Unfathomable Divine Mercy

Here is the image of divine mercy that Saint Faustina particularly favored. She said that it looks exactly like Our Lord, and she worked especially to make sure that the image portrayed His face.

Saint Maria Faustina Kowalska was a sister in the Congregation of Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy in Cracow, Poland. She is widely known for the messages of Mercy that Christ spoke through appearing to her. In 1931, Jesus appeared to her for the first time in this beautiful image. She recorded in her diary:

“In the evening, when I was in my cell, I became aware of the Lord Jesus clothed in a white garment. One hand was raised in blessing, the other was touching the garment at the breast. From the opening of the garment at the breast there came forth two large rays, one red and the other pale. In silence I gazed intently at the Lord; my soul was overwhelmed with fear, but also with great joy. After a while Jesus said to me, ‘paint an image according to the pattern you see, with the inscription: Jesus, I trust in You.'”

Later in her life, Jesus appeared again with this message:

“The pale ray stands for the Water which makes souls righteous; the red ray stands for the Blood which is the life of souls. These two rays issued forth from the depths of My most tender Mercy at that time when My agonizing Heart was opened by a lance on the Cross….Fortunate is the one who will dwell in their shelter, for the just hand of God shall not lay hold of him.”

There’s so much about this image that I think really captivates our hearts and draws us in. Jesus chose to appear to this simple nun in Poland just to emphasize the importance of His unending mercy… but why? His mercy is something that is absolutely necessary for all of us, especially our acceptance and love of it. I want to dig deeper into the mystery of the mercy of God, and to really discover how it can profoundly change our hearts and the very life we live.

What is mercy? The dictionary definition states that it is “compassion or forgiveness shown toward someone whom it is within one’s power to punish or harm.” Imagine God with His Son Jesus and the Holy Spirit in heaven before the creation of mankind. It was the perfect union of three persons with the angels in paradise. Then God decides that He wants to create creatures in His image just so that He can shower them in His love. Our benevolent Father created perfect and beautiful children created from His very love.

All of the sudden, a serpent comes along and offers a very superficial deal, a tricky scheme that His children fall for. Suddenly, they don’t want to receive God’s love anymore and run away from Him. Like any father, God was devastated. God created human beings knowing we would sin and deny His perfect love, resulting in immense pain for Him and His Son. Yet, He still created us. What a beautiful mystery for us to dig deeper into.

This passionate love of a perfect Father has everything to do with completely radical and unfathomable mercy. We, humankind, have completely abandoned a beautiful perfection for corruption, hate, and sin. Didn’t God then have all the right to punish His children who refused His love and even His inheritance of paradise? Yet what does He do? He instead has a plan to sacrifice His own divine Son to save these humans… okay what? This is where the story seems absurd if we don’t understand the Heart of a father. God saw His children corrupted from sin and doomed to death, and His heart still overflowed with nothing but pure love, so much that He wanted to sacrifice His only begotten Son just to give them another chance. This says a lot about His love for us.

We have a Father that will never give up on us, and His Son, Jesus, is our witness to that love. On the cross is displayed the very heart of God, a Son offering everything to save the souls of His beloved. This is the reason we say “Jesus, I trust in You.” We can trust Him because His love has proven to be stronger than any love shown before. God proves His love is deeper than any sin, and because of this, we can completely place our hearts into His unfathomable mercy. To do this, we have to first understand our need for His mercy. If we have not realized our fallen nature and desperate need for a savior, it will be hard to really grasp His unfathomable mercy. We cannot let ourselves believe that we either do not need His mercy or are unworthy of it… both are nonsense. He went to extreme measures to ensure our salvation, and it’s even an insult if we shy away thinking we are “unworthy.” If we do not think that we need His mercy, then we will start to believe we can save ourselves on our own. This is just as dangerous, if not more, because we make ourselves our own God.

This is why accepting His mercy is so important. As Jesus said, God’s hand of judgement cannot touch the one who is hidden in Christ’s rays of mercy. Why? Because those rays of mercy come from His very sacrifice which was given for our sins. Jesus died to spare us from the punishment we deserve because of sin, and when God sees those very rays penetrating our hearts, He cannot help but sympathize with His suffering Son. For this reason, we are called to embrace Christ and allow His rays to penetrate our hearts. By remaining close to Him, any darkness that seeks to destroy us will also be penetrated by that great light.

On another note, let us learn to embrace this mercy given freely by our Lord. In return, we must learn to live a life of mercy: constantly realizing our need for God’s mercy and accepting it, and leading lives of mercy toward our brothers and sisters. If we can see others as God sees them, then nothing will prevent us from seeing just how good and beautiful they are. If God has gone to extreme measures for us, how much more should we go to be merciful and loving for others.

I hope you have been touched by God’s mercy, and I pray that you may experience its fullness like never before. May God bless you and all the people you love!