Mercy doesn't look away.

A reflection for the Second Sunday of Easter

Last year, I offered the Catholic Women Preach homily for the Second Sunday of Easter, Divine Mercy Sunday. I offer it here anew, returning again to the nudges that art and poetry offer the boundaries of my imagination, and to the brutal realities that remain a scourge on our world.

As we move deeper into the Easter season, I am still struck by how the risen Christ still bears his wounds, even as we savor a stretch of abundance and feasting and joy. This reflection is an invitation to consider what it means to be people of hope who do not deny suffering, but meet it with mercy.

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I think sometimes I take for granted the brutality of the woundedness of Jesus.

Poet and theologian Padraig O’Tuama released a book of poetry earlier this year that explores a variety of religious themes. He includes a collection of poems imagining that when Jesus died and descended into hell, he met Persephone, Greek goddess of the underworld. And Persephone encounters Jesus in this imagined rendezvous in his brokenness: she bears witness to his body that has borne violence. Jesus is dehydrated, exhausted, aching, struggling to move. For me, this creative fiction expands my imagination as one of the most intense and resonant studies of the wounded Jesus I’ve encountered.

This: and depictions of today’s Gospel.

Thomas refuses to believe in the risen Jesus until he not only sees him for himself, but “puts his fingers into his nailmarks,” “puts his hand into his side.” Today’s Gospel is embodied, material, carnal. The physicality we hear of between Jesus and Thomas is striking. Jesus moves through the world in his humanness, in his body, returns to us from the dead in his body, and encounters Thomas here in his injured, broken body. And Thomas draws close. In the famous 1602 painting by Caravaggio, The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, Thomas’s finger reaches into Jesus’s ribs beneath his skin. It’s intense and unsettling – as it often is to draw close to the woundedness of another.

The Jesus of today’s Gospel is not the Jesus of Good Friday, nor are we a people of the crucifixion. We are an Easter people, and these weeks ascend us from the ephemeral to the eternal. On Easter Sunday, we celebrate the endurance of unfailing hope. Those celebrations continue, and yet, also, the wounds remain. In this embodied encounter between Thomas and Jesus, we find echoes of trauma – physical, emotional, and spiritual – that so many of us know well.

The calendar pages have turned on the chaos of Jesus’s death and its immediate aftermath. We have held the breath of Holy Saturday. And here we are, with Jesus among us, risen, alive, embodied. He brings his whole self to this rising: his body, a memory keeper of the violence and humiliation he has endured. The joy of the Resurrection eclipses but cannot erase the reality of his suffering.

This duality is the proving ground of our faith.

We confess a steadfast hope while our bodies, our relationships, our communities, our planet lay bare the fractures of our humanity; and this tension locates the entry point for mercy. Our hope in the world unseen, kingdom come, earth as it is in heaven, necessitates a tending to the wounds we bear in our humanness. We are both astonished at the wonder and joy of the Resurrection while the Christ before us lets Thomas probe his mutilated skin. Here, in this both/and, in the presence of the broken but risen Christ, the witness we bear compels us to move with mercy.

Mercy holds space for both suffering and joy, for trauma and hope – just as our lives do. Mercy provides refuge for our lived complexity. Our gorgeous, vicious shared humanity is nuanced, cyclical, never all or nothing, more likely all at once. We luminous, broken beings wandering, crawling, and dancing through the world with our hurt and our hope invite mercy to join us at this crossroads when we choose to meet one another with compassion, listening, and love.

And occasions for mercy surely abound today. How can we source hope and not shy away from the scarred stories of migrants and refugees? Of student visas revoked and voices silenced? Of funding slashed? Of rights denied? Of chaos sown? Of lives upended? It’s our hope in a brighter world, in an order of being that reveals rather than obscures the imago dei, in a way of living that Jesus embodied, that beckons mercy when the body of Jesus appears among us. We need not probe the scars. Rather, we can build toward the promise of peace with which Christ announces his presence.

As we soften into the gifts of the Easter season, we do so carrying with us the shock, horror, and loss of the crucifixion. This is as true in our own lives as it was for Jesus. Our belovedness and our brokenness coexist. Our joy and grief are housed together in the same body, as Mary Oliver writes.

Catholic author and poet, Brian Doyle, brings this duality to life. Among his final essays is an imagined letter written to God addressing God as “Coherent Mercy.” There’s a lot to unpack in that address. Doyle was dying from cancer, and he wrote a ridiculous, exuberant, poignant, heartbreaking letter to the Coherent Mercy, offering thanks for what Doyle calls, “the best life ever.” I like this Coherent Mercy idea. It implies a generosity that is abundant, prolific, forgiving, tender, smart, and just. It’s a concise and revelatory descriptor for God.

On this Divine Mercy Sunday, as we fumble for Easter hope in a broken world, as the wounded Christ reveals himself among us in the joy of the Resurrection, as we brave the coalescence of our lived experiences of hurt and hope, may we meet one another with such coherent mercy, bearing witness, standing in awe, announcing, beholding, embodying, “Peace be with you.”

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Elsewhere —

• Easter joy! I had the delight of contributing an essay to In Praise Of from the Jesuit Media Lab — now published as a book and available for purchase! Heaps of praise to Cameron Bellm for corralling writers, editing essays, and launching this book into being. Some of my very best friends are featured among the pages. This collection is a treasure.
  

• More Easter joy! I’ve followed Laura Kelly Fanucci and her writing for more than a decade now. Her devotional, Living Easter: 50 Days to Practice Resurrection, invites reflection and practice on one of the longest, richest, and most storied liturgical seasons we have to savor, and gracefully guides readers across the transition to feasting from fasting. I’m now convinced that Lent gets way too much attention. More Easter all year, please! Thrilled to blurb this book for The Christian Century next month.

  • On “moon joy” and Mary Magdalene, on grief and the Gospel, on a “cosmic alleluia,” I wept, I wept, I wept.
    

• Even more Easter joy! Eric A. Clayton’s new children’s book, The Seagull on the Chapel, made a great Easter gift for my son and godsons.
  

• This springtime note from Catherine Anne Sullivan has me all sorts of curious about the “greening power of God,” especially as I gear up to visit a lush, greening Boston later this month.
  

• And finally, martha park’s World Without End tops my TBR pile. Til then, this essay renewed my own devotion to awe.

Photo by Pragyan Goswami on Unsplash