“Mercy” By Brian Flanagan, Fiat Ventures
24th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Have you ever been part of a sports team that took on a motto or catchphrase for the season? I remember my freshman year in college, the Rutgers Football team used this simple word: “Chop.” This caught on even among the fans, as we would go to games with cardboard signs in the shape of axes, and eventually the student section was named the “Chop Squad” complete with matching t-shirts.
Maybe you’ve tried to motivate yourself before, dubbing the school year the “Year of Being on Time to Class” or the “Year of Actually Studying.” Sometimes these little one-liners can be really helpful as a reminder to work on a specific aspect of our lives, especially our habits.
Pope Francis had a similar idea, calling this year the “Year of Mercy”, where the Church would take some extra time to focus on the concept of mercy and how well we’re living it out in our lives. Side note, there’s an official logo to go with the Year of Mercy which you should google right now if you haven’t seen it. It’s Jesus carrying a man on his shoulders, and it’s supposed to portray that God is so close to us, almost eye to eye, that Jesus and the man actually share an eyeball in the drawing. I see where the artist was going with this, but my friends and I affectionately refer to the logo as the Three-Eyed-Four-Armed-Year-of-Mercy-Monster.
One of the main Gospel passages for the Year of Mercy happens to be this Sunday’s reading; the parable of the Prodigal Son. You know the story; a man has two sons, the younger son asks for his inheritance now, goes off and wastes it, and comes back with an apology typed out on his iPhone ready to read it to his father when he shows up at the house. Instead, the father runs out to meet the son and cuts him off halfway through the apology (the iPhone, unfortunately, landing in a puddle and sustaining the dreaded “water damage”… but fortunately the new iPhone 7 is coming out soon! Sorry, tangent. I just watched the iPhone keynote video again and can’t wait). The father doesn’t just accept his son back halfheartedly; he has a huge party celebrating his return. That’s mercy. That’s forgiveness. That’s what we’re called to do, and also what we need to remember that God has for us when we turn away.
I was in Poland for World Youth Day this summer, and in one of his talks, Cardinal Dolan, spoke about how mercy isn’t something that we can muster up on our own, but that we can show mercy to others because God has shown mercy to us. In the first letter of John, this is echoed, “We love because he first loved us.” Think of somebody who has hurt you in some way or another. Somebody you have some kind of grudge against. What would it take to show them mercy and forgiveness? Mercy doesn’t mean that you have to be best friends again, but a good starting point is “willing their good”, to use a fancy Catholic term. That basically means that you aren’t sitting around hoping they get hit by a bus or that a tree falls on their new car.
After Cardinal Dolan spoke that day, a young woman from Syria spoke about forgiveness and loving our enemies and how she prays for ISIS that God would have mercy on them. That was so powerful to hear, coming from the mouth of someone living through the awful situation. Forgiveness and mercy don’t change anything about the horrific things that ISIS has done, but it keeps our own hearts clean. Once we start hating our enemies, our hearts can go down a dark path pretty quickly. But if we pray for them and ask for God’s mercy on them, our hearts remain pure even in the face of being hurt by others.
The Year of Mercy ends in November, so we still have a few months to continue to focus on this theme and how well we’re living it out – how well we’re showing mercy and how well we’re receiving God’s mercy.
Of course, Pope Francis would love us to continue to be merciful even if next year is declared the “Year of Actually Singing at Mass”. And depending on who is standing next to you singing, you might need to be merciful.
