September 25, 2024 // Perspective

The Height of God’s Power is Shown Best in His Mercy

Father Mark Hellinger

This Sunday’s collect prayer happened to strike me as I was looking through the Roman Missal to explore the prayers for Mass. For the 26th Sunday in Ordinary Time, we will pray, “O God, who manifest your almighty power above all by pardoning and showing mercy, bestow, we pray, your grace abundantly upon us and make those hastening to attain your promises heirs to the treasures of heaven.”

Before reflecting on the prayer itself, it is probably helpful to discuss what exactly a collect is in the first place. The collect prayer is the first presidential prayer of the Mass – meaning that it is said by the priest celebrant alone. At the end of the entrance procession, greeting, and penitential rite comes the collect, introduced by the invitation, “Let us pray.”

After this invitation, there should be some silence so that each person can actually pray. The praying that is referenced in the invitation to prayer is not the collect prayer itself but the individual prayers of each person, said silently in the heart. This is the moment in which we can each raise our own intentions to God for the Mass we are celebrating. In older forms of the Roman rite, there would occasionally be the invitation of the deacon to kneel for a brief moment before the collect was said, thus emphasizing the time spent in prayer. This little remnant still exists in some Masses – such as ordination Masses when the deacon invites everyone to kneel for the Litany of Saints. The current instruction says, “All pray in silence for a while.”

It is called the “collect” out of the Gallican tradition of interpreting this prayer as the presidential collection of all the prayers that have been made silently. Thus, it really only makes sense if it is doing that – collecting the prayers made. In the current rite, it is also done from the chair, precisely because it is a kingly action – the action of Christ the King in collecting the prayers of His people and offering them with one voice to the Father through the ministerial priesthood.

I know for me, even as a priest, it can be easy to not focus on this beautiful moment of unity as the assembly of the Church comes from the many into the one voice of Christ’s great prayer. That short moment of silence is the proper time to focus, to raise our private intentions to God, and to let them be united into the single prayer offered by Christ to the Father through the rest of the Mass.

The classic structure of the Roman collect prayer is: address to God, a description, a petition, and a doxology (words of praise). What is particularly striking about the collect of the 26th Sunday in Ordinary Time (at least for me) is the description: “Who manifest your almighty power above all by pardoning and showing mercy.”

This descriptive prayer affirms God’s almighty power – shown best not in His sovereign reign over the natural wonders, not in His creative power of making something from nothing, not in His sustaining presence in creation which gives it life and breath – is shown above all in His ability to pardon and show mercy. How bold. How striking.

This same description is affirmed in the Catechism of the Catholic Church: “God is the Father Almighty, whose fatherhood and power shed light on one another: God reveals His fatherly omnipotence by the way He takes care of our needs; by the filial adoption that He gives us (‘I will be a father to you, and you shall be my sons and daughters, says the Lord Almighty.’): finally by His infinite mercy, for He displays His power at its height by freely forgiving sins.”

Thus, we can see that what the collect is reminding us of this Sunday is that God’s power is manifest above all in His mercy for our offenses (which are numerous) and that we can participate in His showing of this power when we both receive and give God’s mercy. The victory of the cross of Jesus in the Sacraments of Baptism and Confession are manifestations of this almighty power of God. And so it is, too, when we live the petition of the Our Father “Forgive us our trespasses (or debts) as we forgive those who trespass (or who are indebted) against us.”

Realizing the power of God to forgive us in a complete manner only He can accomplish compels us to live that with others – with the confidence of resting in God’s forgiveness for us so that we are free to forgive others. Thus, perhaps a good practice for this Sunday would be to bring to God – in the silence of the “let us pray” – that person whom we struggle to forgive (even if it is ourselves), so that God’s power may be manifest, even in a small way, in His pardoning and showing mercy worked in us.

Father Mark Hellinger is parochial vicar at St. John the Baptist Catholic Church in Fort Wayne.