Homily: Monday of the 2nd Week of Lent - Be Merciful

In the Gospel today Our Lord instructs us “be merciful as your Father in heaven is merciful”.  We are called to imitate the one who has made us, the one in whose image we have been created.

Notice, Jesus didn't say, “be merciful....once in while.” “Be merciful, only to the people whom you like.”  “Be merciful, only to people who will be able to pay you back.”  No, he says, “be merciful as your Father in heaven is merciful” and his mercy is available to all at all times.

What does mercy look like?  Because we have such a difficult job imitating God's mercy, God showed us exactly what mercy looks like.  Pope Benedict said, “Mercy has a name, mercy has a face, mercy has a heart...Jesus Christ is divine mercy in person: Encountering Christ means encountering the mercy of God.”

In Christ we realize that God does not stay at a distance judging us, he is not indifferent to our trials.  He enters into our life to show us what it means to be fully human and what it means to be like God.
In the early 15th century, a german priest named Thomas Kempis, wrote a book of regarded by many as the most important devotional book in Catholicism aside from the Bible—its latin title, “De Imitatione Christi”--the Imitation of Christ.

Listen to the opening words of Thomas Kempis' Great Masterpiece:
“HE WHO follows Me, walks not in darkness,” says the Lord. By these words of Christ we are advised to imitate His life and habits, if we wish to be truly enlightened and free from all blindness of heart. Let our chief effort, therefore, be to study the life of Jesus Christ.

So much of our Christian pilgrimage here on earth, is learning to imitate Christ.  He shows us how to love, he shows us and teaches us how to empty ourselves of our selfish willfulness.  We go out into the Lenten Desert with Jesus, we imitate Him in his prayer and fasting, that we may imitate Him in his mercy.  Pope Francis recently said that we need to fast, not just from chocolate, but from “indifference”.

Are we indifferent to the needs of others? If we want God to be lavish in his gifts and mercy toward us, may we be lavish in sharing our gifts, in our mercy toward our neighbor, toward our brother.

We discover who we really are, when we receive God's merciful love, and then, transformed by it, show that mercy to others, that it becomes natural for us to behave like our Father.

May the encounter with Christ in Word and Sacrament today change our hard hearts, that we may be merciful as our Father in heaven is merciful, for the glory of God and salvation of souls.