The Mercy That Heals Even Adultery, Fifth Sunday of Lent (C), April 3, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx, NY
Fifth Sunday of Lent, Year C
April 3, 2022
Is 43:16-21, Ps 126, Philippians 3:8-12, Jn 8:1-11

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following text guided today’s homily: 

• The whole purpose of Lent is to bring us to a face-to-face, a heart-to-heart, encounter with God’s mercy. On Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, St. Paul in the Epistle begged us, as an ambassador of Christ — God as it were appealing through him — to be “reconciled to God” and not to waste any time because “now” is the “day of salvation.” The prophet Joel told us to rip open our hearts to God’s mercy — a summons repeated in today’s Gospel verse — at the very same time that we prayed in the Psalm, “Be merciful, O Lord, for we have sinned.” And the priest marked us with ashes, reminding us that our bodies will return to dust, he repeated to us the words of Jesus’ first homily: “Repent and believe in the Gospel.” Lent is about recognizing our need for repentance. It’s about believing in the Gospel of God’s merciful love and saving plan. It’s about coming to receive that great gift so as to live new lives. And it’s about being transformed by it to such a degree that we become God’s instruments to help others to receive it. The deeper we get into the Lent, the more powerful this message becomes.
• Last Sunday, as you recall, Jesus preached to us the Parable of the Prodigal Son, which stressed the Father’s undying love for every wayward child, the meaning of genuine repentance and the sadness of those who can’t share their father’s joy. In today’s Gospel, that storyabout God’s forgiveness takes on life, in the encounter of Jesus with the woman caught in adultery and with the hardness of heart of all the “older brothers” who were trying to get her executed rather than striving to bring her to conversion and salvation. Just as Jesus wanted us last week to identify with the Prodigal Son, so he wants us to see ourselves in the woman caught red-handed; just as he wanted us to recognize that often we can behave like the older brother in the Parable who resents mercy given to sinful siblings, so, too, he wishes us to drop whatever stones are in our hands and use even other’s sins as a reminder of our own; and just as in last week’s Parable, he wanted to illustrate God’s infinite merciful love and his joy whenever one of his children is reconciled to him, so today he hopes that we will come to hunger for us to have as life-changing an experience with his mercy as did the adulterous woman.
• For this desired Lenten spiritual metamorphosis to take place, we first have to identify with the woman in today’s Gospel. By God’s mercy, probably none of us has had our sins exposed in all their shame and humiliation before the mobs. This is a far more common occurrence today, however, than in the ancient world. The metastasis of tabloid journalism, the rise of social media, and the popularization of the sins of gossip and detraction have made the destruction of others through the publication of their sins, or presumed sins, widespread. So many politicians, celebrities, even Church leaders, have been dragged to the front pages, stoned with millions of likes and shares and vitriol in comment boxes. But the phenomenon has also engulfed those with no major public profile, including teens and children, who have been so humiliated by cyber-bullying and sexting scandals that they have tragically submitted themselves to the death penalty. In my work with the Sisters of Life and my ministry as a priest, I have met so many whose lives have been turned shamefully inside out because they have been caught red-handed, pregnant outside of marriage, as modern Hester Prynnes branded with scarlet letters, dealing with the reality that many of those closest to them are the ones with stones aimed at them and at the sons and daughters growing within them. So the drama of today’s Gospel scene is constantly being replayed and we know many of the characters under the lights.
• Even if, however, we have not been similarly exposed to shame, each of us is called to identify personally with the adulterous woman, because God has revealed to us repeatedly, especially through the Prophets Jeremiah, Isaiah, Hosea, and Ezekiel, that every sin is an act of adultery,because it is being unfaithful to the spousal covenant of love we have entered into with God (see Jer 3:20, Is 1:21; Is 57:8, Hos 2:2-5; Hos 3:1-5; Hos 9:1; Ezek 16:30) Even though others may not haul us into public places, we know that every serious sin still has a death penalty associated with it, an eternal death penalty, which is why we call this type of sin “mortal,” or “deadly.” This is the just consequence of such sins, because it’s what is ultimately chosen in sin. Just like the Prodigal Son in order to seize his inheritance was treating his father as if the father had already croaked, so through sin, we treat God the Father as if he is dead, we want to leave his home, and we want to go far from him and waste the inheritance of the treasure of grace he’s given us. We squander our dignity, we descend morally even beneath the pigs, and we push ourselves in the direction of definitive self-alienation from the Father and his love. It’s important in Lent to face this reality with brutal honesty, because unless we recognize that we have “greatly sinned … by [our] own … most grievous fault,” we don’t need a Savior. Unless we recognize that we’re really sick in need of the doctor, we cannot appreciate either the medicine of mercy or the Divine Physician who dies to dispense it to us.
• This is the chief message of salvation history. Through Jeremiah, Isaiah, Hosea and Ezekiel, God not only reminded Israel of its infidelity but showed his own faithful love, that even though Israel had chosen to cavort with idols of their own making, even though Israel had repeatedly chosen to sin, God’s will was to forgive her and purify her. These prophecies were fulfilled when Jesus himself came. Jesus didn’t die on the Cross for sinners who were “strangers” to him. He died for his Bride! He died for us. St. Paul described this when he called husbands to love their wives “just as Christ loved the church and handed himself over for her to sanctify her, cleansing her by the bath of water with the word, that he might present to himself the church in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish” (Eph 5:25-27). He, who with his sinless mother was the only one who fully merited to be able to cast a stone, took the stones, the nails, the beating, intended for us and died out of love so that we, his bride, wouldn’t have to. Therefore, the woman caught in adultery, without realizing it, was ultimately dragged not before a sympathetic arbiter whom her accusers were similarly trying to entrap, or a gallant rabbi who would sagaciously save her life, but before the loving spouse of her soul against whom she and her partner were cheating. And he responded not with justified anger, or with cold justice, but as he promised he would through Hosea: not condemning her, not permitting her to die as her deeds deserved, but restoring her to the marital bond.
• Today’s was the first Sunday Gospel Pope Francis preached on after his election nine years ago. He surprised everyone by taking the regular Sunday Mass at the Church of Saint Anne, just inside Vatican City gates. There, and in his first Angelus meditation based on the Gospel to the crowds assembled in St. Peter’s Square, he gave the same beautiful message. I’ll never forget hearing it live, present there with my brother Scot and the 300,000 Catholic brothers and Sisters stretching all the way down the Via della Conciliazione. “God never tires of forgiving us,” he proclaimed. “It’s we who tire of asking for forgiveness.” Then he prayed, “May we never tire of asking for what God never tires to give!” It’s through this mercy that the Lord who said in today’s first reading, “See, I am doing something new!” seeks to make us new. This is the means by which St. Paul, who said in today’s second reading that he longed to experience the “power of [Christ’s] resurrection,” came to experience it and that we will come to experience it. Because, as we heard last week, when the Father embraced his Prodigal Son, he pointed to the reality of what was happening: “My son was dead and has come back to life.” Jesus founded the Sacrament of his Mercy on Easter Sunday evening precisely so because, mysteriously, sacramentally, but truthfully, every reconciliation is meant to be a resurrection, when we experience the power of Christ’s resurrection triumphing over our sins and over the death to which our sins lead. Every Confession gloriously participates to some degree in what we celebrate on Easter Sunday, that our “felix culpa,” that our “happy sin” has brought us to experience the love of our Redeemer and the power of his risen life. When St. Paul says today, “I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowingChrist Jesus my Lord,” we know that He came to know the Lord above all through mercy, when the Lord forgave him of having persecuted and killed Christians, including supervising the stoning of St. Stephen, and then nevertheless chose him to become his ambassador of mercy, appealing to others, still down to our own day, as he did to us on Ash Wednesday, to be “reconciled to God” (2 Cor 5:20-22). He recognized as he wrote to St. Timothy, Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the worst of all.” But he continued, “For that reason, I was shown mercy so that in me, the worst of sinners, Christ Jesus might display his immense patience as an example for those who would believe in him and receive eternal life” (1 Tim 1:15-6). Jesus wants each of us to know him in the power of his resurrection through reconciliation. He wants to meet us, just like he met St. Paul, in his mercy, so that we, like him, might become ambassadors of that gift, calling all others not to be afraid of his mercy, but to receive it and let their lives develop in grateful accordance with that love. In the midst of a harsh world that seeks to accuse, summarily condemn, and kill, he wants to forgive, save and give life. In response to the eternal death penalty due to adultery, he seeks through mercy to give eternal life and bring us to the eternal nuptial banquet.
• That brings us to the second point, about how receiving God’s mercy is meant to make us different from the mobs. The reason why Jesus’ message of forgiveness was so difficult for the Pharisees to understand was because they themselves had never truly experienced forgiveness or a God who loves them so much that he does forgive them. Jesus knew that although they might not have been committing similar deeds with their bodies, they were committing them with their mind. One of the great principles of the spiritual life is that if you personally have a problem, a particular sin you’re struggling with on the inside, and you’re not honest with yourself in giving it to the Lord, what often ends up happening is that you “find” that sin in everyone else. It’s the principle of seeing the speck in everyone else’s eyes while avoiding the plank in our own. How was it that these men ended up catching this woman in the very act of adultery? It’s not as if she and the married man were caught in the middle of the temple area committing this sin. It’s probably because they had been keeping their eyes on her for weeks, lusting after her. Some Church fathers speculate it was these sins that Jesus was writing on the ground as they awaited his verdict. Jesus’ response was showing far more than he was a great defense attorney. He was seeing straight into their hearts. That’s why he challenged them the way he did because he knew that it was precisely because of their sin that they were trying to bring the woman to be stoned. Having been forgiven, we need to be on the side of sinners rather than the side of the mobs. Every stone we toss is a boomerang that will come back to hit the sender. If we think we’re fit to toss stones at others, Jesus reminds us, that those stones will in fact zero in on us as the target. Whenever we pick up stones, he calls us to use them to beat our own breasts. We need to help people come to this life-changing encounter with the Lord Jesus and the power of his resurrection and the mercy he gave on Easter Sunday evening.
• Saint Teresa of Calcutta regularly used to call people to the Lord Jesus for the most precious one-on-one dialogue in life. That’s why she would counsel, “One thing is necessary for us: Confession. Confession is nothing but humility in action. We call it Penance, but really it is a Sacrament of Love, a Sacrament of forgiveness. It is a place where I allow Jesus to take away from me everything that divides, that destroys. Confession is a beautiful act of great love. Only in confession can we go in as sinners with sin and come out as sinners without sin. … There’s no need for us to despair, no need for us to commit suicide, no need for us to be discouraged, if we have understood the tenderness of God’s love.” She said elsewhere, very simply, “Confession is Jesus and I, and nobody else.” And then she told us, “Remember this for life.” Every confession is meant to be a life-changing merciful encounter like the woman had with Jesus in today’s Gospel.
• Today, as we prepare to receive in Holy Communion the same body that hung upon the Cross, the same blood that dripped from the crown of thorns and the Lord’s five wounds, we remember that the Lord went through all of this to forgive us our sins. The judgmental Pharisees who were trying to condemn the woman in today’s Gospel were at the foot of the Cross taunting Jesus, as if he were a sinner himself. But from that Cross, Jesus looked up to the Father and said, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do!,” and then, specifically, to one repentant thief, he shared the fullness of that mercy, “Today I tell you, you will be with me in paradise.” The Lord we meet today is the Mercy Incarnate, who has come to save us from death, the one who has come to reveal the Father’s true loving face. The Lord we meet here is the Bridegroom who washes us with water and the word and makes us anew his spotless Bride, ready for the consummation of our nuptial union that takes place on the marriage bed of the altar! The one we meet is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. How blessed are those invited to the supper of the Lamb!

The reading for today’s Mass were: 

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