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JMJ
Easter Sunday
“I absolve thee in the Name of the Father, and of the Son,
and of the Holy Ghost.”
Thus is the penitent sinner assured by the Lord and Savior Himself, acting
and speaking through His minister, at His tribunal of his release from bondage
to the devil through his sins.
“…Our thoughts hitherto have been full of sharpness and
severity. We have been dwelling upon sin… we now enter upon another region –
the realm of peace, of grace, of pardon and healing….
It was late in the evening of the first day of the week when
the Lord and Savior rose from the dead that His disciples were gathered
together, and the doors were shut for fear of the Jews. When they least
expected it, unawares, and by His divine power, He came – though the doors were
closed – and stood in the midst of them; and His first words were, Peace be unto you. And when He had
assured them that it was He Himself, their fears were dispelled. He then said, Receive ye the Holy Ghost. Whose sins you
shall forgive they are forgiven them; whose sins you shall retain, they are
retained (Jn. 20.22-23). That is, He gave them the proof of His Godhead in
the power of absolution. He gave them the proof of His Godhead – for the
Pharisees were right when they asked, “Who shall forgive sins but God only?”
(Mk. 2.7).
God alone can absolve, and God alone can give the power of
absolution. When the power of absolution is exercised by any man, he is but an
instrument in the hand of God: the absolver is always God Himself. Our Lord
exercised, among many other attributes of His Godhead upon earth, these three
special powers of divinity: He raised the dead; He multiplied the bread in the
wilderness; and He cleansed the lepers – and these three works of almighty
power, which are altogether divine, He has committed in a spiritual form to His
Church forever. When He said, Go, and
make disciples of all nations, baptizing them [in Nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti], in that power of
Baptism He gave to His Apostles and their successors [cf., Acts 1.25-26] the
power of raising from spiritual death to spiritual life. Those who are born
dead in sin are raised by a new birth to spiritual life. When He instituted the
Most Holy sacrament of His Body and Blood, and gave to His [ministers of the
Christian altar, cf. Heb 13.10] the
authority to say, This is My Body, He
gave the power to feed His people with the Bread
of Life, and to multiply that Bread forever.
When He said, Whose sins ye shall
forgive, they are forgiven unto them, He gave the power of cleansing the
leprosy of the soul.
Sometimes, incoherent – or, what is worse, controversial –
minds imagine, or at least say, that this power was confined to the Apostles.
The very words are enough to prove the contrary; but there is an intrinsic
reason to the thing which, to any Christian mind, must be sufficient to show
that these three powers are perpetual; for what are these three powers, but the
authority to apply to the souls of men forever the benefits of the most
Precious Blood of Jesus Christ [most generously shed upon the Cross]? The
Precious Blood would have been shed in vain, if it were not applied to the
souls of men one by one. The most potent
medicines work no cures, save in those to whom they are applied; and the Precious Blood, which is the remedy of
sin [without shedding of Blood there is no remission (Heb. 9.22)], works the healing of the soul only by its
application. Baptism, the Holy
Sacrament of the Altar, and the Sacrament of Penance are three divine channels
whereby the Precious Blood of Jesus Christ is applied to the soul.
Penance is both a virtue and a Sacrament. From the beginning
of the world the grace of penance has been poured out upon men. It is an
interior disposition of the soul before God; and from the beginning of the
world the Holy Ghost, Whose office it is to convince the world of sin, has
convinced sinners of their transgressions, has converted them to penance, and
from penance has made them Saints. But penance, in the Christian law, is also a
Sacrament; and I have to explain the meaning of the grace and the action of the
Sacrament, and how they are united.
First, penance is a grace or inward disposition of the soul,
and I need to go far to find an explanation. I need not frame any explanation
of my own, for we have a divine delineation of what penance is, drawn as it
were, by a pencil of light of our Divine Savior Himself in the parable of the
Prodigal Son. There we have a revelation of what the grace of penance is.
Let us take the main features of [it]. First, the son who, under the roof of a loving
father, had need of nothing – for his father was rich – chafed and was fretful because the authority of a superior will was
upon him. He could not bear the yoke
of living under a paternal rule, and his
imagination was all on fire with the thought of liberty. He looked at the
horizon – it may be the mountains that bounded the lands and fields of his
father – and pictured to himself the valleys and plains and cities full of
youth and happiness and life and freedom – a happy land, if only he could break away from the restraints of home.
He came to his father, and with a cold-hearted insolence said that which being
translated is, “Give me what I shall have when you are dead.” There was the a
spirit of undutifulness and of ingratitude in that demand – but the father gave
it; and the parable says that not many days after – that is, with all speed, in
fact – gathering all things together,
all he had and all he could get, he went off into a far country, and there he
spent all he had in living riotously.
Here was the consciousness of unworthiness. He did not
aspire to be a son again; that, he thought, was lost forever. And he arose and went to his father. And as
he was coming, before he caught sight of his father, his father saw him afar
off, for love gives keenness of sight to a father’s eye: he saw his son
returning, and he ran towards him. He was as eager to forgive as the son was to
be forgiven – ay, more; he fell upon his neck, and the Prodigal Son began his
confession. But before he could finish – the words “make me as one of thy hired
servants” never came out of his mouth – his father fell upon his neck and
kissed him, and forgave him all. He was perfectly absolved. And the father said: “Bring forth quickly” –
that is, make haste, no delay – “the first robe.” The robe he had before, and
put it on him. Put shoes on his feet and a ring on his hand. Restore him not only to the state of
pardon, but to the full possession of all he had before his fall; for this
my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.
We see here in the Prodigal Son the grace of penance – that
is, self-knowledge, self-condemnation, sorrow for the past, conversion,
self-accusation, and the will to amend one’s life. We have here then, I say, a
divine delineation of what it is. Let us take another example.
There was in Jerusalem one who was rich, and abounded in all
things. She possessed also the fatal gift of beauty, which has been eternal death
to tens of thousands. She was living in wealth and luxury and enjoyment, and,
as the Apostle said, was dead while she
lived. She decked herself out in gold and in fine apparel, like the
daughters of Jerusalem of whom the Prophet Isaias says, that they were haughty,
and walked with their necks stretched out, with wanton glances in their eyes,
and making a noise with their feet, and walking with mincing step, with the
affectation of an immodest and luxurious life. She was known to be a sinner and
was notorious in the city. On a day – we know not when, we know not where, for
it is not written – she chanced, as we say, to light upon the presence and to
hear the voice of our Divine Redeemer. It may be that it was in the Temple
where He daily taught. It may she had gone up to the Temple in all the bravery
and all the ostentation of her apparel, not to worship the Holy One of Israel,
but from curiosity, and to be seen, and to show herself to men. But she found
herself in the presence of One Whose calm dignity abashed her.
At first, it may be, she resisted the sound of the voice;
but there was something in it which thrilled to the depth of the heart. There
was something in the still steady gaze of that divine eye which she could not
escape. A shaft of light cut her heart asunder, and an illumination showed her
to herself, even as God saw her, covered with sins red as scarlet, and, as the
leper, white as snow. She went her way with the wound deep in the heart – a
wound which could never be healed save only by the hand that made it. The gaze
that had been fixed upon her and the sound of that voice were still in her
memory. She could escape them nowhere. No doubt, there was a conflict going on
day after day, and her old companion, her evil friends, and the manifold dangers
of life came thick about her as before; but she had no soul for them.
At last, laying aside her finery and ostentation, unclasping
the jewels from her head, and with her hair all loose about her – with an
alabaster box of ointment, she walked through the streets of Jerusalem before
the eyes of men, caring for no one, thinking of no one but of God and her own
sins. Hearing that Jesus of Nazareth sat at meat in the house of Simon the
Pharisee, she broke into the midst of the banquet, under the scornful, piercing,
indignant eyes that were fixed upon her; without shame, because her only shame
was before the eye of God; without fear, knowing what she was, because she had
come to know the love and tenderness of Him Who had spoken to her. She stood
silent before Him, weeping. She had the courage even to kiss His feet, to wash
them with her tears, to wipe them with the hair of her head; while the Pharisee
secretly rebuked our Divine Lord, and asked himself in his heart: “If this man
had been a prophet, would He not have known what manner of woman this is? She
is a sinner, and He would not have allowed her to touch His feet.”
But those feet had in them the healing of sin. The touch of
those feet, powerful as the touch upon the hem of His garment, cleansed the
poor sinner. He turned, and in the hearing of them all, He said: Her sins, which are many, are forgiven her,
because she has loved much. Here is an example of the grace of penance; and
an example not of penance only, but of perfect and full absolution given in a
moment; more than this, of a complete restoration of purity given to the most
fallen. In token of that absolution and of that restoration, privileges were
granted to Mary Magdalen beyond others. She, out of whom Jesus cast seven
devils, was the one who stood at the foot of the Cross with the Immaculate
Mother of God. It was she who had kissed His feet at that supper who afterwards
anointed them, and wound them in the fine linen for His burial. It was she, the
greatest of sinners, who, next after His Immaculate Mother, saw Him before all
others when He arose from the dead; and these tokens of the love of Jesus to
penitents, and to the greatest of penitents, have been followed in the kingdom
of Heaven with a glory proportioned to her sorrow and to her love. Mary
Magdalen is set forth forever as an example of the grace of penitence, and of
the perfect absolution of the Most Precious Blood.
But perhaps you will say, she had never known our Savior.
She committed all her sins before she came to the knowledge of His love. I have
known Him, and therefore the sins I have committed I have committed against the
light; and my sins are more ungrateful than hers, and are therefore guiltier,
and I have less hope of pardon. Let us see, then, if there be another example.
Is there an example of any friend, who had been highly privileged, greatly
blessed, who had known everything, who had received all the light and grace
which came from the presence and the words of our Divine Savior in those three
years of His public life – is there any such who afterwards sinned against Him?
There was one to whom the light of the knowledge of the Son
of God was first revealed by the Father in Heaven. There was one who was First
of all the Apostles, because of this illumination of faith, and to whom our
Divine Lord would built His Church and gave the keys of the kingdom of Heaven.
This friend, preferred above all others, dignified above all others, protested
to his Master: Though all men should
forsake Thee, yet will not I. I am ready to go with Thee to prison and to
death. Though all men shall deny Thee, I will never deny Thee (Lk. 22.33).
He had the courage to draw his sword in the garden, and cut off the ear of the
servant of the high priest; yet this man three times denied his Master. He denied
Him utterly: I never knew the Man. I am
not of His disciples. And with cursing and swearing he renounced his Lord.
Here, then, is the ingratitude and the sin of a cherished
friend. But on that night he went out, and he wept bitterly; and his bitter tears upon that night of sin
obtained for him not only perfect absolution in the evening of the first day of
the week, but the power of absolving the sins of others, sinners like himself.
Peter received his own absolution, his own forgiveness, and in that moment, he
was restored to his dignity as Prince of the Apostles. Though he was upbraided
in the gray of the morning on the Sea of Tiberias by the three questions of
tender reproof: Simon, son of John,
lovest thou Me more than these? to remind him of his three falls, Peter was
restored to more than he had before.
He was made head on earth of the Mystical Body of Christ; he died a martyr for
His Lord, and he reigns in Heaven by his Master’s side.
We have here again an example of the grace of penance; and
what do we see in it? Just the same sorrow, self-accusation, reparation as
before. Here is the virtue and grace of penance…." (from a sermon of Henry Edward Cardinal Manning)
A blessed Easter!
