- The fifth-grader came home from school bubbling with excitement after being voted "Prettiest Girl in Class." She was even more excited when she came home the next day after the class had voted her "Most Popular." But a few days later when she announced she had won a third contest, she was considerably less excited. "What were you voted this time?" her mother asked. "Most stuck-up," the girl admitted. (1)
These days of Lent are a call to accept our gifts and abilities, to acknowledge our sinfulness and
blame for our failure to live the Gospel we profess to believe, and to recognize our need for
redemption and resurrection. Confronting the demons of the world must begin with confronting the
demons within our own hearts. We cannot change what is beyond us until we change what is within
us; we cannot lift up the fallen until we realize that we have fallen; we cannot raise others to health
and hope until we seek our own healing; we cannot pass sentence on others until we judge our own
lives.
Today's Gospel shows us Jesus forgiving the woman caught in adultery. He tells her to go and sin
no more. For all we know she became one of the great followers of the women who ministered to
Jesus and his apostles. Like her, we have all sinned and we must turn to Jesus for forgiveness. This latter part of Lent is the time for us to consider going to confession, receiving this Sacrament of
Reconciliation, knowing that God forgives us.
"Ironically, this whole gospel disappeared for a while from the early manuscripts! Why? It is
authentic. That was the point--it was too authentic to Jesus' teaching on love and forgiveness. Early
Christians copying the manuscripts or handing on the oral tradition did not trust this soft approach.'
They were trying to force strict discipline in their new faith communities, and Jesus makes it sound
too easy. What was needed was a stern attitude, a harsh code of compliance, followed by
undeviating punishment and condemnation of sin (which easily lapped over to include the sinner).
It does sound too easy: sin, get forgiven, and you're free to sin again. Mockers of the Catholic church
accuse us of this. What they forget or dare not believe is that love has power to break this pattern.
Yes, punishment has a place. So does limited judgment of right or wrong. Condemnation of sin or
crime, the law courts and all the rest--they are legitimate. But none of these is as successful in
reforming a person as for the person to discover that someone still believes in, regards him or her as fellow humans worthy of love. " (2)
Jesus' enemies put him in a bind. If Jesus said to condemn the woman and put her to death, he would
have gone against the Roman Law, which does not allow the Jews to put anyone to death. If Jesus
forgave the woman, he would be going against the Jewish law in Deuteronomy 22:22-24 which says
such a woman is to be stoned. As always, Jesus solves such a dilemma by turning it back on his
enemies and saying, "He who is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone."
We may wonder what Jesus was doing in stooping and writing in the sand. Some say he was writing
the sins of each of his enemies and that, as each read his sins, he walked away. More likely Jesus
was simply doodling in the sand. One behavior of the time that is noted in history is that men of the region, when annoyed, squatted and doodled. It was an exercise in restraint, a way to think before
you spoke, much like our counting to ten. It is possible to reread this story and see Jesus as the
teacher who was greatly annoyed with the mob. (3)
Jesus always forgave and tells us to do so. What is the nature of forgiveness? We get forgiveness
and forgetting all mixed up, thinking we must forget as well as forgive.
"What then is forgiveness if it is not forgetting? Definitions abound, but a priest who taught a
morality class in high school for years had probably one of the least technical but most
understandable definitions yet. He would say, 'Forgiveness is giving someone the chance to hurt us
again.'" (4)
This is hard, and yet isn't it what God did to the Israelites in the desert...and to all of us? "The
Israelites had a long history of infidelity to God, but God was going to take them back anyway. Of
course God could not forget the things they had done, but He would not consider those things either.
The past was past. He would give them another chance and love them as if nothing had happened.
He would give them a chance to hurt Him again gain--and they would. But then He will give them
yet another chance, and another and another." (5)
God doesn't look to the past but to the future. Isaiah in the first reading tells us that God is always
doing something new. He beckons us also not to get hung up in the past, but to forge on to the
future, to be concerned with how we can bring His kingdom to realization on earth. Isaiah has God saying, "Remember not the events of the past, the things of long ago consider not. I am about to do
a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and
rivers in the desert..." (Isaiah 43: 16-19) As we said last week, forgiveness is so necessary.
- Bud Welch was the father of 23-year-old Julie Marie Welch. Each Wednesday Bud would meet his
beautiful young daughter for lunch across the street from the Murrah Building where she worked as
an interpreter. But on Wednesday April 19, 1995 he didn't get to have lunch with her. Julie was a
victim of the Oklahoma City bombing. Every day for a year Bud Welch would return to that same
spot to grieve her death. He still goes once a week after Mass on Sundays. For the first few months
he says he was not opposed to the death penalty for Timothy McVeigh. But as time goes by he is
trying to deal with forgiveness. He says: "If Timothy McVeigh is executed I won't be able to choose
to forgive him. As long as he is alive I have to deal with my feelings and emotions....It's a struggle
I need to wage.. To me the death penalty is vengeance and vengeance doesn't really help any one in
the healing process."
He goes on to express his belief that the souls of the most "dastardly criminals have a right to be saved--even Timothy McVeigh. He believes that Julie would agree. And since he started expressing his view he is surprised by the number of other people who agree with him but were afraid to say anything for fear of offending those like himself who had lost a love one in the bombing. (6)
- "When Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston was invited to express his views on the death penalty for Timothy McVeigh he vehemently condemned McVeigh's crime and expressed his deep sympathy for the victims but he opposed the death penalty. Why? "It's what it does to us," he concluded. (7)
Jesus was against capital punishment. In today's Gospel, when his enemies asked Jesus to pronounce a death sentence on the woman, he simply pointed out that we all deserve death for our sins. Cervantes, the author of the classic Don Quixote, wrote once, "Give every man his just due and no one will escape hanging."
No, Jesus forgave. And he gave us a beautiful sacrament in which to have our sins--the Sacrament
of Reconciliation.
"Among the penitent's acts," teaches the Catechism of the Catholic Church no. 1451) "contrition
occupies first place. Contrition is 'sorrow of the soul and detestation for sin committed, together
with the resolution not to sin again.'" Some forms of the Act of Contrition include the phrase: "I firmly resolve with the help of your grace to sin no more and to avoid the near occasions of sin."
This contrition puts into effect what Saint Paul says to the Philippians: "I wish to know Christ and
the power flowing from his resurrection; likewise to know how to share in his sufferings by being
formed into the pattern of his death...It is not that I have reached it yet, or have already finished my
course; but I am racing to grasp the prize if possible, since I have been grasped by Christ Jesus." The
Apostle asserts that to make spiritual progress a penitent can "give no thought to what lies behind
but push on to what is ahead." His "entire attention is on the finish line."
The Roman Catechism long ago declared, "The whole power of the sacrament of Penance consists
in restoring us to God's grace and joining us with him in an intimate friendship." This is the way the
avoidance of further sin challenges us to live: in God's grace and friendship.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church (no. 1459) helps make this clear: "Absolution takes away sin, but it does not remedy all the disorders sin has caused. Raised up from sin, the sinner must still recover his full spiritual health by doing something more to make amends for the sin: he must 'make satisfaction for' or 'expiate' his sins. This satisfaction is also called 'penance.' (8)
When Jesus forgives our sins in the Sacrament of Reconciliation, we are completely forgiven.
- I read an account recently of a woman, Betty Nesmith. Betty had a good secretarial job in a Dallas bank. This was before computers took over. Betty ran across a problem that interested her. Wasn't there a better way to correct the errors she made on her electric typewriter? Betty had some art experience and she knew that artists who worked in oils just painted over their errors. Maybe that would work for her too. So she concocted a fluid to paint over her typing errors. Before long, all the secretaries in her building were using what she then called "MistakeOut." She attempted to sell the product idea to marketing agencies and various companies (including IBM), but they turned her down. However, secretaries continued to like her product, so Betty Nesmith's kitchen became he first manufacturing facility and she started selling her concoction on her own. Later she sold her little enterprise to the Gillette Company for $47.5 million.
Wouldn't it be great if there were Whiteout for the soul? There is, of course. It is the Sacrament of
Reconciliation. And in it Jesus doesn't only white-out our sins, he forgives them so that they have
never existed. Only Jesus can do that. And he does it because he is not hung up in the past. He
embraces the words he put in the mouth of Saint Paul in the second reading: "But one thing I do:
forgetting what lies behind and straining forward toward what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal
for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus."
May we do the same in these last days of Lent so we will be able to truly rejoice with the risen Savior on Easter Sunday.
1) Connections, 5/Lent/C, March 1998
2) Good News (25):101-102, "Preaching commentary," 5/Lent/C, March 1998
3) Fr. Edward F. Steiner, The Priest (54):26, 5/Lent/C, March 1998.
4) Fr. Edward F. Steiner, The Priest (54):26, 5/Lent/C, March 1998.
5) Fr. Edward F. Steiner, The Priest (54):26, 5/Lent/C, March 1998.
6) Homily Hints, 5/Lent/C, March 1998
7) Homily Hints, 5/Lent/C, March 1998
8) Fr. Anthony Prosen, Ph.D. Pastoral Life (47): 57-58, 5/Lent/C, March 1998
Fr. Gerard Fuller, o.m.i.
St. William Parish
P.O. Box 367
Gainesville MO 65655
(Comments to padre@TRI-LAKES.NET)