Where Justice and Mercy Kiss
June 9, 2026
Hello! How is each and every one? Thank you for your prayers and offerings. It was a good retreat except for something that most often happens to the sound system. Good enough it was on the fourth day already and nobody knows what went wrong. It just didn’t want to work. Nag-resign ba. Siya ang na pagod.
So alternatives were made available but alternatives don’t always work as well. Now it requires more effort to listen and capture what the priest is sharing in the meditations. And since it is the Holy Spirit who is at work in each one, only what is good for each one is received by each one. That is how I personally take the situation.
At the same time what goes on in my mind is that in activities such as this, when persons are more attentive to Our Lord, the devil wants to do what he usually does. He calls attention to himself by causing some distractions, which Our Lord allows for something good. That something good is for each one of us to decipher.
The management did what they needed to do and the next day the system served as before.
I mentioned in the previous post, we will be celebrating the Feast of Corpus Christ (The Body and Blood of Christ) last Sunday. We are now in the octave of Corpus Christi, that is, everyday of this week we will be having Solemn Benediction to adore with love and gratitude Jesus Christ in the Blessed Sacrament.
Allow me to share with you the following article on the Eucharist for greater love and devotion to Our Lord, Who loves each one of us immensely, the very reason why He chose to be present and available for us in the Blessed Sacrament.
https://opusdei.org/en-us/article/topic-21-the-eucharist-iii/?utm_source=WebShareIcon
This coming Friday,
Friday after the Second Sunday of Pentecost, we will be celebrating the
Solemnity of The Sacred Heart of Jesus.
https://opusdei.org/en-ph/meditation/meditations-sacred-heart-of-jesus/?utm_source=WebShareIcon
The above links are beautiful articles we can consider during our quiet moments with Our Lord in our conversation with Him during the day. We need to know Him better in order to love Him more and more. And then live our daily ordinary life with more meaning, love, joy and peace.
Now let us continue with our topic on the second word of Christ from the Cross (From The Cries of Jesus from the Cross, A Fulton J. Sheen’s Anthology). This time on hope.
5 Hope
Our concern presently is with two kinds of souls; the despairing and the presumptuous: those who say, “I am too wicked for God to be interested in me” and those who say, “Oh, I need not worry about my sins. God will take good care of me in the end.” Both these statements are sins of exaggeration. The first is the sin of despair, which exaggerates divine justice; the second is the sin of presumption, which exaggerates divine mercy. Somewhere there is a golden mean, where “justice and mercy kiss,” as the psalmist puts it (see Ps. 84:11), and that is the virtue of hope.
The virtue of hope is quite different from the emotion of hope. The emotion centers in the body and is a kind of dreamy desire that we can be saved without much effort.
The virtue of hope, however, is centered in the will and may be defined as a divinely infused disposition of the will by which, with sure confidence, thanks to the powerful help of Almighty God, we expect to pursue eternal happiness, using all the means necessary for attaining it.
No stage was ever better set for the drama of hope than Calvary. Seven centuries before, Isaiah had prophesied that Our Divine Lord would be numbered with the wicked. In this hour the prophecy is fulfilled as two thieves, like unholy courtiers, stand unwilling guard on the King of Kings. Nothing could better reveal the contempt in which the Son of God was held than to have crucified Him between two common thieves.
To this ridicule of unholy companionship was added the mockery of a parade that passed before the throne of the central Cross. The evangelists note them as they pass: rulers, soldiers, and passersby. “And the people stood beholding, and the rulers with them derided him, saying: He saved others; let him save himself if he be Christ, the elect of God. And the soldiers also mocked him, coming to him, and offering him vinegar” (Luke 23:35–36). “And they that passed by, blasphemed him, wagging their heads, and saying: Vah, thou that destroyest the temple of God, and in three days dost rebuild it; save thy own self; and if thou be the Son of God, come down from the cross” (Matt. 27:39–40).
As one gazes on that spectacle of three crosses silhouetted against a black and frightened sky, one sees in prospect the future judgment of the world; the Judge in the center and the two divisions of humanity on either side: the sheep and the goats; the blessed and the lost; those who love and those who hate; for the end shall be as the beginning, except that Christ shall appear for the final judgment not on the cross of ignominy but with the cross in glory in the clouds of heaven.
The spiritual development of the thief on the right, reveals how hope is born first out of fear, then out of faith. His conversion began the moment he feared. Like the thief on the left, he too had blasphemed that Man on the central Cross. Then suddenly turning his head, he shouted across the face of Divine Mercy, to his blaspheming fellow thief: “Neither dost thou fear God, seeing thou art under the same condemnation? And we indeed justly, for we receive the due reward of our deeds; but this man hath done no evil” (Luke 23:40–41).
The fear of God of which this robber spoke was not a servile fear that God would punish them for their thefts; it was rather a filial fear based on reverence — a fear of displeasing Him who had done nothing to deserve such a humiliating death.
There is the first lesson: hope begins with fear; hope involves fear because hope is not certainty. We can, of course, be certain God will help us and give us sufficient strength to be saved, but we cannot be sure that we will always be faithful to His grace.
God will not fail us; we need have no fear on that score. But we may fail God. The certitude that I am on the way to God does not exclude the fear that, through some fault of mine, I may not come to His blessed presence.
Note the next step toward hope in the good thief as his fear led to faith, for “The fear of the Lord . . . is wisdom” (Job 28:28).
In a single moment, a soul with a genuine fear of God can come to a greater understanding of the purpose of life than in a lifetime spent in the study of the ephemeral philosophies of men. That is why deathbed conversions may be sincere conversions. The hardened soul disbelieves in God until that awful moment when he has no one to deceive but himself. Once the spark of salutary fear of God had jumped into the soul of the thief from the flaming furnace of that central Cross, fear gave way to faith. His next words were believing.
No longer was Christ an innocent man, nor an exiled upstart, nor a mock monarch. He was a King! Those thorns were His crown; that Cross was His throne; He had omnipotent power; that nail was His scepter; He was a Savior — that is why He forgave His enemies.
Out from the full heart of the thief, there welled up the hopeful petition: “Remember me when thou shalt come into thy kingdom” (Luke 23:42). He could not desire what he did not know; he could not hope in what he did not believe. The thief had faith in the Son of God; now he could hope.
And that hope born of fear and faith received its immediate response: “This day thou shalt be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43).
Above the blasphemous, raucous background of others shouting “Himself He cannot save,” he heard: “This day.” He had only asked for the future, but the answer was more than he had hoped: “This day.” His arms were still pinioned, but he felt them loosen at the sound of “This day”; his body was still racked by pain, but he felt it freshen at ‘‘This day.” His life was of little value — but his soul took on eternal worth as he heard “This day . . . paradise.” A thief had learned to call “Lord” the One whom he had despised. And the Lord can forgive sins . ..Such is the beginning of hope.
Two thieves there were: one who loved and one who hated. Each was on a cross. Neither the good nor the bad ever escape the cross. One thief was saved; therefore, let no one despair. One thief was lost; therefore, let no one presume.
The two extremes to be avoided, then, are presumption and despair. Presumption is an excess of hope, and despair is a defect of hope. Presumption is an inordinate trust in divine mercy, a hope of pardon without repentance, a heaven without merit.
A word to the presumptuous who hope for a deathbed conversion to make their peace with God, and who say: “God would not send me to hell,” or “I have lived a fairly decent life, so I have nothing to worry about,” or ‘‘I know I am a sinner, but no worse than my neighbor; why should I worry? God is merciful.”
When you make the statement “God is good,” what do you mean? Only this: “God is insensible to evil. He is good because He is unmindful of my wickedness.” You forget that God is good precisely because He is the enemy of evil. A healthy man is not indifferent to disease; nor is a government good because it ignores crimes and injustice. Why, then, should you think that God will be complacent about that which you refuse to accept in others?
If you really believed that God is good, would you not be scrupulous about offending Him? Do you not do that much for your friends? The nobler a person is, the more you dread offending him. Even for those whom you do not love, you show respect.
Will you then exploit divine goodness and deceive One in whom you repose the confidence of salvation? Will you forget that Goodness wounded by cynicism avenges itself?
If you lose your earthly friends by prostituting their generosity, will you not in like manner lose your Heavenly Friend by presuming? Will you make divine mercy the excuse for greater sinning? Is there not in every life a last pardon as there is also a last sin? Have we not allotted to each of us a final sin, which fills up the “bag of sin” and seals our eternity?
You may sin a thousand times and be forgiven, but like the man who threw himself into a river a hundred times, each time to be rescued by the bridge tender, you may be told by the rescuer: “Someday you will throw yourself into the river, and I may not be here to pull you out.”
What we all have to realize is that when we sin, we turn our back on God. He does not turn His back on us. If we are ever to see His face again, we must turn around, that is, turn from sin. That is what is meant by conversion. “Turn ye to me, saith the Lord of hosts” (Zech. 1:3).
God cannot save us without that conversion; if we die in our unrepentant sin, we are forever turned away from God. Where the tree falls, there it lies (see Eccles. 11:3). There is no reversal of values after death.
We cannot love sin during life and begin to love virtue at death. The joys of heaven are the continuance of the Christlike joys of earth. We do not develop a new set of loves with our last breath. We shall reap in eternity only what we sowed on earth. If we loved sin, we shall reap corruption; but we shall never gather grapes from thistles.
The justice of God is not separable from His goodness. If He were not just, He would not be good. Because He is goodness, His justice pardons; because He is justice, His goodness expiates. The thief on the right saw the need of justice the moment he admitted, “We suffer justly”; that is why immediately he felt the response of Goodness: “This day . . . paradise.”
Then let not our presuming moderns who pile sin on sin think that they can insult God until their lease on life has run out and then expect an eternal lease on one of the Father’s mansions. Did He who went to heaven by a Cross intend that you should go there by sinning?
Let us consider the other type of soul: the despairing. As presumption forgets divine justice, so despair forgets divine mercy. Modern despair is not only hopeless about eternal life, which it doubts, but even about earthly life, which it mocks. Never before in the history of Christianity has despair been so abysmal. Today there is everywhere an anticipation of catastrophe, an appalling sense of unpredictability and impending disaster.
In the past, men recovered from despair either by returning to the glories of the past or by looking forward to a crown beyond the cross; but now that minds have lost faith in God, they have only this world to give them hope.
Since that has turned against them, they feel a conscious rupture with hope. They curse a meaningless existence, succumb to a continuous exasperation with uncertainty, and yield to a suicidal intent to escape the inescapable.
There are two causes for modern despair: sensuality and sadness. It is a fact that those poets who have most ridiculed the future life and those writers who have poured the most scorn on sin and divine justice were themselves most abandoned to sensuality.
The singers of voluptuousness are always the singers of despair. This is because sensuality produces continuous disillusionment. Its pleasures must be repeated because of their unsatisfyingness; therefore, they make hungry where most they satisfy.
Being deceived so many times by the alluring promises of the flesh, its addicts feel that all life is a deceit. Having been fooled by that which promised pleasure, they conclude that nothing can give pleasure. The fruit of pessimism blossom on the tree of a dissolute life.
From another point of view, sensuality begets despair because by its very nature it is directed to a sensual object, and an excessive dedication to the carnal kills the capacity for the spiritual. Delicate hands lose their skill by handling rough stones, and souls lose their appetite for the divine by undue attachment to the flesh. The eyes that refuse to look upon the light soon lose their power to see: “Having eyes, [they] see . . . not” (see Mark 8:18).
Hope implies love; but if love is centered in the corporal, the soul is deadened to all that is not carnal: it finds less and less satisfaction in duty, family, work, profession, and, above all else, God. There is time only for the wicked joy to which one is a slave.
Naturally, the future life and heaven and the Cross cease to move such a person. There is no desire except the biological; the future begins to be disgusting. From a stage where there is no time for God, they reach another where there is no taste for God. Thus does a world, which, for sex, forgot love, pay its terrible penalty in despair, which calls life meaningless because it has made its own life a wreck.
The second cause of despair is sadness. Sadness does not mean sorrow caused by a death, but rather a surrender to states of depression because of a consciousness of sin and unworthiness. Many falls produce melancholy; repeated defeats induce despair.
St. Paul speaks of carnal excesses and greed for money as the feeble compensations for the one who experiences melancholy induced by multiplied sin: “Who despairing have given themselves up to lasciviousness, unto the working of all uncleanness unto covetousness” (Eph. 4:19).
Despair, born of the loss of God, also ends in persecution. In their impiety, such souls would kill the God they left. That is why wherever you find an atheistic government in the world today, you find “purges.” Not being able to tolerate their own inner sadness, they must compensate for it by killing hope in others.
Each despairing soul must decide for itself the reason for despair. Regardless, however, of how multiplied or grievous your sins may have been, there is still room for hope. Did not Our Lord say: “I came not to call the just, but sinners” (Mark 2:17); and on another occasion, “There shall be joy in heaven upon one sinner that doth penance, more than upon ninety-nine just who need not penance” (Luke 15:7)?
If He forgave the thief, and Magdalen, and Peter, why not you? What makes many in old age sad is not that their joys are gone, but that their hopes are gone. Your earthly hopes may decrease with the years, but not heavenly hope. Regardless of the sinful burden of the years, God’s mercy is greater than your faults.
Only when God ceases to be infinitely merciful, and only when you begin to be infinitely evil, will there be reason for despair; and that will be never; Peter denied Our Lord, but Our Lord did not deny Peter. The thief cursed Christ, but He did not curse the thief. If we had never sinned, we could never call Christ Savior.
The divine invitation has never been annulled: “Come to me, all you that labour, and are burdened, and I will refresh you” (Matt. 11:28). That invitation is not only for the weary; it is also for the sinful.
If you insist that you are disgusted with yourself, remember that you can come to God even by a succession of disgusts. What does your disgust mean except that everything earthly has failed you? That is one of the ways God makes you feel hunger for the divine. Do you not crave food most when you are hungry? Do you not want water most when you are thirsty?
Your own disgust, if you knew it, is the distant call of divine mercy. If, then, the poverty of your merits makes you shrink from the divine presence, then let your needs draw you to Him.
The principal reason for the increase of nervous disorders in the world is due to hidden guilt or unatoned sin locked on the inside until it festered. These souls are running off to psychoanalysts to have their sins explained away when what they need is to get down on their knees and right them selves with God.
When disgusted with our sins, we can go into a confessional, become our own accuser, hear the words of absolution Our Lord Himself gave, make amends and start life all over again, for none of us wants our sins explained away; we want them forgiven. That is the miracle of the sacrament of Penance and the rekindling of hope.
If I had sat at supper with the Lord
And laid my head upon that saving breast
I might have turned and fled among the rest —
I might have been that one who left the board
To add the high priests’ silver to his hoard.
Had our Redeemer stooped to wash my feet,
Would I have washed my neighbor’s, clean and sweet
Or thrice denied the Christ I had adored?
Long have I grieved that I was not St. Paul,
Who rode those seas and saw the tempest toss
The ships he sailed in when he heard the call
To preach the risen Christ and gain through loss.
Tonight I envy most among them all
That thief who hung repentant on his cross.
— The Seven Virtues, Alexander Harvey.
I just hope and trust that the above excerpt will truly help each one of us be more and more focused on Christ. He is the permanent one in our life; everything will pass us by but He it is who will always remain unless you and I decide to drive him out of our heart, mind, and body. And that is why I will always reiterate my prayer and wish that you and I become His closest friend as He is the best of friends to each one of us.
Remember to talk to Him about the above thoughts and ideas in your quiet moments of conversation with Him during the day.
See you in the next post, “May tomorrow be a perfect day; may you find love and laughter along the way; may God keep you in his tender care; ‘til He brings us together again.”
Affectionately,
Guadalupinky
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