So, we Catholics have had a busy couple of months. We had 40 days of Lent where we fasted, did works of charity, sought forgiveness… all to get us ready for Holy Week and Easter. 

We had Holy Thursday where Jesus established the Eucharist and said those words repeated at every Mass, “Do this in remembrance of me.” That same night before he was turned over, he washed the disciple’s feet in a sign of total servitude and instructed us to do the same. He said, “I have given you a model to follow, so that as I have done for you, you should also do.”

Then, Good Friday, the Passion, and death on the cross. The disciples, not understanding what was happening, had feelings of fear, anguish, and even abandonment.

Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday – the Resurrection! Fears vanquished. Anguish replaced with wonder. Abandonment replaced with joy. Our Savior resurrected! Good wins out over evil, life wins out over death. A pathway to the Father is reopened and Jesus stands with us to present our prayers to Him. He gives us access to the Father because He loves us that much. And that begins the 50 days of Easter right up until Pentecost – a season of joy, a season of seeking and finding our Savior Jesus Christ. 

But just as the Easter season starts, we lose our Pope on Monday. So, this week we watched the gathering of Bishops, Cardinals, and world leaders to pay their respects and remember all the good that Pope Francis did, and watched in respectful silence as he was laid to rest.

We will now watch during the coming weeks the Conclave and election of a new Pope, and the anticipation of his impact on our Church. But with all that to watch and pay attention to, we might forget about the Easter season we are in. We might forget about all the preparation we did to get ready for this season. We might forget what Pope Francis told us about mercy.

He said, “God’s mercy is our liberation and our happiness. We live for mercy, and we cannot afford to be without mercy. It is the air that we breathe…. We need to forgive, because we need to be forgiven.”

Which brings us to today, Divine Mercy Sunday. It is no coincidence that it occurs right after Easter because Jesus worked so hard and suffered so much to open that pathway to the Father so that we could have access to His mercy. That is what His mission in life was, to gain for us a way to seek and receive mercy for our mistakes, our hurt we’ve done to others, the sins we’ve fallen into. 

Jesus longs to give us His mercy. Jesus wants us to come to Him. He spoke of that longing through Saint Faustina with these words about mercy. “My daughter, write that the greater the misery of a soul, the greater its right to My mercy; [urge] all souls to trust in the unfathomable abyss of My mercy, because I want to save them all.”

That’s amazing. He said, “Because I want to save them all.” He calls the amount of His mercy an “unfathomable abyss of mercy.” But here’s the catch. We can’t receive His mercy for sin if we don’t ask.When we do ask for forgiveness, he says, “Your faith has saved you”. So why don’t we do that more? Why don’t we admit our sins freely when we know He will forgive us? That’s what Divine Mercy Sunday is all about. Us recognizing the desire Jesus Christ has to give us His mercy, to give us His grace, to say, “Your faith has saved you.” 

Reconciling ourselves with Christ through the sacrament of Reconciliation is easy once we stop being self-conscious about it. Just lay it out there and have an honest conversation about what we’ve done. He knows our sin, we need to say it out loud to Him. And in doing so, we receive God’s grace and we build that relationship with Jesus. But remember that catch: we have to ask.

So, Divine Mercy Sunday is a special day to seek and receive God’s grace. But then again, access to His Body and Blood, access to His grace is available every Sunday and really every day there is a Mass. Reconciliation for sin and access to mercy can also happen any day. We should carry into the Easter season all the good habits we picked up during Lent and Holy Week. Let’s carry them forward as, frankly, a part of who we are, part of the resurrected people. A people blessed with a full dose of His Mercy.