Mercy Will Save the World
Mercy Will Save the World
Fr Raniero Cantalamessa, OFM Cap.
From man's desire for vengeance to Christ's answer on the Cross
Celebration of the Passion
On Good Friday, 25 March [2016], the Holy Father presided at the celebration of the Lord’s Passion in St Peter’s Basilica. The Preacher of the Pontifical Household, Fr Raniero Cantalamessa, OFM Cap., gave the homily. Published here is a translation of the homily which was delivered in Italian.
God reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation.... We beseech you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. Working together with him, then, we entreat you not to accept the grace of God in vain. For he says, “At the acceptable time I have listened to you, and helped you on the day of salvation!” (2 Cor 5:18, 20-21; 6:1-2).
The Apostle’s call to be reconciled to God does not refer to the historical reconciliation which occurred [through Christ] on the cross; neither does it refer to the sacramental reconciliation that takes place in Baptism and in the Sacrament of Reconciliation. It refers to an existential and personal reconciliation that needs to be implemented in the present. The call is addressed to baptized Christians in Corinth who belonged to the Church for some time; so it is therefore also addressed to us here and now. “The acceptable time, the day of salvation” for us, is the Year of Mercy that we are now in.
But what does this reconciliation with God mean in its existential and psychological dimension? One of the causes, perhaps the main one, for people’s alienation from religion and faith today is the distorted image they have of God. What is the “predefined” idea of God in the collective human subconscious? To find that out, we only need to ask this question: What ideas, what words, what feelings spontaneously arise in you without thinking about it when you say the words in the Lord’s Prayer, “Thy will be done”?
Those who say it do so as if inwardly bowing their heads in resignation, preparing themselves for the worst. People unconsciously link God’s will to everything that is unpleasant and painful, to what can be seen as somehow destroying individual freedom and development. It is somewhat as though God were the enemy of all celebration, joy, and pleasure — a severe inquisitor God.
God is seen as the Supreme Being, the Lord of time and history, that is, as an entity who asserts himself over an individual from the outside; no detail of human life escapes him. Men of flesh have desires: the desire for peace, for power, for money, for another man’s property, for another man’s woman. In this situation, God appears to them as the One who blocks the way with “you must” and “you must not”. Instead of a will to love, which seeks only man’s happiness, God’s will appears to man as a hostile will. All this goes back to the image of God “envious” of man, which the serpent instilled in Adam and Eve, and which some modern thinkers take upon themselves to keep alive, stating that where God exists man cannot (Sartre).
Of course in Christianity the mercy of God has never been disregarded! But mercy’s task is only to moderate the necessary rigours of justice. It has been the exception, not the rule. The Year of Mercy is a golden opportunity to restore the true image of the biblical God who not only shows mercy but is mercy.
This bold assertion is based on the fact that “God is love” (1 Jn 4:8, 16). It is only in the Trinity, however, that God is love without being mercy. The Father loving the Son is not a grace or a concession, it is a necessity; the Father needs to love in order to exist as Father. The Son loving the Father is not a mercy or grace; it is a necessity even though it occurs with the utmost freedom; the Son needs to be loved and to love in order to be the Son. The same can be said about the Holy Spirit who is love as a person.
It is when God creates the world and the free creatures in it that for God love ceases to be nature and becomes grace. This love is a free concession, it may not be there; it is hesed, grace and mercy. The sin of human beings does not change the nature of this love but causes it to make a qualitative leap: mercy as a gift now becomes mercy as forgiveness. Love goes from being a simple gift to become a suffering love because God mysteriously suffers when his love is rejected. “The Lord has spoken: ‘Sons have I reared and brought up, but they have rebelled against me” (Is 1:2). Just ask the many fathers and mothers who have experienced their children’s rejection if it does not cause suffering — and one of the most intense sufferings in life.
But what about the justice of God? Has it been forgotten or underestimated? St Paul answered this question once and for all. The Apostle begins his explanation in the Letter to the Romans with this news: “Now the righteousness of God has been manifested” (Rom 3:21). We can ask, what kind of righteousness is this? Is it the righteousness that gives unicuique suum, “to each his own”, and distributes rewards and punishments according to people’s merits? There will, of course, come a time when this kind of divine justice will also be manifested. The Apostle in fact wrote shortly before that God “will render to every man according to his works: to those who by patience in well-doing seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life; but for those who are factious and do not obey the truth, but obey wickedness, there will be wrath and fury” (Rom 2:6-8).
But Paul is not talking about this kind of justice when he writes, “Now the righteousness of God has been manifested”. The first kind of justice he talks about involves a future event, but this other event is occurring “now”. If that were not the case, Paul’s statement would be an absurd assertion that contradicts the facts. From the point of view of distributive justice, nothing changed in the world with the coming of Christ. We continue, said Jacqucs-Bénigne Bossuet (Sermon on Providence, 1662, in Oeuvres de Bossuet, Paris, Pléiade, 1961, p. 1062), to see the guilty often on the throne and the innocent on the scaffold. But lest we think there is some kind of justice and some fixed order in the world, although it is upside down, sometimes the reverse happens and the innocent are on the throne and the guilty on the scaffold. It is not, therefore, in this social and historical sense that the innovation brought by Christ consists. Let us hear what the Apostle says: Since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, they are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as an expiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins; it was to prove at the present time that he himself is righteous and that he justifies him who has faith in Jesus (cf. Rom 3:23-26).
God shows his righteousness and justice by showing mercy! This is the great revelation. The Apostle says God is “just and justifying”, that is, he is just to himself when he justifies human beings; he is in fact love and mercy, so for that reason he is just to himself — he truly demonstrates who he is — when he shows mercy.
But we cannot understand any of this if we do not know exactly what the expression “the righteousness of God” means. There is a danger that people may hear about the righteousness of God but not understand its meaning, so instead of being encouraged they are frightened. St Augustine had already clearly explained its meaning centuries ago: “The ‘righteousness of God’ is that by which we are made righteous, just as ‘the salvation of God’ [cf. Ps 3:8] means the salvation by which he saves us” (The Spirit and the Letter, 32, 56). In other words, the righteousness of God is that by which God makes those who believe in his Son Jesus acceptable to him. It is not a matter of obtaining justice but of “making” people just.
Luther deserves the credit for restoring this truth when its meaning had been lost over the centuries, at least in Christian preaching, and it is this above all for which Christianity is indebted to the Reformation, whose fifth centenary occurs next year. The reformer wrote, upon discovering this: “I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates”. But it was neither Augustine nor Luther who explained the concept of “the righteousness of God” this way; Scripture had done that before they did: “when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of deeds done by us in righteousness, but in virtue of his own mercy” (Tit 3:4-5)-
God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead through our own trespasses, made us alive together with Christ — by grace you have been saved (cf. Eph 2:4-5).
Therefore, to say “the righteousness of God has been manifested” is like saying that God’s goodness, his love, his mercy, has been revealed. God’s justice not only does not contradict his mercy but consists precisely in mercy!
What happened on the cross that was so important as to explain this radical change in the fate of humanity? In his book on Jesus of Nazareth, Benedict XVI wrote, “That which is wrong, the reality of evil, cannot simply be ignored; it cannot just be left to stand. It must be dealt with; it must be overcome. Only this counts as a true mercy. And the fact that God now confronts evil himself because men are incapablc of doing so — therein lies the ‘unconditional’ goodness of God” (Jesus of Nazareth, II, Vatican City, Vatican Publishing House, 2011, p. 133).
St Anselm of Aosta (1033-1109) who, more than others, had reflected on the relationship between justice and mercy, wrote: “What conduct could be more merciful than that of the Father who tells the sinner condemned to eternal torment and lacking means of atonement: ‘Take my Only Begotten Son and make of him your sacrifice’” (Cur Deus homo?, II, 20).
God was not satisfied with merely forgiving people’s sins; he did infinitely more than that: he took those sins upon himself, he shouldered them himself. The Son of God, says Paul, “became sin for us”. What a shocking statement! In the Middle Ages some people found it difficult to believe that God would require the death of his Son in order to reconcile the world to himself. St Bernard of Clairvaux responded to this by saying, “What pleased God was not Christ’s death but his will in dying of his own accord: Non mors placuit sed voluntas sponte morientis” (Refuting the errors of Abelard, 8, 21- 22). It was not death, then, but love that saved us!
The love of God reached human beings at the farthest point to which they were driven in their flight from him: death itself. The death of Christ was necessary to demonstrate to everyone the supreme proof of God’s mercy toward sinners. That is why his death does not even have the dignity of a certain privacy but is framed between the death of two thieves. He wants to remain a friend to sinners right up to the end, so he dies like them and with them.
It is time for us to realize that the opposite of mercy is not justice but vengeance. Jesus did not set mercy against justice, but against the law of retaliation: “eye for eye, tooth for tooth” (Ex 21:24). In forgiving sinners God is renouncing not justice but vengeance; he does not desire the death of a sinner but wants the sinner to convert and live (cf. Ez 18:23). On the cross Jesus did not ask his Father for vengeance.
The hate and the brutality of the terrorist attacks this week in Brussels help us to understand the divine power of Christ’s last words: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Lk 23:34). No matter the extent of human hatred, the love of God has always been, and always will be greater. In these current circumstances Paul’s exhortation is addressed to us: “Do not be overcome by evil but overcome evil with good” (Rom 12:21).
We need to demythicize vengeance! It has become a pervasive mythic theme that infects everything and everybody, starting with children. A large number of the stories we see onscreen and in video games are stories of revenge, passed off at times as the victory of a good hero. Half, if not more, of the suffering in the world (apart from natural disasters and illnesses) comes from the desire for revenge, whether in personal relationships or between states and nations.
It has been said that “beauty will save the world” (Dostoyevsky, The Idiot, Part III, ch. 5). But beauty, as we very well know, can also lead to ruin. There is only one thing that can truly save the world: mercy! The mercy of God for human beings and the mercy of human beings for each other. In particular, it can save the most precious and fragile thing in the world at this time: marriage and the family.
There happens in marriage something similar to what happened in God’s relationship with humanity, which the Bible in fact describes with the image of a wedding. In the very beginning, as I said, there was love, not mercy. Mercy comes in only after humanity’s sin. So too in marriage, in the beginning there is not mercy but love. People do not get married because of mercy but because of love. But then after years or even months of life together, the limitations of each spouse emerge, and problems arise with regard to health, finances, and the children. A routine sets in that quenches all joy.
What can save a marriage from slipping down to the point of no return is mercy, understood in the biblical sense, that is, not just reciprocal forgiveness but spouses acting with “compassion, kindness, lowliness, meekness and patience” (Col 3:12). Mercy adds agape to eros, it adds a giving and compassionate love to the love of need and desire. God “takes pity” on human beings (cf. Ps 103[102]:13). Shouldn’t a husband and wife, then, take pity on each other? And those of us who live in community, shouldn’t we take pity on one another instead of judging one another?
Let us pray. Heavenly Father, by the merits of your Son on the cross who “became sin for us” (cf. 2 Cor 5:21), remove any desire for vengeance from the hearts of individuals, families, and nations. Let the Holy Father’s intention in proclaiming this Holy Year of Mercy be met with a concrete response in our lives, and let everyone experience the joy of being reconciled with you in the depth of the heart. Amen!
L'Osservatore Romano
Weekly Edition in English
1 April 2016, page 7
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