Throughout our Lenten journey we have been confronting and confessing our own sinfulness, turning to the Lord and asking for His mercy and forgiveness, and undergoing the disciplines that strengthen us to resist temptation and grow in virtue. Many of our readings, like last Sunday’s story of the Prodigal Son, have spoken to us about how, despite our sinfulness, God still reaches out to us with tremendous love and mercy.
In contrast, today’s Gospel for the Fifth Sunday in Lent, focuses a bit more on our confrontation with the sin of others, and how we are meant to respond. Ultimately, of course, we are instructed to emulate the same compassionate, forgiving love that we have experienced in Christ.
St. John records that while Jesus was teaching in the Temple, the scribes and Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery, and asked: “Moses commanded us to stone such a woman. So what do you say?”
It is clear, as John states directly that the scribes and Pharisees were less interested in upholding the Law of Moses than in trapping Jesus. They knew of His practice of eating with tax collectors and prostitutes, and they wanted to catch Jesus disregarding Moses’ commandments and minimizing the seriousness of sin.
Knowing their intent, Jesus outwits them by saying: “Let the one among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” Now they are the ones who are trapped. They certainly cannot claim to be sinless themselves, and so “they went away, one by one.” This leaves Jesus and the woman alone, together. He asks, “Has no one condemned you?” “No one, Lord,” she responds. And Jesus says, “Neither do I condemn you. Go, and from now on sin no more.”
"Jesus and the Fallen Woman" by Louis Cranach
We are often in the position of knowing, quite well, the sins and failings of others. In fact we typically find it much easier to know and to judge the sins of others than to accuse ourselves of having sinned and failed.
It is thus a very real temptation for us to follow the lead of the Pharisees. They had become so convinced of their own righteousness that they sought to trap and condemn Jesus for his ministry of forgiveness and healing towards sinners. In hatching their plot, they condemn the woman caught in adultery not simply because she has violated the Law, and certainly not in an attempt to win her conversion and salvation, but mainly because she has become a convenient pawn in their plotting.
In every age there is a risk that in our proclamation of Gospel truth our preaching could become too strident, too condemnatory. Fallen creatures that we are, we can too easily make our own personal standards the standards of God and self-righteously exclude others from God’s mercy and love because of their race or class, their political beliefs or their sexual orientation. We can too easily turn brothers and sisters into the personifications of sin and use them merely as pawns in our own arguments and causes.
The antidote to such self-righteousness is found in our second reading, from St. Paul’s Letter to the Philippians. St. Paul hardly shrinks from naming the sins of the Christian communities to whom he writes. But St. Paul also remembers well his own history of having persecuted the Church and arrested and killed the followers of Jesus. He knows that it was only by God’s grace that he was converted from this life of sin and made an Apostle to the Gentiles.
And so St. Paul says: “I do not have any righteousness of my own, based on the law, but only that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God.” Paul shows us that we must not rely on ourselves, or have a false sense of righteousness based on flawless observance of the Law, like the Pharisees. Rather, we must entrust all our hope for “attaining the resurrection of the dead” – in other words, the fullness of life – to the sufferings and resurrection of Christ.
It is in Christ alone that we can obtain righteousness and it is in Christ alone that we can learn the correct way to approach the sinfulness of our neighbors: only in Christ can we treat others with the same love and mercy that He has shown, and thus win our and their conversion and salvation.
But unfortunately, there is yet another way in which we can fail to adequately confront the sin we see in others – and it is just as prevalent, ultimately just as self-righteous, as the mistaken approach of the Pharisees.
This approach would have us short-circuit the truth of the Gospel, and dull the sharpness of its blade, by calling nothing a sin and no one a sinner. It suggests that the Church should amend the truth of its teaching so that we may act, without guilt, as we would choose – and beyond that, it claims that because we are all sinners, none of us are capable of calling another to account, or of encouraging and supporting them to true conversion and holiness.
Again, today’s Scriptures offer us a different way forward. In the Gospel, Jesus does not claim that the woman did not sin. He does not deny the legitimacy of the Law, or critique the scribes and Pharisees for their interest in following its precepts. Rather He rejects their self-righteousness and simply refuses to join in their condemnation of the woman.
Instead He says, “Go and sin no more.” Here is the model we must seek to follow as we confront our own sinfulness, and that of others. This truly Christian approach does not wallow in guilt, or claim self-righteousness. It does not condemn, but neither does it call sin grace.
Rather, out of love for the sinner, and desire for the sinner’s conversion and salvation, it makes an invitation to the newness and fullness of life that has been deadened by sin, and can only be brought back from death through life in Christ Jesus! In the words of the prophet Isaiah, the Christian call to conversion exhorts and promises the sinner: “Remember not the events of the past, the things of long ago consider not; see I am doing something new! Even now it springs up, do you not perceive it?”
When we are aware of our own sinfulness and of the mercy we have received, and out of love and concern for our brother or sister, we instruct and help them to sin no more, then we have shared in Christ’s mission of mercy, and invited that person to the fullness of life they are truly seeking.
We know well, this is no easy path to walk. Our own pride makes us vulnerable to the folly of the Pharisees - and others’ resistance to Gospel truth can make us timid in its proclamation. So we need the strength of this Eucharist to lay down our ego, and to pick up the Cross – to follow Christ in laying ourselves down in loving service, seeking to win the sinner back to life. May this Eucharist strengthen us for our share in Christ’s ministry of mercy and forgiveness.
Faithful readers of "Gift and Mystery" will know well my dear friends Josh and Stacey Noem, and their children Oscar, Simon Peter, and Lucy - my goddaughter. The Noems have appeared regularly on this blog as we have shared the last eight years as MDiv classmates, colleagues in ministry, priest and parishioners, travel companions, partners in crime, and much, much more.
