Mercy and the Paschal Mystery

The Paschal Mystery unfolds the depths of that providence whereby God, in his mercy, takes upon himself the utter abandonment we have incurred through our forays into sin. Having committed injustice against the infinite justice of God, man after the fall finds himself in the helpless situation of needing to make reparations which his finitude prevents him from making. And so the action of the Paschal Mystery, with that of the hypostatic union, becomes a wholly marvelous work which fulfills the dictates of justice and mercy at once. As man, Christ is able to make reparation to God on man’s behalf. He at last justifies man to God, yet he also justifies the ways of God to man by taking the weight upon himself and showing the depth of God’s mercy. John Paul II expresses it thus:

“Death has justice done to it at the price of the death of the one who was without sin and who alone was able-by means of his own death-to inflict death upon death.83 In this way the cross of Christ, on which the Son, consubstantial with the Father, renders full justice to God, is also a radical revelation of mercy, or rather of the love that goes against what constitutes the very root of evil in the history of man: against sin and death.” (Dives in Misericordia 8)

Death has haunted man from the beginning. And while it is conceivable that we could find in death a mere facet of the order of things, the natural succession by which one generation passes away to allow the next to take the stage in the grand concourse of universal existence, nonetheless there seems to obtain a fundamental dissonance between such a conception of death and man’s lived experience of death, an experience which is intimately connected with birth and which, almost from the dawn of awareness, factors into man’s anxiety.

 
The Paschal Mystery enacts a fundamental transformation of death. It cancels the emptiness of death, preserves death’s capacity to free us from the pains of earthly existence, and elevates death such that it becomes a means of entering into the vision of the Trinity which fulfills man’s life as imago Dei, the one who is in the image of God because he shares in the divine intimacy of lover, beloved, and love between them. 

The Paschal Mystery further extends mercy to us by demonstrating to us the great spectrum of human drama which swirls about the events in Jerusalem in those days. Witnessing the despair of Judas, the failure and restoration of St. Peter, and the steadfast discipleship of Mary and St. John, we are trained in how to ask for mercy and in how to show it to others. The latter pair, given to each other by Jesus from the Cross, model for us that mercy which does not leave Christ alone in his agony, and they train us to recognize that advancing in perfection does not reduce our need of mercy but rather expands our capacity for it toward the dimensions of the divine largesse. St. Peter, absent at the foot of the Cross, reminds us to count on the prodigal mercy of God, and perhaps he also trains us to be merciful to our ecclesial leaders. 

The Paschal Mystery is God’s wholly marvelous work, the one whereby he opens a font of mercy flowing from the Lamb whose blood washes us white.