Divine Mercy –important part of salvation history

By Kaelanne Jordan

Email: mediarelations.camsel@catholictt.org

Twitter: @kaelanne1

“If we understand that Divine Mercy is really the ethos of Christianity, how we could have sourpuss Christians?… How could we be at enmities with one another? How could we hold each other in any form of unforgiveness? How could we dare not show mercy when we have been shown so greater mercy?”

Archbishop Jason Gordon posed these questions to participants during Zion RC Community’s virtual Divine Mercy celebration last Sunday. The celebration had as its theme Mercy for restoration in families.

Ecclesial communities like the Living Water Community, Eternal Light Community, People of Praise Community, and Emmanuel Community contributed to prayerful segments.

In delivering the feature address, Archbishop Gordon highlighted that the crux of Jesus’ ministry and mission was through revelations of Divine Mercy. Divine Mercy, he said, ought to be “seen most reverently” in the family.

He opined the reason the current generation finds Christianity “difficult” is because they don’t receive mercy from others. He said that we who have received mercy, must give mercy, so that the world would be “set ablaze” with the mercy of God.

“They constantly say we speak one thing, and we live another…. There’s only one call here and that’s the call to repentance and to recognise if the coming of the Messiah was the jubilee of the jubilees, where Paradise was closed [and] is now open to you and me, then you and I have to do everything in our power to open Paradise and bring people back into Paradise and show them the way back to God,” the Archbishop said.

He reminded that the apostles were given this same mission when they were breathed on in John 20:20–23. So too, faithful are called to understand they are to be faces of mercy in the world and be “joyful” in this.

At the start of his address, the Archbishop remarked that the day’s celebration was a very special day in the life of the Church given to Catholics by the revelation of St Faustina and the cooperation of Pope St John Paul II.

“And it’s an unusual feast because it’s highly unusual to put anything at all to break the Easter cycle,” he commented.

He beseeched participants to see Divine Mercy not simply as an attribute of God, or something ancillary to the mission of Jesus Christ, but as the core and “epicentre” of understanding who God is.

“If we are to understand that, then we have to understand that this thing we call Divine Mercy is really an important part of salvation history. And as a part of salvation history, it gives us a way to see a paradigm, a key to unlock the whole history.”

The Archbishop referred to the “cryptic”, “apocalyptic” and “quirky prophecy” of Daniel’s vision of the seventy weeks in Daniel 9:20–26. The text is a “jubilee of jubilees” prophesied through Daniel.

Similarly, the decree by Cyrus to rebuild the city of Jerusalem (2 Chronicles 36:23) sets in motion the prophesy of Daniel.

“Remember the prophecy of Daniel says “from the time the word goes out to restore and rebuild Jerusalem, until the Anointed One, the ruler comes. After the sixty-two ‘sevens’, the Anointed One will be put to death and will have nothing… the people of the ruler who will come will destroy the city and the sanctuary” (Dan 9:20–26).

According to Archbishop Gordon, this prophesy gives a view to the coming Messiah, the One whom every first century Jew would have known, heard, listened to, ruminated on, and meditated on.

“And that’s why there was so much messianic activity around the time of Jesus Christ because the time had come close…. The 70 times 7 weeks of years which is 457 BC plus 490 years would have brought that prophecy from the day that Cyrus issued … to 33 AD which is the year in which Christ our Lord died on the cross.”

Archbishop Gordon concluded that if this reading of salvation history is “right”, then the whole of salvation history is about the display of Divine Mercy.