Jesus, Mercy Incarnate

Nevertheless, the visions and meditations of St. Faustina shed further light on this mystery. It seems that God was teaching her that just as we are truly united with Christ’s Passion and Resurrection at Holy Mass, so, in a mysterious way, we are given access to His Holy Childhood as well. It is in fact, the whole Christ who is present and available to us in the Eucharist, from His cra- dle to His cross to Easter morning. Moreover, this would not appear to be a doctrinal novelty, but an implication of the Church’s own faith in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, coupled with the Church’s traditional teaching concerning God’s relation- ship to earthly time. The Church’s pre-eminent theologians, such as St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, have always taught that time, the course of history, is not the same for God as it is for us. For human beings there is before, during, and after; some things are past, some present, and some yet to be. But for God, it is not so. As St. Thomas Aquinas wrote: God is wholly outside the order of time, standing as it were in the high citadel of eternity.... The whole course of time is subject to [His] eternity in one simple glance. 19 In other words, God sees all of time much like someone look- ing out of a tower might see a line of people passing by down below. Some people in the line come before, and some come after each other. But the person looking down from the tower, while he sees which ones come before and which ones come after, also sees all of them at once, from his all-encompassing perspective. Theologians in the tradition of St. Thomas call this divine per- spective on time God’s “eternal now.” Simply put, it means that all times and places are present before Himat once. Thus, for God, the Sacrifice on Calvary is not something that happened long, long ago; rather, it is ever present before His eyes. Again, His Holy Infancy in Bethlehem is not something in the distant past: it is always, eternally, present before Him. What actually happens at Mass is that the participants are, in a sense, taken beyond the dimension of earthly space and 32 Jesus, Mercy Incarnate