If you’ve been keeping up with us for the past several days, you know we’ve been looking at mercy in light of the Paschal Mystery. This is the final paragraph of section 8:
Here is the Son of God, who in His resurrection experienced in a radical way mercy shown to Himself, that is to say the love of the Father which is more powerful than death. And it is also the same Christ, the Son of God, who at the end of His messianic mission – and, in a certain sense, even beyond the end – reveals Himself as the inexhaustible source of mercy, of the same love that, in a subsequent perspective of the history of salvation in the Church, is to be everlastingly confirmed as more powerful than sin. The paschal Christ is the definitive incarnation of mercy, its living sign in salvation history and in eschatology. In the same spirit, the liturgy of Eastertide places on our lips the words of the Psalm: Misericordias Domini in aeternum cantabo.(Ps. 89:2)
“Forever I will sing of the Lord’s mercy.” Is it a conceit to think we will exist for all ages? That would indeed represent an inexhaustible mercy, wouldn’t it?
Dives in Misericordia, the second encyclical of Pope John Paul II, is available online here, and is copyright © 1980 – Libreria Editrice Vaticana
Catholic Sensibility 