Our
psalmist declares today: “I will pour clean water on you and wash away all your
sins.” We
can all feel burdened by different things in our lives: past hurts, struggles
with addictions, anger and frustration that we harbor in our hearts, the
inability to forgive, and the sins we cannot leave behind. Yet,
we were washed away from our sins in the waters of baptism, but we can fall
back into our sins and into temptation, in need of conversion and renewal. Christ comes to us again and again in the sacraments of the Church to heal us –
the Eucharist, the anointing of the sick, and the sacrament of reconciliation. In
his Easter homily in his first year as pope, in the light of Christ’s
resurrection that we celebrate on Easter morning, Pope Francis had this to say:
“Dear brothers and sisters, let us not be closed to the newness that God wants
to bring into our lives. Are we often
weary, disheartened, and sad? Do we feel
weighed down by our sins? Do we think
that we won’t be able to cope? Let us
not close our hearts, let us not lose confidence, let us never give up: there
are no situations which God cannot change, there is no sin which he cannot
forgive if we open ourselves to him. God
will indeed pour clean water on us and wash away our sins if we repent and
continue to try to follow Christ’s Gospel in our lives.
That reminds me of an entry from St Faustina's diary:
ReplyDelete"It so happened that I fell again into a certain error, in spite of a sincere resolution not to do so — even though the lapse was a minor imperfection and rather involuntary — and at this I felt such acute pain in my soul that I interrupted my work and went to the chapel for a while. Falling at the feet of Jesus, with love and a great deal of pain, I apologized to the Lord, all the more ashamed because of the fact that in my conversation with Him after Holy Communion this very morning I had promised to be faithful to Him. Then I heard these words: If it hadn’t been for this small imperfection, you wouldn’t have come to Me." (1293) Thank God for his plentiful mercy that he longs to pour out over us.