Mercy Catholic College – Annual Mercy Day Mass – 31 August 2026
There is something rather surprising about the Gospel we have just heard. Jesus presents us with this enormous scene: all the nations gathered together, the Son of Man coming in glory, the angels surrounding him, the throne prepared. Everything sounds dramatic and overwhelming. And yet, when the judgement actually takes place, Jesus brings our attention not to enormous things, but to the smallest and most ordinary things of life. Did you notice someone who was hungry? Did you give someone a drink? Did you welcome the stranger? Did you care for someone who was sick or alone? The people ask Jesus, “Lord, when did we see you?” But in fact, they had seen him hundreds of times without recognising him. They had seen someone hungry, someone lonely, someone who was a stranger, someone who needed them. And Jesus says, in effect, “That was me.”
That question, “When did we see you?”, gives us a wonderful way of thinking about what we celebrate today. Because mercy begins with learning how to see. This morning that question has a very special significance because, in the course of our celebration, two members of our College community will be baptised. In a few moments, water will be poured over them and they will be baptised. It is such a simple action. A little water. A few words. And yet we believe something profound is taking place. They are being drawn into the life of Christ. They are becoming members of his Body, the Church. They are being given an identity that will remain with them for the whole of their lives: they belong to Christ.
But Baptism is not simply about receiving a new identity. It is also about receiving a new way of seeing. To be baptised into Christ is gradually to learn to see the world as Jesus sees it; to see other people as Jesus sees them; to discover the dignity that lies within every human person. And that brings us back to today’s Gospel: “Whatever you did to one of the least of these, you did to me.”
We can go through an entire day without really seeing very much. We pass hundreds of people. We sit beside people in classrooms. We move through corridors and playgrounds. We scroll through hundreds of images on our phones and receive countless messages and notifications. We are probably amongst the most visually stimulated generations in history, and yet strangely it is possible for us to see everything and notice almost nothing. Mercy asks us to look again. Baptism asks us to look again. It asks us to notice the person sitting by themselves, the person who has become unusually quiet, the student who is new, the person who does not quite fit into the group, the person who has made a mistake and whom everyone else has decided to define by that mistake. It asks us to notice the person who may be carrying something difficult that we know nothing about.
And then Jesus goes further. He says that when we notice such a person, we are in some mysterious way noticing him. We naturally imagine that if we were looking for God, we would look upwards. We might look for God in a church, in prayer, in the beauty of creation, perhaps in some extraordinary spiritual experience. And certainly, God might be encountered in all those places. But in today’s Gospel Jesus says: if you really want to find me, look around. Look especially towards the person whom everyone else might overlook.
That is why the word Mercy in the name of our College is so important. It is not simply a name inherited from the past. It is an invitation about the kind of community we are called to become and the kind of people we are being formed to be. Catherine McAuley understood this very well. In the Dublin of her time, she encountered women and children who were poor, people with few opportunities, people whose dignity could easily be overlooked. She could simply have felt sorry for them, but mercy is much more than feeling sorry for someone. Catherine did something. She welcomed. She educated. She accompanied. She created possibilities for people who had very few possibilities. For Catherine, mercy was practical. Mercy meant seeing a need and responding to it.
This remains a challenge for us because we could misunderstand mercy as weakness. We might imagine that the strong person is the one who always wins, who gets their own way, who has the cleverest comeback. But Jesus gives us a very different picture of strength. It takes strength to be kind when everyone else is being cruel. It takes courage to welcome someone whom our group might prefer to exclude. It takes strength not to join in when someone is being ridiculed, especially online. It takes courage to say, “That’s not right,” when everyone else is laughing. It takes strength to forgive, and sometimes even greater strength to apologise. Mercy is not weakness. Mercy is strength directed towards the good of another person.
Imagine what Mercy Catholic College might be if every person came through the gates each morning with one simple question: “Who can I encourage today?” Imagine a school where students noticed the person being excluded; where difference was not something to fear but something to welcome; where mistakes did not become permanent labels; where people did not always have to pretend that everything was fine. Imagine a school where achievement certainly mattered, but where the question was not simply, “What marks did I get?” but also, “What kind of person am I becoming?” That would truly be a Mercy Catholic College.
One day perhaps we too will ask the question from today’s Gospel: “Lord, when did we see you?” And Jesus may remind us of a classroom, a playground, a sporting field, a bus, a conversation, a message we sent, a person we defended, someone we invited to sit with us, someone we forgave, someone whose story we took the time to hear. And Jesus will say, “That was me.”
Today, as water is poured over two members of this community, may we all hear again the call to see differently, to love differently, to live differently. This, then, is the deepest meaning of what we celebrate today: through Baptism we belong to Christ; through mercy we learn to recognise Christ; and through the way we treat one another, we allow others to recognise Christ in us.
