Following is the prepared text from Bishop Olmsted’s homily for Divine Mercy Sunday.

“The Lord is risen! He is truly risen!”

April 11, 2021

When, on the second evening after Jesus’ crucifixion, the Apostles huddled in fear behind locked doors, they could not imagine saying these words with enthusiasm. However, just as He had promised to do, “Jesus came and stood in their midst and said to them, ‘Peace be with you.’ [Then] …He showed them his hands and His side.” As the disciple rejoiced and simultaneously felt confused by a mix of emotions, Jesus said again, “Peace be with you.” How great was their need to hear these words of the Lord; for only three nights before, they had denied Him, betrayed Him and fled in fear. The Risen Lord’s words of peace and His Presence among them were like the balm of Gilead, healing sin-sick souls.

Then, the Lord renewed His mandate for them to go forth in His Name, saying, “As the Father sent me, so I send you.”  And then, he did something that harkened all the way back in time to the creation of the world: “…He breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit, Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, and whose sins you retain are retained.”  At the time of the Creation of Adam and Eve, the Book of Genesis tells us (2:7), “The Lord God formed man out of the clay of the earth and blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and so man became a living being.” As the Lord God breathed life into Adam in the first creation, so the Lord Jesus breathed on the Apostles and filled them with sacred power from on high to forgive sins in His Name. The deadly impact of sin on souls was losing its power; the Risen Lord was breathing forth Divine Mercy into humanity; and he was making the Apostles its heralds and ministers: “Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them.”

In our First Reading today, from the Acts of the Apostles, we see how the Holy Spirit transformed the frightened Apostles into fearless witnesses of the Risen Lord. We are told, “With great power the Apostles bore witness to the Resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great favor was accorded them all”(Acts 4:33). Who would have imagined the Apostles, only weeks before huddled in fear behind locked doors, becoming such courageous witnesses of the Risen Lord! The great interior power of Jesus’ Resurrection was unleashed within them and the Church, His Mystical Body, came to be through the Holy Spirit.

Prior to the Resurrection of Jesus, the Apostles had come to acknowledge Him as their teacher and Master, and even to believe He was the Messiah promised through the Prophets. But what “Messiah” meant had not been clear; and never would they have guessed Him to be what the Resurrection revealed: namely that He is not only man but also Lord and God. Now it was dawning on them that Jesus of Nazareth was so much more than they had ever imagined. This helps us understand why St Paul writes to the Philippians (3:8), “I even consider everything as a loss because of the supreme good of knowing Christ Jesus as my Lord.”  There is a great difference between knowing about Jesus and actually knowing Him as our Lord, consubstantial with the Father. The more we grasp that Jesus is Lord and God, the more we shall experience, as the Apostle John states in our Second Reading, that “the victory that conquers the world is our faith” (1 Jn 5:4). It is this faith that helps us to appreciate why the Second Sunday of Easter is known as “Divine Mercy Sunday.”

The abundant mercy of God far-surpassed all the betrayals, denials, failures in faith and other sins of the Apostles. We see this dramatically on display when the Risen Lord Jesus appeared to them, a second time, when Thomas was now with them, and He said, “Put your finger here and see my hands, and bring your hand and put it into my side, and do not be unbelieving, but believe.” The wounds of Jesus manifest the suffering of Jesus for the forgiveness of sins; and now as glorious wounds they reveal how the Risen Lord has transformed them into signs of His abundant mercy.

God’s mercy reached perfection in what looked to the world like disastrous failure and weakness. But the weakness and seeming failure suffered by Jesus on the Cross make even more evident the wondrous power of His mercy. As Thomas, surrounded by the other Apostles, gazed in awe upon the glorious wounds of Jesus, his lack of faith was healed and He said, “My Lord and my God!”

Faith in Jesus our Risen Lord leads us to believe in the mercy of God and to receive it through the Sacraments of Confession and the Eucharist.  As the Risen Lord forgives our sins and nourishes us through these great sacraments, He gives us the grace and ability to forgive one another. We stand in constant need of mercy and forgiveness.

No marriage can survive without forgiveness. No friendship can survive without forgiveness, no relationship, no community… Forgiveness is what God’s mercy makes possible. It draws us more profoundly into the love of God.

Mercy restores our dignity. It renews our confidence in our true identity as beloved sons and daughters of God. Mercy gives us the grace to say, “The Lord is Risen; He is truly risen!”  And to say, “Lord Jesus, I trust in you.”