By: Jennifer E. Miller, S.T.D., Professor of Moral Theology
This catechesis continues the catecheses on the Jubilee Year of Mercy which began on December 8, 2015. These catecheses are intended to help the faithful in living and witnessing well to the mercy of our Lord during this Extraordinary Jubilee.
Dr. Miller’s comments can be found in the blue boxes as you read her translation.
5. God hears the cry and makes a covenant
Dear brothers and sisters, good morning!
In the Sacred Scriptures, the mercy of God is present throughout the entire history of the people of Israel.
With his mercy, the Lord accompanies the journey of the Patriarchs, gives them children despite the condition of sterility, conducts them by ways of grace and reconciliation, as the story of Joseph and his brothers demonstrates (cfr. Gen:37-50). And I think of the many siblings that have become estranged in a family and do not speak to one another. But this Year of Mercy is a good occasion to find one another again, to hug, and to forgive one another and forget the ugly things. But, as we know, in Egypt the life of the people becomes hard. And it is precisely when the Israelites are about to succumb, that the Lord intervenes and works his salvation.
It is thus that begins the story of Moses as a mediator of liberation for the people. He confronts the Pharaoh in order to convince him to allow Israel to leave; and then he will guide the people, across the Red Sea and the desert, towards liberty. Moses, who divine mercy had saved as soon as he was born from death in the waters of the Nile, becomes a mediator of that same mercy, allowing the people to be born into liberty, saved by the waters of the Red Sea. And we also in this Year of Mercy can do this work of being mediators of mercy with the works of mercy in order to draw close, in order to give consolation, in order to create unity. Many good things can be done.
Divine mercy does much. God proposes a relationship of special, exclusive, privileged love. When he gives instructions to Moses in regard to the covenant, he says: “If you will listen to my voice and keep my covenant, you will be for me a treasured possession among all peoples; mine in fact is the earth! You will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Ex 19:5-6).
Certainly, God possesses all of the earth, because he created it; but the people become for Him a special, different possession: his personal “reserve of gold and silver” like that which King David asserted to have given for the construction of the Temple.
Well, we become like this for God welcoming his covenant and allowing ourselves to be saved by Him. The mercy of the Lord renders man precious, like personal riches that belong to Him, that He guards and in which he is pleased.
These are the marvels of divine mercy, that arrives at its full completion in the Lord Jesus, in that “new and eternal covenant” consummated in his blood, that with forgiveness destroys our sin and renders us definitively sons of God (cfr. 1 Jn 3:1), precious jewels in the hands of the good and merciful Father. And if we are sons of God and we have the possibility of this inheritance – that of goodness and of mercy –in our interactions with others, let us ask the Lord that in this Year of Mercy we also may do things of mercy; we open our hearts in order to bring to all with the works of mercy, the merciful inheritance that God the Father has had with us.
About the Author: Jennifer E. Miller, S.T.D., Professor of Moral Theology
Cajun by birth, Dr. Jennifer E. Miller comes from the Lafayette area. She earned her BA in theology from the Franciscan University of Steubenville in 2002, after which she worked for two years in youth ministry in the Ville Platte area of southern Louisiana.
Travelling to Rome to complete her studies, she earned an STB at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas in 2007 and an STL in moral theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University in 2009. After a year of postgraduate studies at the John Paul II Pontifical Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family, Dr. Miller began work on a doctorate in Catholic Social Doctrine at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross. During this time, she also worked as assistant to Msgr. Martin Schlag, consultor to the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, and as the Directress of Studies at the Markets, Culture and Ethics Research Centre, an interdisciplinary research center between philosophy, theology, and economics that seeks to encourage and promote the virtuous culture necessary for an ethical economic system. Her STD was completed in 2013, with a thesis critiquing and reformulating Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach in light of the principle of subsidiarity and the family.
Dr. Miller has previously taught moral theology at the Aquinas Institute in Lafayette, Louisiana and was involved in teaching at Christendom College’s Rome Campus and at the Institute of Higher Religious Studies at the Apollinare (ISSRA), located at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross. She has taught and published both in English and in Italian. Dr. Miller believes that the moral life is best lived when it is understood as the call to holiness, to the beauty of the virtuous life in Christ directed towards beatitude, rather than as a system of exterior rules and obligations; she seeks to impart this understanding and this way of living the moral life to her students.
Jennifer E. Miller, S.T.D.
Office Location
St. Joseph Hall – Room 109
Contact
Email: jmiller@nds.edu
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