Memorial of St. Joseph Mary Rubio Peralta, SJ
The Lord’s Mercy is meant to teach us something about God, but it also teaches us something about ourselves and about how we ought to live. As we gaze into the face of our loving and merciful God, we see how good He is! He who loves more than any other, who forgives more than any other, who is Mercy and Goodness Itself, that is who we are looking at in our prayers, who we are meeting in the Church’s sacraments.
As we encounter this God of Mercy, we see that He relates to us as merciful, because we are in such need of His Mercy! Our English word ‘mercy’ comes from the Latin word ‘misericordia’ which has two parts, ‘miser-’ which refers to persons in poor and pitiable conditions, and ‘cord-’ which refers to the human and divine heart. It is our need, our poverty, our weakness, even our sin that provokes the Heart of our God to show us infinite Love, Forgiveness and Mercy. But this merciful love comes to us with a mission. “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” (Jn 20:21) Jesus is sent to be the Father’s Mercy among us. He in turn sends us to live out the Mercy poured upon us through our manner of loving our neighbor, especially our neighbors in greater need.
St. Joseph Mary lived this out beautifully. Known as a ‘father of the poor’ and ‘the apostle of Madrid’, this diocesan-priest-turned-Jesuit lived out a very active apostolate of simple preaching, hearing confessions for long hours, visiting the poorest areas of the cities in which he worked to find out the needs of the people there, and organizing large groups of lay people to work to meet the spiritual and material needs of their neighbors. Today, when the first reading tells us of the Holy Spirit’s work of establishing the order of deacons to mercifully meet the needs of the poor, let us ask how God calls each of us to be reflections for others of the Mercy He pours out upon us.