insight into the mysteries which we have just celebrated during the Seventh-Year Lecture. There is, moreover, another happily new coincidence, given the liturgical occasion we are celebrating this very day. Something, by the way, that required of me an act of humility, in the spirit of Fr. something which I believe has led me precisely to leave behind some accustomed ways of thinking in the effort to come to a more faithful understanding of the divine reality extended down to us in the Word of God and in the Church's tradition. I refer to this lecture being given not merely on the second Sunday of Easter as we conclude the pastoral offer. but on what the very typical edition of the Roman Missal also calls, rather modestly, and in smaller print beneath its major title, Selvigina misericordia, War of the Larnaci.

[01:16]

As you might know, devotion to the Divine Mercy has achieved a remarkable notoriety and reception among Christ's faithful. As propagated by an otherwise obscure Polish nun, St. Faustina Kowalska, whom Pope John Paul II canonized as the first saint of the third Christian millennium. His death on the vigil of Divine Mercy Sunday in 2005 and his beatification today only served to raise the profile of this popular devotion. Now here is the aspect you know. For a long time I found this devotion frankly repulsive. For years I had a copy of Sister Faustina's diary on my bookshelf which contains a record of her inner life and which was focused entirely on divine mercy in her soul.

[02:26]

Writings replete with interior messages and visions advocating forms of piety that seemed to me endless, to say the least. Every time I attempted to read from Faustina's work, I could not get beyond a few lines. Part of the reason was my accustomed way of human thinking, an instinctive suspicion we theologians have of private revelations, and another part was the lack of different diaries that I found, and still find, rather awkward. I am happy, however, to report that my original reservations regarding the devotion to Divine Mercy replaced me in some very quick countenance. One example suffices. That is Sister Faustina's own spiritual director, Fr. Sokolov. Among his initial reservations was the somewhat obvious one concerning Faustina herself.

[03:34]

Here she was, a person of very simple background, and yet who would cause him one day to remark in the following words. I was of Maine, this she, a sinful nun, with hardly any education, and without the time to read aesthetic works, could speak so knowledgably of theological matters, and such difficult ones as the mystery of the Holy Trinity, or the Divine Mercy, and other attributes of God. with the expertise of a consonant theologian. And indeed, it is true. When I was finally able to delve into the diary, I remember my own astonishment at some things which read like a virtual treatise of spiritual theology, with all the earmarks of theological learning and acquaintance with the masters of the tradition.

[04:40]

And so the diary of St. Justina finally compelled me for reasons once again given in her spiritual director's own words. I quote, There are truths of the faith which we are supposed to know and which we frequently refer to, but we do not understand them very well, nor do we live by them. It was so with me concerning the Divine Mercy I had thought of this truth many times in meditation, especially during retreats. I had spoken of it so often in sermons and repeated it in the liturgical prayers. But I had not gone to the core of its substance and its significance for the spiritual life. In particular, I had not understood, and for the moment I could not even agree. that the Divine Mercy is the highest attribute of God, the Creator, Redeemer, and Saint.

[05:50]

It was only when I encountered a simple old-age soul who was in close communion with God, who, as I believe, with divine inspiration, told me that she impelled me to read, research, and reflect on the subject. Let me move now from the theological and liturgical context for this lecture to seminal formation. The first of which is a deeper appreciation of the very mystery of the Lord's death and resurrection. We celebrate it during the Paschal Trilogy. And in what follows, I would like to acknowledge my indebtedness to theologian James Allison for introducing me to the two scholars whose work influences the remainder of this lecture, namely the British exegete and philologist Margaret Barker and cultural anthropologist and literary crete René Girard.

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Here then is the first level correlation I would like to make between the Divine Mercy and the Eastern Mystery. The way into which is the identification we find in the New Testament between Christ and the Mercy Seat of the ancient Temple in Jerusalem. What's called the Philisterion in Greek and the Kapparat in Hebrew. And the important texts are Romans 3.25, God put Christ Jesus forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood. And Hebrews 9.5, Above the ark of the covenant were the cherubim of glory overshadowing the mercies. Notice how the same word, Hebrew, is translated in Yiddish.

[08:06]

In the case of Romans, translators render hilasterion in reference to the atoning work of Christ, sometimes as propitiation, whereas Hebrews refers to the seat or cover over the throne-like structure, flanked by cherubim, the upper portion of the Ark of the Covenant that existed in the Holy of Holies during the period of the First Temple, that is, in Solomon's time. I'll never translate it. In both passages, as we do with God's eternal has said for humanity, This Hebrew word being the defining attribute of God in the Old Testament, translated in the Septuagint, the Greek Old Testament, as Eleison, and the Latin of Saint Jerome as Misericordium.

[09:09]

Both words are handily translated into English as mercy. But where do we find the link between the hilasteria and the khaporev, the mercy seat, and the chapsed with the erezos, the misericordia of God, to make our first correlation between Divine Mercy and Easter secure? Let us return to the astounding philological, historical, and exegetical work of Margaret and her instruction for the annual ritual of making the Divine Mercy effectual for Israel on the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur. Barker's central and controversial thesis can be stated as follows. early Christianity. What do I mean by early Christianity?

[10:13]

Well, a particular form of first century post-living Judaism. This early Christianity was rooted in pre-deuteronomic, that is to say pre-egyptic first temple of Israel's religion. And while we cannot go into detail about how this differs from Second Temple Israelite religion, the Temple standing in the time of Jesus, the Absaritarian Judaic groups differentiated themselves from Second Temple practices and its priesthood, most notably at Qumran. What follows is the related thesis relevant to our purposes. mainly that the theology and rituals of the Day of Atonement from the first temple period inform Christian understandings of Christ's death and resurrection as well as the practice of Christian worship from the very beginnings of the Christian movement.

[11:19]

In this regard, perhaps the most important thing Barber does for us is point out what we call the Paschal Mystery. It is in fact a conflation of not only the meanings associated with the Jewish Passover, that's clear enough, but those of Yom Kippur as well. In other words, the New Testament does not interpret the death and resurrection of Christ only against the backdrop of the past, but also in light of atonement, most notably in the 9th and 10th chapters of the Letter to the Deep. In recovering the centrality of atonement themes for Christian religion, Christian origins, and Christian worship, Barker wants us to hearken back, as I said, to the rite as performed in the first temple, when the Ark of the Covenant, and hence the Mercies, were still present in the Holy of Holies.

[12:28]

They seem to have been lost at the time of the Babylonian exile. She wants us also to grasp, above all, the meaning attached to the word atonement. This is all important, since for many of us this word and its cognates, such as propitiation, extinction, appeasement, are associated with the Anselmian substitutionary theories, which so easily conjure notions of a god who can only be appeased by the altering of his son's blood in sacrifice. In other words, the understanding still prevalent in evangelical circles, and I dare say many Catholic ones as well. Before attempting a revisioning of such notions, let me briefly present Barker's interpretation of the pre-exilic ritual, central to which is her painstaking reconstruction of the whole temple apparatus

[13:39]

from its personnel, its physical layout, and its rituals, as a system of representation, where each earthly item in the temple had its heavenly owner. She says the traditions say that it was an exact replica of the servants of heaven. This was especially true of the High Priest, who was understood to represent the Lord, that is Yahweh, whose name he wore on his forehead, on his mic. The subject of the Atonement Rite was therefore God himself, acting in the person of his earthly counterpart, the High Priest. She summarizes it as follows, The key figure in the Rite of Atonement was the High Priest, who was the visible presence of the Lord, that is Yahweh, on earth.

[14:48]

And just as the Lord had ordered the creation at the beginning, so He recreated it on the Day of Atonement at the New Year. We recall that the Jewish High Holidays begin with Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and conclude with Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. The ritual itself, as reconstructed by Parker, runs thus in Alba. Oh, look, a picture. Back to the lot. We went past these earlier. I have a couple left on. Handbooks here that give you some visuals of the Holy of Holies, also called the Tabernacle, and then the ancient temple, and you can pass these around if you want. I'm just trying to visualize all of this. The service. On the Day of Atonement, the eternal covenant was renewed, and blood was sprinkled and seared to remove the effects of sin and to heal.

[16:01]

The high priest took the blood of a goat into the Holy of Holies, where he sprinkled the helestarium over which the Lord was thought to be enthroned. And when he emerged, he snared and sprinkled it on various parts of the temple. In temple symbolism, this was new life, brought from heaven to renew the earth, since for the Hebrews life was in the blood. And this was meant to restore the community of all creation, which had been broken by sin. The blood which renewed the creation was new life from the Lord. Then he placed both his hands on another's ropes, the scapegoat, loaded the animal with the sins of the people and sent it into the desert. Translated, if the temple turns, this means the Lord, in the person of the high priest, emerged from heaven.

[17:12]

carrying light, which was then given to all parts of the creative order as the effects of sin were absorbed and wounds healed. Since the high priest himself represented the Lord, wearing the sacred name on his forehead, we have here a ritual in which the Lord was both the high priest and the victim in the act of atonement. By the way, he spilled as much in the concluding hymn this morning at the Memphis, that the lions are goose. The blood rituals of atonement were then essentially creation rituals. Rituals of healing and restoring the creative order ruptured by sin, the order inscribed by the creator. These recreation rituals were also restorative of the covenant in its cosmic dimensions.

[18:16]

Hence, Barber tells us, the role of the High Priest, the Lord, was to remove the damaging effect of sin from the community and the creation, and thus to restore the bonds which held together the community and the flesh. By the way, our English word here is very helpful in that we can catch the meaning without too much further translation. Act 1. The Barber's Insights help us to appreciate, I think, more the several New Testament allusions to atonement seen now from this perspective. For example, the letter to the Hebrews mentioned earlier. when Christ became as high priest of the good things that had come to be, passing through the greater and more perfect tabernacle not made by hands, that is, not belonging to this creation.

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He entered once for all into the sanctuary, not with the blood of goats and calves, but with his own blood. Thus obtained eternal redemption. Let me pass now to the second level correlation linking the Eastern Mystery, Divine Mercy, the Atonement, and now, Sacrifice. Here I would like to draw on the insights of Rene Girard, who has helped me to recognize Christianity for what it is, and just as importantly, for what it is not. His anthropological and theological insights on the nature of violence have opened up for me new vistas on the meaning of the Pascal atonement mystery. One of Gerard's central insights is his mimetic theory concerning the nature of human desire.

[20:28]

Not the desire arising from instinct, but from culture. What Dirac's study of human beings disclosed was how human desirable if something were indeed beneficial. Think of a room full of toys, to enough to fill a nursery full of children. As soon as one child chooses a toy, all the rest are forgotten, and pretty soon there's a competition to have the one desired toy longer. In other words, human desire is, as he says, a cohorting to the other, where someone else is always modeling a desirable object for someone else, creating desire, as it were. And it's not hard to see how the convergence of desire on one object by several subjects becomes the source for much human rivalry, conflict, and violence.

[21:36]

Another central feature of Erard's thought that concerns the scapegoat mechanism, whereby human beings demonstrate a need to create victims who absorb, so to speak, the rising tension created by rivalry and conflicting desire. The scapegoat becomes the convenient third whose death releases the tension and permits culture to form and develop in the absence of the rivalries that were destroyed. The victim, in turn, is often rewarded with elevation to a quasi-divine status, as the memory of the founding murder is covered over and lost in the mists of human origins. One has only to think here of the murder of Abel by his daughter, Jean, originators of agricultural and bourbon life, respectively.

[22:48]

And how the staple of Abel's blood is thought to speak with an elegance prefiguring the blood of the victim, the end of all victims, our great high priest, Jesus Christ. Like Barker, Girard also requires us to think what Christians mean by atonement, and especially what place sacrifice, bound up in the history of religion to the death of scapegoats, could possibly have in a religion whose founder has permanently interrupted the mechanisms of dignity. We are, in other words, confronted with the central problem in theology of soteriology, that is, the need of Christ. The first thing to note, as important as it is to us, is that this is the death of an innocent victim who is consciously and publicly proclaimed as such.

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As the first letter of Peter puts it, of a spotless, unblemished land. This is crucial, because the victimage mechanisms of religion normally operate on churches. But what the death of Christ does for Gerard is to expose the lie. Being seated since the foundation of the world, as the title of his major work on religion and violence puts it, No longer, after the death of this victim, can the community remain convinced of its innocence in murdering the scapegoat. The tension of rising memetic desire and rivalry discharges through its sacrifice. The Jehoiachin, he Christ, exposes all the myths of scapegoat. It shows that the victims were innocent and the communities guilty.

[25:02]

At the same time, because Christ returns to those responsible for his death, beginning with the disciples who abandoned him, not to exact vengeance, but to offer the Easter gift of Shalom, the mechanism of scapegoating and sacrificing victims is at. Moreover, it is the deity who is the subject of the final sacrifice, the very Son of God, and not a victim, as in religion elsewhere, offered to propitiate a deity. This forgiving victim after offering himself to non-resistance to violence, will have no more of sacrifice understood as propitiation. Hence the traditional superiologies indebted to Anselm's substitutionary satisfaction theory of atonement are falsified.

[26:13]

as he himself says, when you understand Christianity correctly, in its closeness and distance from archaic religion, it is the same structure, the scapegoat phenomenon, that Jesus is victim of. Yet the text, the scripture, is intended to destroy your belief in the scapegoat phenomenon, instead of using it in order to have yet more in sacrifice. I hope the correlations between Gerard of Barclay are becoming evident, as well as the Easter and Divine Mercy Sunday. Atonement has little to do with sacrifice, as practiced and understood by ancient religions, and I dare say much in Christian theology and spirituality.

[27:18]

On the contrary, atonement as renewal of the cosmic covenant of shalom by a God who becomes a forgiving victim for us interrupts, as I said, all mechanisms of rivalrous desire leading to violence and transposes all notions of sacrifice. This transition relativizes all human notions of justice by exposing them to the revolution interjected into human history by the one who never seeks vengeance, does not look for further victims, and who makes merciful forgiveness the primary transaction to be sought in all human relationships. all of which brings us back full circle to divine narcissism.

[28:22]

One reason this devotion, and now its liturgical observance, is so popular among so many people is the promise purportedly made to Saint Faustina in one of her interior locutions, and I quote, and this is Jesus speaking, On that day, Divine Mercy Assembly, the very depths of my tender mercy are open. I pour out a whole ocean of graces upon those souls who approach the fount of my mercy. The soul that will go to confession and receive Holy Communion shall obtain complete forgiveness of sins and punishments. On that day I'll open all the floodgates to which dregs explode. Let no soul fear to draw near to me, even though its sins be as starved.

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My mercy is so great that no mind, be it of man or angel, will be able to fathom it throughout all eternity. Everything that exists has come forth from the very depths of my most tender mercy. Every soul in its relation to me will contemplate my love and mercy throughout eternity. The Feast of Mercy emerged from my very depths of tenderness. It is my desire that it be solemnly celebrated on the first Sunday after Easter. Mankind will not have peace until it turns to the thought of minors. Now, Catholics of a certain vintage, and I think there are a few of the Jews who are here, will recognize this as the grant of a plenary indulgence.

[30:34]

And indeed, the Vatican has officially regularized this aspect of devotion. But here again I confess, it's on the interior reservation, yet for no other reason than the dangers of a worse righteousness or mechanistic approach to grace that could be lurking. I have also noticed among some devotees of the Divine Mercy what seems to be a greater importance attached to these devotional exercises. than to the sacred truth itself. I am an ant who would not miss the devotion today, but I can't abide going to these two rituals because it's so long. Having said that, it also strikes me as evidently appropriate for theological, spiritual, and the eternal reason, that the conclusion of the Easter holiday be at hand, for they thought and denied it, that we had just celebrated the plenary indulgence of a God.

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who has assumed the mantle of both priest and vicar, in order to win for us so great a salvation through the offering of Christ once for all, such that we may approach the throne of divine mercy, the one who has become in his own person the illusterium, defined with confluence, every grace, which means All of which, you know, summarized in that reading of Shalom. It was taught to Matthew, but it was Shalom, I assume, when he first uttered it in his own language, Easter, Sunday, Eve, and then again on the last day. The reading of Shalom that the Lord gave his disciple. A further reminder, by the way, Father James, you anticipated me in your homily this morning, a further reminder known to the ancients that every Sunday is at the same time the first and the eighth day, signifying the new order brought about by the resurrection of Christ, and that will be completed when the high priest of our confession,

[33:09]

the Alpha and the Omega, comes forth again from the heavenly realm to console the creation. Now, it would be lost, by the way, it would be good merely to highlight these under-represented themes of this story, without suggesting some important liturgical and spiritual implications. Now talk to yourself. And here, Rutherford Adams warned us of something in the work I cited at the beginning, and I quote him once again. Whatever our immediate political future may be, the final outcome of the present struggle depends on the degree in which the given reality of our redemption through Christ transforms our personal lives.

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This transformation will not come about so long as the power of Christ's death and resurrection, contained in the mysteries of the year of the Lord, is shackled by a false objectivity which considers the liturgy of the church either as a decorative series of ceremonies of only aesthetic value, or as a collection of regulations appointed by the hierarchy to be carried out in the performance of the sacred rites, or, and this is perhaps the greatest danger, as an object of sacramental power which would render our personal cooperation superfluous. The Feasts of the Lord's Year, the sacred texts with which the Church adorns their celebration, are intended, here's the golden phrase, to bridge the gap between sacramental grace and ourselves.

[35:19]

Here, it says, lie their decisive importance. So as we wind down, allow me to suggest just one item that might help bridge the gap between liturgy and ourselves, which I think is of considerable importance in light of the material I've shared with you. It is something, I think, by the way, that has steadily eroded in the post-ancillary period, and which, frankly, is something the recent restoration of the traditional rite, the extraordinary form of the Mass, reminds us of, a reminder of which we, I think, have sore need. I refer to the sacrificial character of the Eucharist. Anyone observing the former Reich has no doubt that they are primarily there to participate in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, that is, the altering of the innocent victim by a priest acting in persona Christi.

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The only difference between Calvary and the Mass being the unbloody manner of the latter's altering of the body and blood of the Lord. Little emphasis is given, as I'm sure some of you remember, to the Eucharist of the former rite as a fraternal meal shared by an assembled community, at least by contrast with most celebrations of the ordinary form of the Roman one. Let me return here for a moment to Margaret Barclay. In her reconstruction of the ancient temple's ritual of atonement and its relation to the Christian liturgy, She observes how, for her words, the original context of the Eucharist should be sought in the Day of Atonement, when the high priest took the blood into the Holy of Holies and then returned to complete the rite of Atonement and the North. In particular, she notes the relation between the Hill of Saria and the Christian altar.

[37:37]

As the ancient high priest sprinkled the mercy sink with blood, blood for the Jews carrying the divine power over life, so, in the bloodless sacrifice of the Christian, the wine was substituted with the blood of the goats. But the same process was believed to take place. The Christian altar, derived from the Caporet in the Holy of Holies, the place where the atonement blood was transformed and the law was pressed. And why was this the important retrieval for both the church and society at the present time? I'm not merely talking here about liturgical matters. Because it's derived in distance. that it is the definitive status of Christ, its final and all-sufficient victim, that frees us from the cycles of violence, which create endless skid-ropes upon which to vent the tense build-up of human desire and rivalry.

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As Gerard notes, these stimulants to violence in the hands of those with the power to unleash destruction on a massive scale now put the whole of humanity at risk. And it is the genius of Christianity to show the way to short-circuit these spirals through its proclamation of the One whose blood has been shed once for all in a sacrifice unlike all others in the history of culture and religion. Moreover, the Eucharist, in Gerard's own words, brings the sacrificial pattern into the open so that it can be overcome. I'm going to repeat that. The Eucharist brings the sacrificial pattern into the open so that it can be overcome. And here one finds the heart of Gerard's view of Christian life and spirituality, the claims made by the Gospel on its inheritance, the commitment to non-violence.

[40:09]

Since there is no longer warrant of any kind to seek out scapegoats, victims, or the sacrificial violence to which they give rise, And the sacrifice of the Mass is the continual sign of that truth to any who would venture to observe its ritual message and embrace its call to live non-violence as a partaker in Christ's sacrifice. And so I close appropriately with the words of yet another Benedictine, Andrew Marr. who I think actually sums up the material I have shared with you. Much of the anxiety that inclines us to sacrifice other people before they sacrifice us comes from the fear that our sacrifices will have no end. But in Christ, our sacrifices participate in the one, final, and complete self.

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the sacrifice to them also. The divine love of the crucified one freezes from the need to sacrifice any of the human beings from whom Christ died. Perhaps we are tempted to draw back in the fear that we will remain victims if we become victims in Christ. But that is not what happens. Just as Jesus moved from death to new life, so we also will experience the movement to new life. In Christ, we gain the courage to face the reality of our own pain as victims and the pain of others, because our risen Lord allows that to unfold into His body as an Easter little. much more.

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