke’s Gospel, Jesus asks, “Who ‘among you having a hundred sheep and losing
one of them would not leave the ninety-nine in the desert and go after the lost
one until he finds it’”? If we were among the first hearers of this parable,
our answer, if we were in our right mind, would probably have been something
like this: “Nobody, Lord. No sensible shepherd would leave ninety-nine of one
hundred sheep to search the desert for one lost sheep. What an almost
unnervingly ridiculous question”!
Yet
if we think of God’s history of loving mercy toward us and all creation, dating
back to the very first moments of creation, God’s history with us has been one
of unnervingly ridiculous loving mercy, of leaving the ninety-nine sheep to search
the desert for the one lost sheep. One of my favorite retreat talks of all time
by the late founder of l’Arche, Jean Vanier, focuses on God’s first response to
Adam’s and Eve’s sin of eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and
evil. Jean Vanier invites the retreatants to remember the first directly-spoken
words of God in the Bible. When nobody on the retreat is able to remember the
first words God speaks in the Bible, Vanier gives the silenced group the
answer: God says to Adam and Eve, “Where are you”? “God does not say to them, ‘You’re
bad,’” Vanier emphasizes; God asks, “Where are you”?
From
this earliest point in the history of God-with-us; Mercy-with-us, our ridiculously
loving, merciful God has been leaving the “ninety-nine righteous people who
have no need of repentance”—in fact, this image is itself ridiculous, because each and every one of us, at one point
or another, has been and will be in “need of repentance”—to seek out the few
lost, vulnerable ones in the desert, beyond the pasture or garden: “Where are
you”?
Still
early in our history as a people of God, God-with-us; Mercy-with-us sent us
prophets like Ezekiel, from whom we hear today, to speak God’s ridiculously
unnerving loving-mercy to us. Ezekiel speaks to us from a time not, sadly, too
different from our own in many respects, even and especially in our Church,
when the elites in positions of power; those positioned to shepherd God’s
people in God’s place, instead misled, scattered, wounded, and deceived the
people. These bad shepherds, abusers of power, were more concerned with
protecting their own power and afraid of appearing ridiculous by having mercy
on the people they served; by going out, seeking and bringing back the most
vulnerable purposefully and preferentially. So Ezekiel, speaking for God, promises
the people; promises us: “The lost I will seek out, the strayed I will bring
back, the injured I will bind up, the sick I will heal, but the sleek and
strong I will destroy, shepherding them rightly.”
Ezekiel’s
vision of a shepherd God would not be so ridiculous, or possibly unnerving, if
Ezekiel were to restrict his vision of whom is to be shepherded to the people
who were, for the most part, faithful to God, strong and morally upright. But
no, Ezekiel’s vision is of a God who preferentially seeks out, brings back, and
heals “the lost… the strayed… the injured… the sick” and destroys those who
think they are among “the sleek and the strong” (or allows them to destroy
themselves by their own pride).
St.
Paul’s letter to the Romans takes Ezekiel’s “preferential option,” if you will,
for “the lost… the strayed… the injured… the sick” to yet another level. St.
Paul proposes for our belief, our worship as Christians, an unnervingly,
ridiculously merciful God. St. Paul proposes for our worship a God and God’s
Son, Jesus Christ, who did not shepherd only the worthy; those who would never
stray far from pasture. St. Paul proposes for our worship a God who, in the
person of God’s Son Jesus Christ, died for us “while we were still sinners… while
we were enemies” of God and of one another.
My
sisters and brothers, the readings we hear today on this Solemnity of the Most
Sacred Heart of Jesus, and the images themselves that we might associate with
this celebration, put before us a God of unnervingly ridiculous, extravagant
mercy: The shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine to search for the one lost
sheep; who preferentially seeks out “the lost… the strayed… the injured… the
sick”; who dies for us “while we were still sinners… while we were enemies.” We
worship and we celebrate on this day the unnervingly ridiculous God-with-us, Mercy-with-us,
who gazes intensely into our eyes from the cross; whose wounded heart bleeds
and is ablaze with love for us and who, in that great mercy of God that God
calls us to imitate among ourselves, chooses us for his own.
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