Mercy in Church’s “ordinary time”

By Ladislaus Louis D’Souza

Mumbai: “Jesus longs for us to move beyond the idea of sacrifice—what we feel obligated to give up in order to be perceived as practicing Christians. He would much rather have our hearts involved in every act of mercy on our part, our lives entangled with the lives of others, whereby the word sacrifice is itself replaced with ‘compassion’, the compassion of Jesus as our yardstick of love!”

The call of the Church’s Liturgical Seasons of Advent and Lent is for a change of heart, the former in preparation for the coming of Jesus at Christmas and at end-time, the latter in preparation for celebrating the Easter Mysteries. Essentially, the change-of-heart theme is as old as Biblical history so to say.

We hear Yahweh telling Israel: “I will give you a new heart, and I will put a new spirit within you. I will remove the heart of stone from your body and give you a heart of flesh” (Ezek 36:26) even as the Psalmist [51:10] pleads, “A pure heart create for me, O God, and put a steadfast spirit within me.”

And what does purity of heart and newness of spirit symbolize in the life of a believer? It is passion for sharing the mercy experienced during Advent and Lent with those in need of much that makes life worth living, mercy, straddling effectively so to say Ordinary Time from post-Pentecost to Christ the King and then again post-Christmas up to Shrove Tuesday (the day before Ash Wednesday), topping the list.

Gospel mercy running deep – In Matthew 9:13a, Jesus, quoting Hosea (6:6a) [who, centuries earlier, had condemned the Jews for offering prescribed animal sacrifices in justification of idolatry and the oppression of the poor] admonished the Pharisees thus: “Go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice’” (Mt 9:13a). But of course, mercy backed by sacrifice is the ultimate Christian ideal, the truism of which was evident during the pandemic that has been ruling our lives with impunity for well-nigh over a year, individuals and institutions alike going out of their way to help alleviate the sufferings of the less fortunate in one way or another.

When God says “I will give you a new heart,” He does so with the addendum “I will put a new spirit within you”! A heart without the Maker’s spirit is precisely “the heart of stone” that He purports to remove from our body and replace with “a heart of flesh” (cfr Ezek 36:26). The profundity of this assertion is tremendous in that it brings home to our minds the “meaning” of mercy, love and sacrifice, Jesus Himself candidly declaring, “Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy” (Mt 5:7). This highlights the significance of the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart annually celebrated on the Friday following Corpus Christi.

Historicity – Devotion to the Heart of Jesus, encompassing as it does his long-suffering love and compassion towards humankind, is ancient. However, the popularization of this devotion in its modern avatar with its roots in the various facets of Middle Age Catholic mysticism [in the mold of Saint Gertrude the Great] unmistakably derives from two holy women: Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque, a 17th century French Visitation nun who is said to have learned the devotion from Jesus himself during a series of apparitions between 1673 and 1675, later reinforced in the 19th century by the mystical revelations of Blessed Mary of the Divine Heart, a German noblewoman and Good Shepherd nun in Portugal, who influenced Pope Leo XIII in Jesus’ name to consecrate the entire world to His heart. Pope Saint John Paul II, an ardent devotee of the Sacred Heart, avers that “this feast reminds us of the mystery of the love of God for the people of all times.”

“Blessed are the pure of heart for they shall see God” (Mt 5:8) – Theoretically, the Feast of the Sacred Heart, which was established by Pope Pius IX in 1886, is all about love—a love that allowed the purity of God’s only-begotten Son to be humiliated at a mock trial preceding a grotesque form of undeserved Capital punishment, crucifixion.

All this for our sake – as Jesus Himself asserted: “Greater love has no one than this – to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (Jn 15:13), the most significant aspect being that Jesus, treating us as His friends, makes us children of the Heavenly Father through His death on the cross. The blood and water of healing gently flowing from his pierced side fulfilled Isaiah’s prophecy (53:5d), “By his wounds we are healed” – a heart-action of mercy on the part of Jesus crucified that cannot but challenge us to have our stony hearts replaced with hearts of flesh embodying God’s Spirit!

The ‘Ordinary Time’ of the Church’s year will then begin to appear not as ordinary but as an extraordinary period of humanization for our psyches long burdened with heartlessness. And so we could well make the simple, honest-to-goodness words of Eddie Espinosa’s 1982 hymn Change my heart, O Lord” our own today, in the process experiencing the beating of a new heart in our beings as we sing:

Change my heart oh God
Make it ever true!
Change my heart oh God
May I be like You!