The Empowering Mercy!

Saturday, April 26, 2025

Acts 4: 13-21; Mk 16: 9-15

Today’s Gospel highlights the empowering mercy of God. 

Ahead of celebrating Divine Mercy Sunday, we witness the patient and understanding love of Christ. 

Mark repeats the sentence that Jesus’ disciples ‘did not believe’ in his resurrection, though Mary Magdalene and the two disciples on the road to Emmaus recounted their personal encounter with the Risen Lord. 

While Jesus was disappointed about their disbelief, he did not lose hope in them. 

This is what we find in his gesture, which turns those ‘unbelievers’ into the heralds of the Gospel. 

We are made to realize that human failings are not occasions for God to desert us or let us down but opportunities to correct and uphold us. 

It is also a profound reminder that if God were judgmental, none of us would be spared. 

In his Conversations with God, Neale Donald Walsch has a description that helps us glimpse into the absolute magnanimity of God. ‘God’s love and God’s compassion, God’s wisdom and God’s forgiveness, God’s intention and God’s purpose, are large enough to include the most heinous crime and the most heinous criminal.’

The Divine Mercy is so empowering that our unworthy past is obliterated in a way that our future becomes a witness to the healing love of God. 

Let us pray that we may live up to the empowering gift of the Divine Mercy. 

Fr. Dhinakaran Savariyar