When Pope John Paul II canonized St. Faustina on April 30, 2000 and proclaimed the Second Sunday after Easter to be officially called Divine Mercy Sunday, he urged everyone to make her beautiful exclamation—Jesus, I trust in You— our own. We cannot view an image of the Divine Mercy without being reminded of this thought. Jesus himself requested that it be written on this image of his merciful Heart. So what is so significant about this inscription that every copy of the Divine Mercy image exhorts us to trust in Jesus?
Trusting in Jesus: do we really do this in our daily lives? Recently, I came across an analogy on trust that was poignant but easy to understand. It was a small demonstration that a Christian pastor used with his congregation to get across the concept of trust in Jesus. He placed his small two year old son on a high table and took a few steps back, inciting his son to jump into his arms. Without any hesitation, the little one leaped with joy into his father’s awaiting arms. To prove his point, the father again put his son back on the table and asked him to repeat what he just did. With faith that his daddy would catch him, the toddler leaped with gusto. The point of the demonstration was simple enough: will we trust our heavenly Father? Will we trust his Divine Son, Jesus with our lives? Or will we choose to stay on the table of self-reliance, self-security, self-willfulness over our belief that Jesus is always there for us to help us, to rescue us, to be our guide, protector and savior?
The little boy in the story above undoubtedly knew that his father loved him and would not let anything hurt him. His trust was spontaneous, sure, complete. Can we say the same for our trust in Jesus? In the Lord’s messages in the book In Sinu Jesu, Jesus tells us,
“Never doubt of My prevailing love for you, the love that will triumph in you and around you, provided that you come to Me with confidence and offer Me all your infirmities, your weaknesses, and even your sins.”
Surely, the good Lord does not want us to be shackled with our weaknesses and sins and asks us to give them to his merciful heart. He wants so much to strengthen our confidence in his merciful love for each of us and to comfort our souls so often caught in the throes of temptations against His mercy and against the unchanging love of his Sacred Heart.
Listen to the laments of Jesus (expressed in In Sinu Jesu) as he invites us to unburden ourselves to Him:
Nothing so grieves my divine Heart as the doubt of My merciful love. Sin in all its forms and manifestations offends Me and grieves My most loving Heart, but one who doubts of My merciful love grieves Me in a way that you cannot imagine. It is because I am love, and all love; it is because My mercy is the expression of My love towards sinners, that My Heart suffers when these same sinners close themselves to Me by doubting that I am all love and ready to forgive all.
Never let sin become a pretext for staying away from Me. Instead, let sin be a catalyst pushing you into My presence. There, in my presence, as in a furnace, sin is consumed in the fire of merciful love, souls are made clean, healed, and restored to My friendship. I reject no one who comes to Me with confidence in My merciful love. My arms are open to receive repentant sinners into the embrace of My merciful love.
Having just gone through Lent and Holy Week, the scripture passages of Judas’ betrayal and Peter’s denial are still fresh in our minds. Both of these apostles tried to disown Jesus and what he stood for. Yet, their outcomes were so very different. Look at Peter and his obvious denial of Jesus told so plainly in the Gospel of Mark we just heard read on Good Friday. Peter outright swore that he did not even know Jesus (Mk 14:66-72). We read in the third denial of Peter that he is confronted with the words, “You are, too, one of them, for you are from Galilee!” Then Peter began to curse and swear, “I don’t even know the fellow you are talking about.” Right afterward, the cock crowed as predicted by Jesus. And Peter began to cry. Peter’s denial is rash. It flies out of his mouth as fear for his own skin takes precedence over all former convictions and logic. His weaknesses pull him down to a level unworthy of a follower of Christ. Realizing his mistake, Peter is genuinely repentant and goes to Jesus with great contrition in his heart, pleading for forgiveness. Ah, this is the state of soul that so moves the merciful Heart of Jesus who will raise Peter up again and propel him to a full recovery. How different from the dispositions of Judas who, although his remorse was sincere, it was not true repentance. He does not go to Jesus nor trust in his mercy. Entrenched in his own understanding of things, he cannot accept Jesus’ ways and will not cast himself repentant and sorrowful into the purifying mercy of Christ’s Heart.
To further enlighten us about His mercy, Jesus instructs us in these beautiful and significant passages from In Sinu Jesu:
When you are weak, come to Me. When you are burdened, come to Me. When you are fearful, come to Me. When you are assailed by doubts, come to Me. When you are lonely, come to Me. Let nothing separate you from My Heart, which is ever open to receive you. It is the Evil One who seeks to turn souls away from My Heart. It is the Evil One who sows the seeds of doubt, of fear, of sadness in souls, so as to turn them away from Me and drive them into the cold pit of darkness and despair that he himself inhabits.
My Mother, on the other hand, raises souls when they fall; she instills in them a confidence in My loving mercy, a readiness to believe in My merciful love, a desire to come into My presence and to expose to Me, the divine physician, the wounds suffered in spiritual combat. My Mother is the Mother of Holy Hope. She is the Mother of Holy Confidence. One who entrusts himself to My Mother will never fall into the pit of despair. Even when solely tempted, there will remain in that soul enough confidence to turn to Me, and to make an act of abandonment to My merciful love that will touch My Heart and release from it a torrent of forgiveness, healing and mercy.
In the messages of the Divine Mercy given to St. Faustina and so similar to those we have just cited, the Lord really emphasizes the importance of trusting Him. Here is the passage from Faustina’s Diary (#1578) that truly highlights this:
“My graces of My mercy are drawn by means of one vessel only, and that is—trust. The more a soul trusts, the more it will receive. Souls that trust boundlessly are a great comfort to Me because I pour all the treasures of My graces into them. I rejoice that they ask for much because it is my desire to give much, very much. On the other hand, I am sad when souls ask for little, when they narrow their hearts.”
The priority of trusting in Jesus cannot be overestimated in the spiritual life. This sort of trust in the Lord means that we believe in Him, hope in Him, love Him and lean on Him. We aspire to have His mind and thoughts and His will done in our daily lives. In trusting the Lord, we truly desire that he inspire and direct every aspect of our existence so that anything not in conformity with His Holy Will would be repulsive to us.
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This is pretty radical trust. It means we agree to let God be God and not try to play God ourselves. This thought is crucial because basically there are two root sins we humans tend to commit. One is to make God out to be like us and two, to make ourselves out to be like God. As one biblical scholar put it, “The core of sin is not our failure to adequately value ourselves but our refusals to adequately value God.”
Unfortunately, in our day, it is so easy to fall into a false Christianity that brings God down to our level and tries to explain away the lofty tenets of God to make them compatible to today’s society. Don’t we see this all around us and hear very convincing arguments for adjustments in Gospel-inspired values that were our standards for centuries? We are now surrounded—in an all-pervasive way—with a false, private, pragmatic Christianity that takes God and reduces him to our level of thinking, feeling and acting. Mercy has become the buzz word for a sympathetic accommodation for our sins and failures instead of acknowledging them in a contrite manner so that we may be cleansed and re-instated in God’s graces. One evangelical author has called it the New Reformation, not built on sin and grace and the centrality of God and his glory but on “the doctrine of self-esteem and the gospel of self-love.” “They would have us coin a new slogan,” he avers, “on self-alone.”
Trust in Jesus is the prime building block to our closer relationship with Him. Yet, many of us are tempted to rely more on our own resources. In an article entitled Why is it Hard to Trust God? the author (Rick Thomas) points out three major hindrances to trusting God.
- Ignorance of God: If you do not have a clear understanding of who God is, then it will be hard to trust him. Some people who are raised without religion or come from broken homes may be suspect of a God who is all-loving at all times. The article makes this point by sharing a poignant experience that the author had while visiting in New York City. Sitting in a restaurant, he saw a prostitute in a booth outside and went to talk to her, inviting her to a prayer meeting during the week. Surprisingly, she came but afterward admitted: “Rick, you don’t understand. You talk about peace, love, mercy, grace, whiteness, cleanliness and light. The words that you use or represent have no place in my world. Those are foreign concepts. I appreciate what you stand for and how you care for others, but I cannot relate to what you are saying.” However, God’s grace did work in her life and she was eventually converted.
- Fear: There are those who fear what God will do in their lives if they trust Him. Naturally fearful and insecure people are reticent about letting go and giving themselves over to God’s hands. They would far rather have control at all times and in this way direct their own futures, even though they may be drifting apart from God.
- Anger: The author of this article tells us that anger is the most common sin manifestation of the unbelieving heart, even though most people do not see themselves as angry at God. He says, “I have interacted with many Christians who have what I call a low-grade fever of anger that runs under the radar. It comes out when expectations or desires are not met.” He explains that whenever we choose anger as a response to something that has happened to us that we don’t like, then we’re making a statement about God and his sovereignty. We’re making a choice that we’re going to do it our way rather than God’s way. In other words, we’re putting more trust in ourselves, than in God.
So let us all strive to deepen our trust in the Lord Jesus. That is the most effective way to honor his Sacred Heart and to allow the torrents of its mercy to sweep over us and over our hard-hearted world. As Jesus exhorts us (in In Sinu Jesu): “Learn, then, to trust in Me to do the things that you cannot do of yourself, and allow Me to work in you secretly, in a manner perceptible to the gaze of My Father, and by the operation of My Holy Spirit.” †
This talk on Sacred Heart Spirituality was given on April 8th, 2017 by one of the Sisters of the Visitation of Holy Mary at the Visitation Monastery in Tyringham, Massachusetts. The next talk will be held on Sunday, May 6th, 2018 at 4:00 pm. All are invited to attend.