I had a different homily prepared originally, but I spent almost five hours hearing confessions at various places across the diocese yesterday. In the midst of that, I found myself thinking about all of you—thinking about what these past three weeks have been like—and something struck me during that time.
One of the things I have noticed, fairly consistently, is that most of us here, if not all of us, are wounded. As a community, it seems we have all had experiences that have hurt us in some way, and we have held on to those hurts.
It is important that you know: I can not fix most of your problems. And the few that I could fix are usually the trivial things you could have solved yourself, if you had thought about it a little longer. And I can not heal you. I definitely cannot heal you. But we do know the one person who can. He is the one we are gathered here for—our Lord Jesus Christ, the one who rose from the dead and conquered even death itself.
He can bring you healing. He can solve every problem. He has defeated death. There is nothing he cannot achieve. And in fact, today we celebrate precisely that: the boundless power and love of God. Today is Divine Mercy Sunday, the day we remember that God’s mercy for us is infinite—that there is no barrier he cannot overcome, no wound he cannot heal, no relationship he cannot reconcile.
But we must open ourselves to receive the grace and mercy he offers. I think sometimes we imagine that healing from God looks like saying a quick prayer, and then he snaps his fingers and we are instantly healed. But it so rarely looks like that. Healing is usually a long process, one we must choose to enter. We have to desire to be healed.
Today is the day to make that choice. Today is the day to lay before Christ all our challenges, all the wounds we have carried from our past. Today, we should lay them at his feet and ask him to enter into our lives and begin that process of healing—to help us let go of the past, to help us forgive those we need to forgive, and to help us look forward and keep walking along the path he has set before us.
It is imperative that we begin today because there is so much work to do. Just as the apostles were sent out into the world to proclaim the good news, so too are we. And there are many people around us who need to hear it. There are many in this area who have never truly heard who Jesus Christ is. They walk through life without hope, weighed down by fear and despair, because they do not know him.
It is our mission to spread the good news, to let them know that salvation and eternal life are real, that evil and sin do not have the final word, but Christ does. Eternal life is a real and living hope. But we cannot offer that hope if we are still trapped in our wounds. We must first find healing. We must find wholeness in our souls.
So today, let us open our hearts completely to Christ. Let us hand over everything to him, and allow him to begin the work of healing within us. Then, renewed and strengthened, we can return to the mission he has given us: to draw all people into this place, into God’s kingdom, and offer them the gift of eternal life, eternal happiness, and eternal peace in the presence of God.