Back on March, on Ash Wednesday, we started our journey with Jesus in the desert for 40 days. Celebrating Palm Sunday today, we now enter holy week and are close to our celebration of Easter. We Catholics know that Lent is a special time of the year for us, a time of repentance, renewal, and conversion. Pope Francis declared he wanted our Lenten journey to be a time when we live out our Christian faith intensely as a privileged moment in which we celebrate and experience God’s mercy in our lives.
As we hear the Passion of Jesus from the Gospel of Luke today, what struck me was the mercy and compassion Jesus had for the good thief at his side even while Jesus himself was going through his own agonizing death on the cross. While the other Gospel narratives tell us that Jesus was crucified alongside two revolutionaries, Luke’s Gospel tells us that these two men were thieves. Tradition has passed down the name of the good thief as Dismas and the other unrepentant thief as Gestas. As Jesus and these two men were dying on the cross, the unrepentant thief taunted Jesus along with the rest of the crowd: “Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us.” Dismas rebukes this other thief, telling him: “Have you no fear of God, for you are subject to the same condemnation?...The sentence we received corresponds to our crimes, but (Jesus) has done nothing criminal.” The good thief then addresses Jesus: “Remember me when you come into your kingdom,” to which Jesus mercifully replies: “This day you will be with me in paradise”
As we reflect on our own lives as we prepare to enter Holy Week, we might realize that there are some areas of our lives where we’re like Dismas, the repentant thief, and in other areas we are like the other thief who mocks Jesus. In some ways, Dismas represents all of humanity in the way he approaches Jesus as he’s dying on the cross. All of us will face death one day. We can see Jesus’ response to Dismas, in telling him that he will be with him in paradise, as speaking to all of us who repent from our sins, to all of us who place our trust in Jesus and in his pledge of salvation and eternal life. Pope Francis has declared to us: “God never, ever gets tired of forgiving us! The problem is that we get tired of asking for forgiveness… The loving Father always forgives….He has a heart of mercy for all of us. [That is how] we can learn to be merciful with others.”
Isaiah today stated that God had given him a well-trained tongue so that he could speak inspiring words to the weary. There may be times in our lives when we feel like we are carrying a cross that’s too heavy to bear. We may feel weary in the challenges that we facing in our family life, in the workplace, in school, or in a prayer life that no longer inspires us. As we enter Holy Week, we’re called to reflect about God’s mercy, to experience God’s mercy, to share God’s mercy with others. In the Triduum that we well commemorate in our liturgies this upcoming Thursday, Friday and Saturday of Holy Week, God’s mercy will touch our hearts and our lives in amazing ways if we are open to Him. Pope Francis has said: “God’s mercy transforms human hearts. It enables us, through the experience of his faithful love, to become merciful in turn.” Let us accept that invitation to open our hearts to God’s mercy in every area of our lives.
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