Duminica Milostivirii

Second Sunday of Easter-Divine Mercy
Kibiko-Sisters house
Christu amefufuka!
“Divine Mercy!” Exclaimed Pope John Paul II in St. Peter’s Square on 22 april
2001, “Divine Mercy! This is the Easter gift that the Church receives from the risen
Christ and offers to humanity at the dawn of the third millennium” (Homily, 22 April
2001).
My dear friends, we live in times in which mercy, like so many other things, has
become a stranger concept in people’s minds, separated from the things that really help
us to understand it. For indeed, mercy makes sense and is necessary because we are
sinners in desperate shape, but how can be mercy if people think that sins are only
some ideas of Church to keep people under her? Many think that mercy is a
declaration that God doesn’t really care about sin, or that sin is not a relevant concept.
On the contrary, mercy means that sin exist and thanks be to God for the gift of His
mercy! Without it, we don’t have a chance to enter in Heaven.
Let’s concentrate a little and to watch this upper room where the apostles were…
who is there…. The men who run away when Jesus was arrested, the man who
betrayed three times Jesus in front of the other peoples, and Jesus said to them, “Peace
be with you,” he says twice. And then? “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.
When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy
Spirit. Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, and whose sins you retain are
retained.”
Pope John Paul could say that divine mercy is an Easter gift because the risen
Christ’s first concrete action is to establish the holy Sacrament of Mercy. Christ gives
to his disciples the power to forgive sins. This first gift of Easter is itself an act of
mercy.
Yes, first of all, they have received forgiveness and then they become the givers of
forgiveness, because to be able to give someone something, you must receive before.
It’s like in seminary, it’s like for you here…we must learn, we must feel the life of our
vocation, we must receive from who is sending me (Jesus in the person of my
superior), the charism for that vocation. Before I must feel the vocation, and than I can
go. If I can not feel, I can not go to the others to be a witness…A witness of what?
So, coming back to the Readings of today, we see the first action of Mercy, the
Sacrament of Penance and in this sacrament Christ presents himself sacramentally to
us in the person of the priest confessor who speaks and acts, as the Church declares, in
persona Christi. It is to Christ that we confess our sins, and it is from Christ that we
receive mercy and pardon. Just as the gift of faith is imparted to Thomas in the context
of a direct personal encounter with Christ, so is the gift of divine mercy granted to
us in a sacramental encounter with Christ who, hearing our sins, our sorrow for
them, and our firm purpose of amendment, forgives and fortifies us in his grace.
Yes, you can not be like priest to hear the sins of the people, and I tell you is not
easy, but what can you do is to be witnesses and messengers of this sacrament, but to
be a good witness and messenger you must fell what is the sacrament of Penance.
Fr. Andrei Petrică Imbrea

Second Sunday of Easter-Divine Mercy
Kibiko-Sisters house
But you can do many others things to be witnesses of God’s mercy, and one
example we have in the first reading from today. „The faithful all lived together and
owned everything in common; they sold their goods and possessions and shared out
the proceeds among themselves according to what each one needed.”.
People have put everything in common, to be near to the need people. What means
this… You know, God have given to each of us gifts, many gifts, and this gifts are not
for us, but they are for the other, are to make known the God love for world. And let’s
travel very far from here, in Italy, and see the priest’s gesture, who has given up his
ventilator bought by his parishioners, to help and to save the life of a younger person.
Yes, is an example of mercy, an example of love that this and others priests had given
for God.
And from where had they this power to be witness of mercy…„The whole
community remained faithful to the teaching of the apostles, to the brotherhood, to the
breaking of bread and to the prayers.” To the breaking of bread....What is
this?....The Holy Eucharist, the Holy Mass, and what is The Holy Mass, than the
Mercy in action....What is happening during the Mass…Christ is offering himself
again and again for the forgiveness of sins like in Holy Friday, but in non-bloody way,
and food for those who are hunger of him.
The novena of Divine Mercy we start in Good Friday, is the day by excellence of
Mercy, but every time when we celebrate the Mass, we celebrate the Mercy, so the
first community they took the power and the examples from the breaking of bread,
from Christ himself, because He is the breaking bread, and now we must take the
power to be witness of mercy also from here…This is the power of Holy Mass for
whom lets Christ to act through him, to change his, her life to be witness of Him,
because the name of God is Misericordia, told us pope Francis in his book, but we
must be careful because people look at us, and we can also be guilty if other people
leave Christ.
The French writer Georges Bernanos, a very good Catholic, was sitting one day at
the window of his apartment, which was right in front of the church. He looked at all
the believers who were coming out of the liturgy. Each, quite, lonely, without drawing
a smile, going to his house or his occupations. And Bernanos says: "I could have gone
to every one, take him by the collar and ask him: Where is, Christian, the glad that
you have attended the liturgy? Where is your gratitude on the face that you met
God here? Why do you remain so sad after sharing with the bread of heaven? ”
Sadness and incoherence may not convince, as fear and apostles did not convince
Thomas. Is it this today, why so many people do not know Christ is because of the
inconsistency of the testimony of Christians?
Let’s try my dear friends to be witness of mercy, witness of hope, witness of Love,
witness of God, in a world who seems to forget Him.
Fr. Andrei Petrică Imbrea

Duminica Milostivirii

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Second Sunday of Easter-Divine Mercy

Fr. Andrei Petrică Imbrea

Fr. Andrei Petrică Imbrea

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