Divine Mercy: The Heart of the Gospel

24 Divine Mercy: The Heart Of The Gospel instead by the laws o f parallelism. This means that Hebrew poetry matches ideas instead o f words. The ideas are matched and balanced, set off one against the other: half-line against half-line; verse against verse; or groups o f verses against other groups of verses. Once the reader has begun to notice this pattern he will begin to appreciate the artistry involved. Parallelism is extremely ingenious, and is no doubt more difficult to work out in practice than to describe after the fact.21 There are different types o f poetic parallelism22 employed by Hebrew poetry. For example: 1) synonymous parallelism : it occurs when the same idea is set forth twice in different words. We see this in the Magnificat : “My being proclaims the greatness o f the Lord [first time] and my spirit finds jo y in God my Savior [second time]” . Luke 1:46-47 2) antithetic parallelism: it occurs when things are stated in opposition or contrast. We see this also in the Magnificat: “He has deposed the mighty from their thrones and raised the lowly to high places. The hungry he has given every good thing, while the rich he has sent empty away” (Luke 1: 52-53). The point is, since the idea o f hesed (Mercy) is proclaimed in both the Benedictus and Magnificat, by using poetic parallelism, Luke is not only able to expand the meaning o f the nuances o f Divine Mercy through the juxtaposition of ideas so common in poetry, but also to repeat ideas, balance them, and define them by their negative opposite by the means o f the poetic parallelism. Luke is able to condense so much more meaning into so little written space. Moreover, Luke being a non-Jew, a foreigner, is conscious that God’s salvation is for all mankind. So Luke uses a literary construct that gives meaning to the universality o f Divine Mercy. In explaining the Mission of John the Baptist, Luke quotes the Prophet Isaiah just as Matthew does. However, Luke expands and finishes his quote from Isaiah by