Jesus, Mercy Incarnate

My daughter, the blessings of the poorwho blessMe as they leave this gate have reachedMy ears.And your com- passion, within the bounds of obedience, has pleased Me, and this is why I came down from My throne – to taste the fruits of your mercy. What St. Faustina learned here is that Jesus Christ is not only an example of merciful love for us to imitate, and the source of grace which enables us to do so. In addition, our Lord is also the true and ultimate object of all our human acts of mercy. What Jesus Christ living within us enables us to do is precisely to love Jesus Christ hidden under the guise (so to speak) of our neighbours in need. As Mother Teresa of Calcutta once said, there are two kinds of Eucharist: the presence of the Lord in the Blessed Sacrament, where He is at work to fill us with His light, life, and love, and the presence of the same Lord in the poor, where He is waiting for us to give HimbackHis light, life, and love. The fact is that our neigh- bours in need are tied by the most intimate bonds of compassion to the Merciful Heart of Jesus. His compassion extends especially to them in their plight, because they are most in need of His Mercy. That is why our Savior can truly say in His parable (Matt. 25:35- 40): “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.... Truly I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.” In commenting on this passage from the gospels, Pope John Paul II restated this same truth in his encyclical Dives in Misericordia (Rich in Mercy): the merciful God actually “invites man to have mercy on His only Son, the crucified one.” He does so by sending the crucified Savior to knock on the door of the heart of every man, calling us to love, “which is not only an act of soli- darity with the suffering Son of man, but also a kind of ‘mercy’ shown by each one of us to the Son of the eternal Father.” 72 The duty of every Christian to perform the works of mercy, therefore, in a mysterious way, returns us to the centrality of the 83 Saint Faustina and Devotion to the Passion of Jesus Christ