6 March 2018
Tuesday of the Third Week of Lent
“The present-day mentality, more perhaps than that of people in the past, seems opposed to a God of mercy, and in fact tends to exclude from life and to remove from the human heart the very idea of mercy. The word and the concept of “mercy” seem to cause uneasiness in man, who, thanks to the enormous development of science and technology, never before known in history, has become the master of the earth and has subdued and dominated it. This dominion over the earth, sometimes understood in a one – sided and superficial way, seems to have no room for mercy.”
If I asked people, who wrote the message above and when it was written, my guess that many people will say that it was written by Pope Francis during his pontificate. The right answer is that it was written Pope Saint John Paul II in 1980, during his third year of Pontificate, in his second encyclical letter Dives in Misericordia. The theme of the letter is “the revelation of the mystery of the Father and his love.” As Pope John Paul II wrote further, “the truth, revealed in Christ, about God the ‘Father of mercies,’ enables us to ‘see’ Him as particularly close to man especially when man is suffering, when he is under threat at the very heart of his existence and dignity. And this is why, in the situation of the Church and the world today, many individuals and groups guided by a lively sense of faith are turning, I would say almost spontaneously, to the mercy of God. They are certainly being moved to do this by Christ Himself, who through His Spirit works within human hearts. For the mystery of God the “Father of mercies” revealed by Christ becomes, in the context of today’s threats to man, as it were a unique appeal addressed to the Church.”
In the Gospel, Christ tells us exactly how often we should forgive: seventy-seven times. My learning process in the school of mercy is very slow. In fact, I realize that it is impossible for me to graduate from the school of mercy. The only thing that enables me to make progress is the grace of God. So I hope that I will slowly make progress in the school of mercy. During this lenten season, we face the test to be merciful. Let us continue our prayer, fasting and almsgiving with the hope that we can be merciful when we allow the grace of God to transform us.