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Bruce Marshall’s novel To Every Man a Penny.
mercy is God’s identity card. God of Mercy, merciful God. For me, this really is the Lord’s identity.
‘Lord, forgive me if I have forgiven too much. But you’re the one who gave me the bad example!’ ”
G. K. Chesterton: “When Man ceases to worship God he does not worship nothing but worships everything.”
Mostly, people are looking for someone to listen to them. Someone willing to grant them time, to listen to their dramas and difficulties.
I feel compelled to say to confessors: talk, listen with patience, and above all tell people that God loves them.
without mercy, without God’s forgiveness, the world would not exist; it couldn’t exist.
It’s true, that’s how it is. It’s a good example of the lengths to which God goes to enter the heart of man, to find that small opening that will permit him to grant grace. He does not want anyone to be lost. His mercy is infinitely greater than our sins, his medicine is infinitely stronger than our illnesses that he has to heal.
God the Father loves me, he wants to save me, he wants to remove me from the wretchedness in which I find myself, but I am incapable of doing it myself. And so he sends his Son, a Son who brings the mercy of God translated into an act of love toward me….But you need a special grace for this, the grace of a conversion. Once I recognize this, God works in me through his Son.”
The Church does not exist to condemn people but to bring about an encounter with the visceral love of God’s mercy.
as long as we are alive it is always possible to start over, all we have to do is let Jesus embrace us and forgive us.
Justice on its own is not enough. With mercy and forgiveness, God goes beyond justice, he subsumes it and exceeds it in a higher event in which we experience love, which is at the root of true justice.
God forgives everyone, he offers new possibilities to everyone, he showers his mercy on everyone who asks for it. We are the ones who do not know how to forgive.
To walk down the path of holiness means living in the presence of God, being irreproachable, turning the other cheek, and imitating his infinite mercy.
it even more important for us as Christians, challenging us to take up the refrain in our daily lives by praying these words of praise: “for his mercy endures forever.”
wherever there are Christians, everyone should find an oasis of mercy.
In order to be capable of mercy, therefore, we must first of all dispose ourselves to listen to the Word of God. This means rediscovering the value of silence in order to meditate on the Word that comes to us. In this way, it will be possible to contemplate God’s mercy and adopt it as our lifestyle.
To refrain from judgement and condemnation means, in a positive sense, to know how to accept the good in every person and to spare him any suffering that might be caused by our partial judgment, our presumption to know everything about him.
“as we prepare to leave this life, we will be judged on the basis of love”.
Everyone, in fact, without exception, is called to embrace the call to mercy.
Salvation comes not through the observance of the law, but through faith in Jesus Christ, who in his death and resurrection brings salvation together with a mercy that justifies.
God’s justice is his mercy
“It is easier for God to hold back anger than mercy”.13 And so it is. God’s anger lasts but a moment, his mercy forever.
God’s justice is his mercy given to everyone as a grace that flows from the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
“Be mindful of your mercy, O Lord, and your steadfast love, for they have been from of old” (Ps 25:6).
