The Lord is a God of Mercy

Tomorrow is the Feast of Divine Mercy. This is a fairly new devotion in the Western Church, but the concept has been part of Eastern Catholic Spirituality for centuries. The Trisagion Prayer, prayed as part of the Byzantine Prayers of the Divine Liturgy is used in this chaplet:

Holy God
Holy Mighty
Holy Immortal
Have mercy on us.

I think God is using Saint Faustina (to whom Jesus gave this spirituality, devotion, and chaplet), to bring together the East and the West--to allow the Church, as John Paul II said, to "breathe with both lungs."

The misguided Western focus on God's justice as necessitating an abusive type of "punishment" to a humanity that can never hope to deserve otherwise, has been seen by some in Eastern Christianity as causing many to reject the possible existence of a God at all, when, instead, "justice" in Scripture is more properly translated as "mercy."

God's justice is not a blind justice with no power to save us from ourselves. It is quite the opposite. God's justice is love, mercy and salvation from the power of sin and its consequence, death. Jesus is not "saving" us from God and His punishment. Jesus died on the cross to save us from the logical consequences of our own wrong choices--Sin and DEATH.

Jesus' message was one of truly "Good News". Look at the parable of the prodigal son. The father in Jesus' story, representing God the Father, rushes out to his wayward son, who has just spent his share of his father's lifetime of hard work, and welcomes him, literally, with open arms. In another parable, Jesus tells of the owner of a vineyard who pays the workers hired late in the day the same (fair) wage as those who have been working all day. Is that "just" in the human sense of the word? No. Is that "fair"? No. But that is how much Our Lord loves us. He wants us to be one with Him. He does not want us to suffer in sin. He wants to pour out His endless and eternal mercy on us all.

The video below is by Steve Silvia and pairs the song "Breathe" with information on the Catholic devotion to God's Divine Mercy.