2nd Sunday of Easter
(Divine Mercy Sunday)
Acts 2:42-47; 1 Peter 1:3-9; John 20:19-31
"I
Trust in You"
by Fr. John
Martin Shimkus, O.S.B.
In this time of Coronavirus, our community has been praying
daily the Chaplet and the Litany of Divine Mercy. We
offer these prayers to call down God’s mercy upon the world
and especially on those who suffer most from this
plague. And as we have repeated again and again the
litany’s response, “I trust in you!”, I began to reflect on
the true meaning of this prayer. Because “I trust in
you” can only be words directed to a person, not a
thing. “I trust in you” refers to a “Divine Mercy”
that is therefore, a person and not merely some impersonal
object or attribute. And so as we prayed, I came to
sense most deeply that Divine Mercy must be God himself,
manifested most powerfully and meaningfully in the Crucified
and Risen Lord.
Isn’t that the meaning of the
Apostle Thomas’ encounter with Jesus in the gospel?
Was this not an encounter with the Mercy of God, who comes
to us in person? True, when Thomas voices his protests
to the other apostles he sounds more like a coroner rather
than a disciple: “Let me see the body so I can poke around
in the wounds.” But later, when he got the chance to
see them, to touch them, they became for him something more
than mere physical injuries; they were truly the precious
marks of the Divine Mercy, the signs of the Lord’s
unfathomable love for his friends. Thomas’ ecstatic
cry of gratitude and faith says it all: “My Lord and my
God!”
Divine Mercy. Divine
Friendship. We live each day not surrounded by virus,
but by mercy - the mercy of a God who did not think it too
much to send his Love in person. We live each day
accompanied by a Divine Friend who has laid down his life
for us. And when we let this reality find its way deep
into our minds and hearts, our whole lives can become an
unending litany, a litany in which we acclaim again and
again “I trust in you!” to the One who is love and mercy
himself.