Abuse of Divine mercy
“Take care of him.”—Luke 10:35
In today’s gospel we read that a certain man fell into the hands of robbers, who, after stripping him of his money, wounded him and left him half dead. A Samaritan passing by saw him and took pity on him; he bound up his wounds, brought him to an inn, and left him in the care of the host, saying: “Take care of him.” These words I address today to anyone among you, if there be such, whose soul is wounded by sin, and who, instead of seeing to its cure, keeps aggravating the wounds with new sins, thus abusing the mercy of God, who preserves his life so that he may repent and not be lost forever.
I say to you: Brethren, take care of your souls, which are in a very bad state; have compassion on them. “Have pity on thy own soul” (Ecclus. 30:24). Your souls are sick, and—what is worse—they are near the eternal death of hell; for he who abuses the divine mercy to excess is on the point of being abandoned by the mercy of God. This shall be the single subject of the present discourse.
1. St. Augustine says that the devil deludes Christians in two ways—“by despair and by hope.” After a person has committed many sins, the enemy sets before his eyes the rigor of divine justice and tempts him to despair of the mercy of God. But before he sins, the devil represents to him the divine mercy and so emboldens him not to fear the chastisement due to sin. Hence the saint gives this advice: “After sin, hope for mercy; before sin, fear justice.” If, after sin, you despair of God’s pardon, you offend him by a new and graver sin; have recourse to his mercy, and he will pardon you.
But before sin, fear God’s justice, and do not presume on his mercy; for they who abuse the mercy of God to offend him do not deserve that he should treat them with mercy. Abulensis writes that the man who offends justice may have recourse to mercy; but he who offends mercy and provokes it against himself—to whom can he have recourse?
2. When you intend to commit sin, who, I ask, promises you mercy from God? Certainly God does not promise it. It is the devil who promises it, that you may lose God and be damned. “Beware,” says St. John Chrysostom, “never to heed that dog who promises you mercy from God” (Hom. 50, ad Pop.). If, beloved sinner, you have until now offended God, hope and tremble: if you wish to give up sin and you detest it, hope; for God promises pardon to all who repent of the evil they have done. But if you intend to continue in your evil life, tremble lest God wait for you no longer, but cast you into hell.
To what end does God wait for the sinner? That he may go on insulting him? No; he waits for him that he may give up sin, and that so God may have pity on him and pardon him. “Therefore the Lord waiteth, that he may have mercy on you” (Isa. 30:18). But when he sees that the time he gave the sinner to weep over his past sins is spent in multiplying them, then he sets his hand to chastisement: he cuts off his path, letting him die as he is, in sin, so that by dying he may cease to offend him. And then he calls against the sinner the very time he had given him for repentance. “He hath called against me the time” (Lam. 1:15). “That very time,” says St. Gregory, “comes to judge him.”
3. O common illusion of so many poor Christians who damn themselves! We seldom find a sinner so abandoned to despair as to say: I want to damn myself. Christians sin, and yet they mean to save themselves, saying: “God is merciful; I will commit this sin, and confess it afterwards.” Behold the illusion, or rather the snare, by which the devil drags so many souls to hell: “Sin, for you can confess it afterwards.” But listen to what the Lord says: “And say not, the mercy of the Lord is great; he will have mercy on the multitude of my sins” (Ecclus. 5:6). Why does God tell you not to say that the mercy of the Lord is great? Hear the words that Scripture adds in the next verse: “For mercy and wrath come quickly from him, and his wrath looketh upon sinners” (Ecclus. 5:7).
The mercy of God is one thing, the acts of his mercy another; the mercy of God is infinite, but its acts, which are its workings, are finite. God is merciful, but he is also just. St. Basil writes that sinners want to consider God by halves, reckoning him only merciful and ready to pardon, and not just and ready to punish. Of this the Lord complained one day to St. Bridget: “I am just and merciful; sinners regard me as merciful only.” This is what St. Basil says: Bonus est Dominus, sed etiam Justus; nolimus Deum ex dimidia parte cogitare—“The Lord is good, but also just; let us not think of God by halves.” God is also just, and to be just means that he must punish the ungrateful. Father John Avila used to say that to bear with one who avails himself of the mercy of God in order to offend him the more would not be mercy, but a failure of justice. Mercy, as the divine Mother sang, is promised to those who fear God, not to those who despise him. “And his mercy to them that fear him” (Luke 1:50).
4. But God, says the rash sinner, has already shown me so many mercies; why should I not hope that he will show them to me in time to come as well? I answer: he will show them to you, if you are willing to change your life; but if you mean to go on offending him, God tells you that he will have to take vengeance on you by casting you into hell. “Revenge is mine, and I will repay them in due time, that their foot may slide” (Deut. 32:35). And David warns us: “Except you be converted,” he will “brandish his sword” (Ps. 7:13). The Lord holds his bow bent and waits for you to be converted; but if you will not be converted, he will at last let the arrow fly against you, and you will be damned.
O God! some will not believe in hell until they actually arrive there. But once the wretched have arrived, there will be no more mercy for them. Can you, my dear Christian, complain of the mercy of God, after he has shown you so many mercies by waiting for you so long? You ought to remain always with your face to the ground, thanking him for them and saying: “The mercies of the Lord, that we are not consumed” (Lam. 3:22). Had you offered to a brother of your own flesh the offenses you have offered to God, he would not have borne with you; yet God has borne with you so patiently, and now he calls you again. If, after all this, he sends you to hell, will he do you any wrong? “What is there,” God will say, “that I ought to do more for my vineyard, that I have not done to it?” (Isa. 5:4). What more ought I to have done for you that I have not done?
5. St. Bernard writes that the confidence which sinners have when they sin, trusting in the goodness of God, wins for them not a blessing but only a malediction from the Lord. Est infidelis fiducia solius ubique maledictionis capax, cum videlicet in spe peccamus—“There is an unfaithful confidence capable only of malediction everywhere, namely when we sin in hope” (Sermon 3 on the Annunciation). O false hope of Christians, which sends so many to hell! “They hope, in order to sin! Woe to perverse hope,” says St. Augustine. Sperant, ut peccent! Vae a perversa spe (Ps. 144). They do not hope that God will pardon the sins of which they repent; rather they hope that, while they go on sinning, God will show them mercy; and so they make the mercy of God serve them as a motive for going on to sin.
O accursed hope! hope which is an abomination to God! “And their hope the abomination” (Job 11:20). This hope will make God chastise them the sooner; for surely a master would not defer punishing a servant who offended him just because the master is good. So does the sinner act and speak, says St. Augustine, trusting in the goodness of God: “God is good; I will do what I please” (Tract. 33, in Joan.). But, alas, how many has this vain hope deceived, exclaims the same St. Augustine! “They who have been deceived by this shadow of vain hope cannot be numbered.” St. Bernard writes that Lucifer was therefore so swiftly chastised by God because, in rebelling, he hoped he would not be chastised for it. Ammon, son of King Manasses, seeing that his father had been pardoned his sins by God, also gave himself up to sin in the hope of pardon; but for Ammon there was no mercy. St. John Chrysostom says that Judas too was lost for this very reason: trusting in the kindness of Jesus Christ, he betrayed him. Fidit in lenitate Magistri—“He trusted in the lenity of the Master.”
6. He who sins in the hope of pardon, saying, “Afterwards I will repent, and God will pardon me,” is, according to St. Augustine, “not a penitent, but a scoffer.” On the other hand the Apostle tells us that God is not mocked: “God is not mocked” (Gal. 6:7). It would be to mock God to offend him as often as you please and always to receive pardon. “For what things a man shall sow, those also shall he reap,” St. Paul goes on to say (Gal. 6:7). He who sows sins can hope for nothing but the hatred of God and hell. “Despisest thou the riches of his goodness, and patience, and long-suffering?” the same Apostle exclaims (Rom. 2:4). Do you then, O sinner, despise the riches of the goodness, the patience, and the forbearance that God has toward you? He says riches, because the mercies God shows us in not chastising us after sin are riches more precious to us than any treasure. “Knowest thou not,” he goes on, “that the benignity of God leadeth thee to penance?” (Rom. 2:4). Do you not know that the Lord waits for you and is so kind to you, not that you may go on sinning, but that you may weep over the offenses you have offered to him?
Otherwise, says St. Paul, by your obstinacy and impenitence you treasure up for yourself a store of wrath against the day of wrath, which will be the day of God’s judgment upon you. “According to thy hardness and impenitent heart, thou treasurest up to thyself wrath, against the day of wrath, and revelation of the just judgment of God” (Rom. 2:5).
7. Upon the hardness of the sinner there will then follow his abandonment by God, who will say of that soul grown obstinate in sin what he said of Babylon: “We would have cured Babylon; but she is not healed; let us forsake her” (Jer. 51:9). And how does God abandon the sinner? Either he sends him a sudden death and lets him die in sin, or he deprives him of the graces he would need to be truly converted, leaving him with his sufficient grace, by which the man could save himself but will not. His darkened mind, his hardened heart, the bad habit he has formed, will make his conversion morally impossible; and so he will be abandoned, not absolutely, but morally. “I will take away the hedge thereof, and it shall be wasted” (Isa. 5:5). When the master of the vineyard tears down its hedge and lets whoever wishes go in, what is the sign of it? It is a sign that he abandons it. So God acts when he abandons a soul: he takes away the hedge of holy fear and remorse of conscience, and leaves the soul in darkness; and then all the vices come crowding into it. “Thou hast appointed darkness, and it is night: in it shall all the beasts of the wood go about” (Ps. 104:20). And the sinner, abandoned in that depth of sins, will despise everything—admonitions, excommunications, the grace of God, chastisements, hell—and will make a jest even of his own damnation. “The wicked man, when he is come into the depth of sins, contemneth” (Prov. 18:3).
8. Jeremiah asks: “Why doth the way of the wicked prosper?” (Jer. 12:1). And he answers: “Gather them together as sheep for a sacrifice” (v. 3). Wretched the sinner who prospers in this life! It is a sign that God means to repay him in this world for some morally good work of his, but then keeps him in reserve as a victim of his justice for hell, where, like accursed cockle, he will be cast to burn for all eternity—as Jesus Christ said: “In the time of the harvest I will say to the reapers: Gather up first the cockle, and bind it into bundles to burn” (Matt. 13:30).
9. And so, for a sinner not to be punished in this life is his greatest chastisement, threatened by God against the obstinate through Isaiah: “Let us have pity on the wicked, but he will not learn justice” (Isa. 26:10). St. Bernard says on this text: Misericordiam hanc nolo; super omnem iram misericordia ista—“This mercy I do not wish for: such mercy is worse than all wrath” (Sermon 42 on the Canticles). And what greater chastisement than to be abandoned into the hands of sin, so that, God permitting him to fall from sin to sin, he must in the end go to suffer as many hells as he has committed sins—according to what David said: “Add thou iniquity upon their iniquity…let them be blotted out of the book of the living” (Ps. 69:28–29). On these words Bellarmine writes: “There is no greater punishment than when sin is the punishment of sin.” It would have been better for such a sinner to have died after his first sin; for by dying afterwards under the heap of so many added iniquities, he will have as many hells as the sins he has committed. So it happened to a certain comedian in Palermo named Caesar. Walking one day with a friend, he told him that Father La Nusa, a missionary, had foretold him that God was giving him twelve years to live, and that if within that time he did not change his life, he would die a bad death. “Now,” he added, “I have traveled through so many parts of the world; I have had several illnesses, one of which nearly finished me; but this month, in which I complete the twelve years, I feel better than in all the years past.” Then he invited his friend to come and hear a new comedy he had composed. But what happened? On the day of the comedy, the 24th of November, 1668, just as he was about to go on the stage, he was struck with apoplexy and died suddenly, expiring in the arms of a woman who was also a comedian; and so the scene of this world ended miserably for him.
10. Let us come to ourselves, and conclude the discourse. Brethren, I beg you to cast a glance over all the bygone years of your life: see how many grievous offenses you have committed against God, and how many mercies he has shown you, how many lights he has given you, how many times he has called you to change your life. Today, by this sermon, he has called you again, and he seems to say to you: “What is there that I ought to do to my vineyard, that I have not done to it?” (Isa. 5:4). What more ought I to have done for you that I have not done? What do you say? What do you answer? Will you give yourselves to God, or will you go on offending him?
Consider, says St. Augustine, that your punishment has been deferred, but not pardoned: “Unfruitful tree, the axe has been deferred. Be not secure: you shall be cut off.” If you go on abusing the divine mercy, you shall be cut off; vengeance will soon fall upon you. What are you waiting for? Do you wait until God actually sends you to hell? The Lord has been silent until now, but he is not silent forever; when the time of vengeance comes, he will say to you: “These things hast thou done, and I was silent. Thou thoughtest unjustly that I should be like to thee: but I will reprove thee, and set them before thy face” (Ps. 50:21). He will set before your eyes the graces he gave you, which you have despised; and these very graces shall judge and condemn you.
Come, then, resist God no longer when he calls you; and tremble lest the call he gives you today be the last for you. Go to confession soon, and make now a firm resolution to change your life; for it is no use to confess and then turn back to your old ways. “But I,” you say, “have no strength to resist temptations.” Listen to what the Apostle says: “God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that which you are able” (1 Cor. 10:13). God is faithful: he will never permit you to be tempted beyond your strength. And if of yourself you have no strength to resist the devil, ask it of God, and God will give it to you. “Ask, and you shall receive” (John 16:24). “Praising, I will call upon the Lord, and I shall be saved from my enemies,” said David (Ps. 18:4). And St. Paul said: “I can do all things in him who strengtheneth me” (Phil. 4:13). Of myself I can do nothing, but with the divine help I can do all things. And so you too: commend yourself to God in your temptations, and God will give you strength to resist, and you shall not fall.
Points for Reflection
1. “After sin, hope for mercy; before sin, fear justice” (§1)
2. “Do you not know that the Lord waits for you and is so kind to you, not that you may go on sinning, but that you may weep over the offenses you have offered to him?” (§6)
3. “Go to confession soon, and make now a firm resolution to change your life” (§10)