This is my homily for today, the Fifth Sunday of Lent, Cycle C.
NB: Our parish won't be baptizing any adults during the Easter Vigil this year, so we are doing the Cycle C readings rather than the Cycle A Scrutiny readings. Those of you who heard the Cycle A readings today heard the story of the raising of Lazarus from the dead. If, like our parish, you heard the Cycle C readings, today's Gospel is the story of the woman caught in adultery.
Today's readings for both options can be found here.
That Responsorial Psalm we sang* a few moments ago is still running through my head: “The Lord has done great things for us; we are filled with gladness and joy!”. If you happened to glance my way while we were singing it, you would have seen both feet tapping along; if it wasn’t so early in the morning, I might have leaped out of my chair and danced around.
The Lord has done great things for us, hasn’t he? And one of the greatest things he does is show us mercy, just as Jesus mercy to the woman caught in adultery in today’s Gospel reading. I want to spend a few minutes this morning reflecting on this gift of mercy.
There is no indication that Jesus’s enemies had mercy on their minds, neither for the woman caught sinning nor for Jesus, when they brought her to him. As this Gospel story tells it, she was simply a means to an end, the end being to stop Jesus and his ministry. Or as we might put it these days: she was the means to try to “cancel” him. Using her as a convenient set of circumstances, they wielded the Law of Moses as a weapon to try to trick and trap him.
If you can picture the scene in your head, with the woman in the center of the circle of onlookers, it was like a trial. The woman was on trial; Jesus was the judge; and the scribes and Pharisees were the prosecutors. They cited the law to argue for her sentence: stoning to death.
But Jesus deftly refuted their legal argument, just as he had bested the devil that time he fasted in the desert for 40 days. And so his enemies, defeated by Jesus’ mastery of the Law, walked away, one by one. Not that they were gone for good. They will kept trying to go after Jesus, until they succeeded by bribing one of his followers, Judas Iscariot, to betray him. We’ll tell that story of Jesus’s betrayal, arrest, passion and death next Sunday on Palm Sunday.
But that is in Jesus’s future. In this story’s present, after his enemies have walked away, the one left behind is the woman – the flagrant sinner, caught in the very act of adultery. But we see very quickly that to Jesus, she was not just some means to an end. She was a person in her own right, a child of God just like us, and Jesus cared about her as much as he cares about us. He doesn’t overlook her sin, but apparently he sees her as something more than a sinner. And so he tells her, “Neither do I condemn you. Go, and from now on do not sin any more.” This poor woman, who until then must have feared she would be stoned to death, instead is given a second chance. She is given new life.
We have a word to describe what Jesus showed the woman: “mercy”. He showed her the same mercy we hope he will show to us when it’s our turn to come face to face with him some day.
The Lord has done great things for us! Even when we sin, God doesn’t give up on us. On the contrary: he redoubles his effort to reconcile with us. How good and merciful is God! He is slow to condemn us, but quick to forgive us. His love for us is so great that he sees beyond our sins. It seems that God did not send his son Jesus to us as some avenging angel to punish us for all the ways we’ve failed him – even though that may be what we deserve. He sent his son, not to punish us for our sins, but to forgive them, and to welcome us back with loving arms.
That is Good News for us. But here is the hard part: Jesus expects us to be as merciful to one another as he has been to us. We know this is true, because he taught us a prayer, the Our Father, which says so. The line I’m referring to is, “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” All of us want to be forgiven. But how willing are we to show mercy to those who have transgressed against us?
Mercy doesn’t come naturally to us. For many of us, the only person we can forgive easily is ourselves – and some of us struggle even to do that. Yet we just show mercy to those around us. We especially owe mercy to those over whom we have authority, or for whom we are responsible: parents are to be merciful their children, employers to their employees, teachers to their students.
Yet when I look around at what is happening in the world today, what I see leads me to wonder if we may be in the midst of a mercy deficit – perhaps even a mercy crisis. I want to mention a handful of instances where I believe our public life would benefit from mercy.
The first is something I’ve already mentioned: the so-called “Cancel culture”. People who fail some sort of ideological purity test are “canceled”. The internt mob appoint themselves as judge, jury and executioner. They seek to wield social media, just as the scribes and Pharisees sought to wield the law in today’s Gospel story, to destroy their victim’s personal life, career and reputation. Cancel Culture strikes me as the opposite of merciful. Where is the forgiveness? Where are the second chances? Where is the love? In my view, we should resist Cancel Culture.
I’d also like to mention those federal employees who are losing their jobs by the thousands, even the tens of thousands, regardless of their work performance. These workers depend on their jobs to support their families. Isn’t there a more merciful way to shrink the size of government?
Finally, I’d like to call out our federal government’s current treatment of immigrants. I imagine all of us have heard reports that our federal government is arresting and deporting immigrants, and in some cases flying them to a Salvadoran prison, without due process – without stopping to discern whether the person being deported actually has committed the crimes he or she is accused of. Apparently, in at least a few cases, this is being done without even discerning whether the right person has been arrested. Not only is this unmerciful, it’s not even just. This is not how Jesus calls us to live. Jesus wants us to treat one another, including immigrants, as he treats the woman in today’s Gospel: with dignity and mercy and love. The adulterous woman is made in God’s image and therefore is good. The same is true of immigrants. Can we dare, as a people, to call for treating immigrants with mercy and dignity?
Let us treat one another with mercy, just as Jesus showed mercy to the woman caught in adultery. Chances are, she’s no worse than us. Many of us have heard the Golden Rule: Do unto others as we would have them do unto us. I’d like to propose a Christian spin on the Golden Rule: let us do unto others as Jesus already does unto us: by showing mercy and love to one another.
This one stirred a reaction. After both masses where I gave it, more people than usual told me they liked it, and some of them were pretty warm about it. At the second mass, there was some scattered applause immediately after the homily - something I have mixed feelings about.
ReplyDeleteNobody voiced anything negative directly to me after the early mass (although the pastor, who didn't even preside but was standing by the door when mass ended, apparently was on the receiving end of a complaint). After the second mass, two people came to me directly to complain that I was bringing politics into church. One was a young man I don't recall seeing previously. He was clutching a bible - he was sort of holding it front of his chest; it kind of looked like he was trying to ward me off with it :-). The other was a woman whom I have known slightly for years now; I may have baptized some of her children. Both told me I shouldn't discuss political topics at church. I admit I suspect that both were actually upset because they approve of the policies I criticized. I think for most people, it takes some courage and motivation to approach a preacher and tell him directly that you objected to what he said, so I give them some credit for coming up to me to tell me face-to-face.
It's pretty rare that I talk about current events that are controversial or divisive, but as I've probably mentioned before: I think there are some times when it's required, and in my judgment (such as it is), we are in one of those times.
The woman who complained yesterday sent a couple of nastygrams to my parish email box, so apparently she's not letting it go. I've forwarded them to the pastor.
DeleteSpeaking up against injustice and maltreatment of God’s children isn’t politics. Calling it “politics” is just a way to shut down the truth. Good on ya, Jim, for bringing these things up in your sermon. Church isn’t a spa to get a nice mental massage but I guess that’s what some expect. They can get that from some New Age venue. Go to a burning man festival.
DeleteStanley, thanks. I've been reflecting the last few days. I think part of the situation today, at least at our parish, is our parishioners don't get exposed to Catholic social teaching very much, unless they're motivated to seek it out on their own. As a general rule, I'm the only preacher who ever touches on social teaching themes (and if you read my homilies here, you know I don't actually do it very often, either.) Our homilies have a lot of nuggets and advice on how we can apply Jesus's message to our daily lives. People gobble up that stuff. The woman who sent me those lovely emails said that she liked the first half of the homily, when I talked about Jesus's mercy, but couldn't stand how I then applied it to worker's rights and immigrant rights. (She didn't use those terms; I think one has to have at least a nodding acquaintance with Catholic social teaching to be able to name those categories.)
DeleteTo continue on the topic of Catholics' exposure to Catholic social teaching: my dad went to 12 years of Catholic school during the 1940s and 50s, i.e. during the reign of Pius XII. He was absolutely a creature of the Catholic subculture of that era. He even went to Notre Dame for a time :-).
DeleteI think there is a common thought among Catholic baby boomers that my dad's generation had no exposure to Catholic social teaching, but I don't think that's true. When I was young, he advanced in his career by being willing to stand up to rather militant labor unions in manufacturing companies. I always thought he was reflexively anti-union, but when I was old enough to have a sort of adult conversation with him, I discovered that his views on the rights of workers were quite nuanced, and very much in accord with what the church teaches. The same was true of his views on racial integration, the Vietnam War and other big social issues of the 60s. Maybe his having been a young adult during the Vatican II event had an influence on him. I suspect John Kennedy's presidential campaign and his policies also were influential.
Conservative Catholics today have tried to resuscitate the thickness of the old Catholic subculture, but I don't think they've succeeded very well. I think, in truth, they inhabit a bubble that is permeated by Evangelicalism, MAGA, Fox News and other not-particularly-Catholic influences. I think they view worker rights, immigrant rights, environmentalism, the preferential option for the poor, etc. with skepticism, occasionally lapsing into hostility.
Good points about the need for mercy, Jim. I didn't see it as particularly radical. You pretty much said similar things to a recent statement by the USCCB (I'm not sure if that statement was by the whole organization, or just some of the members).
ReplyDeleteIt wouldn't have gone over well here, even though people are quite willing to help individuals, and we are probably 20% immigrants in the community. They would say they don't like politics in church, but we had to listen to some pretty hard pushing for the latest pro-life ballot initiative. People try to say Trump is pro-life, but that is only if you close one eye and squint the other so you can only see one thing. Peripheral vision is important.
Needless to say I have been absolutely appalled at the administration sending people to a gulag in El Salvador, with no recourse. ICE has quotas, and they don't care how they fill them.
Good work, Jim. I’ve been bogged down with a number of things, including income taxes, which are much more complicated this year than usual. Today one of my sons sent me an image of a letter written by a school principal in New York somewhere, complaining about ICE coming in and arresting third graders, leading them away in handcuffs. How low can we go?
ReplyDeleteI hope to fill you in on how all of this us impacting those of us who live in ground zero.
The challenge of talking about the present political situation is to do it without condemning the present politicians and their supporters because you are then becoming political.
ReplyDeleteJesus did not condemn his enemies; they may have condemned themselves by walking away, but he did not directly condemn them. I think this is an important part of the story, of the mercy of Jesus even for his enemies.
So, one can ask in a homily: where is the mercy of Jesus for federal workers suddenly fired? the mercy of Jesus for the immigrants arrested? Would Jesus be doing these things? The answer is clearly NO. No one in their right mind can believe that Jesus would do these things. You cannot be a disciple of Jesus and do these things.
On the other hand, would Jesus be spending his time calling out politicians who are doing these things? The answer seems to be that he would writing in the sand rather than confronting them directly. Jesus did not give them the satisfaction of entering into debate with them.
Rather than confronting the politicians, it seems Jesus would be spending his time helping the federal workers, the immigrants, etc. who have been harmed by the politicians. He would not be either cheering on the politicians or condemning them.
Jesus was known to call his enemies (who were politically involved, in a way) a "brood of vipers". To be sure: prophets who spoke truth to power were known to have sudden and unfortunate endings!
DeleteOne explanation of his writing on the ground was that, in doing so, he was alluding to the prophet Jeremiah. Here is the footnote in the NAB:
"Jer 17:13 (RSV): “Those who turn away from thee shall be written in the earth, for they have forsaken the LORD, the fountain of living water”"
(It interested me that the editors of the NAB were quoting the RSV version in their footnote. Here is how that verse from Jeremiah is translated in the NAB: "The rebels shall be enrolled in the netherworld; they have forsaken the LORD, source of living waters". "Enrolled in the netherworld" doesn't quite make the connection to 'writing in the earth', although "enrolled in the netherworld" makes its own point.)
"The challenge of talking about the present political situation is to do it without condemning the present politicians and their supporters because you are then becoming political."
DeleteYes. I tried to talk about policies without mentioning politicians or their followers. But of course, some people's hackles were raised anyway. And I think your advice is good, to frame it as, "Would Jesus arrest immigrants and ship them to a Salvadoran prison"?
Jesus writing in the sand makes me thing of the "handwriting on the wall" episode in Daniel 5. In both instances it was the hand of God doing the writing. In both instances it was apparently not something which those present wanted to see. Though I have also read commentary that it was Jesus' way of showing how little he was interested in what the Pharisees were saying.
DeleteThe woman in the gospel was accused of adultery, but it takes two to commit adultery. There is no mention of the man who was a party in the incident. I have thought that maybe he was one of the ones who slunk away. Maybe it was his name that Jesus wrote in the sand.
Katherine, that is an interesting theory! I saw a commentary a few days ago that the Mosaic Law is clear that both adultering parties, the man and the woman, are to be subject to the same punishment (i.e. stoning). That the Pharisees only brought the woman to Jesus would be taken by him as an instance of their flawed interpretation of the law.
DeletePerhaps Jesus's mercy toward the woman caught in adultery could be taken as a sign that the church should be forgiving toward divorced couples (if one supposes that adultery is at the root of many divorces; I don't know whether that is really the case).
ReplyDeleteAdultery probably is at the root of a lot of divorces (maybe most of them?) The church should be merciful to the divorced and remarried, because some things can't be fixed.
DeleteI believe that I read something recently that infidelity is the #1 cause of divorce and that money issues are next.
DeleteI know of some people in long time marriages that went on the rocks because they cracked under the burden of a spouse's mental illness or addiction. Sometimes people get to the point where they just can't do it anymore.
DeleteI have read that women who initiate divorce in middle age and beyond simply are tired of taking care of an adult male who won’t wash dishes or do his own laundry or whatever. My late sister was an estate and trust attorney. She said once that when the men were widowed they often remarried quickly - within a year. But the women usually did not, telling her that they didn’t want to be taking care of another old adolescent. At some point they might be interested in a companionship, even a romantic companionship, but did not want to remarry. I have read articles that support her anecdotes.
DeleteI've talked with a number of divorced or widowed women in that children-now-adults stage of life who have zero interest in remarrying. At our most recent high school reunion, I spoke with two classmates with whom I've stayed in touch (at least at intervals) over the years - both were not only high school classmates but also had gone on to Loyola with me. One divorced after ~25 years of marriage; the other married relatively young, divorced within a year, and has no interest in remarrying. Both shared the opinion - this was after a few trips to the cocktail bar, I think - that husbands our age just want a wife who will "wipe their *ss" when they have health issues. Sorry for the crudity, but it sort of struck me when they said it.
DeleteTo be sure, that kind of thing could be in my future, or my wife's future. I figure it's what I signed up for, and the least I can do. I hope she may feel similarly, should it ever come to it!
With the coming chaos, political, economic, environmental, I don’t see my personal longevity being as probable as what it was. No country or planet for old men. So I don’t think too much at all about it. Last thing I imagine is some woman being my caretaker. Regarding this possibility, I told M that if I decline, I’d expect her to take care of me and then I said “if you know what I mean”. Just kidding.
DeleteWell I’m there, although we have a caregiver ( we’ve been cutting back on hours because of the cost) for my husband, I do empty the colostomy bag and the urine bags every night and other times if the caregiver isn’t here. I don’t give bed baths or change his clothes. By summer I hope to eliminate the part- time weekend care completely (we cut off the nighttime care a couple of months ago and reduced weekends from 20 hours to 8) and hope to find 5 day/ care for 4 hours/ day by then. I plan to start going to the gym for weight bearing e recuses so that we can cut weekday care to 3 days. I am simply too old 77 (and soon 78) and too weak to do the bathing and clothes changing. And range of motion exercises. I had no idea how heavy dead weight feet and legs are. I can now get him from wheelchair to bed using the Hoyer lift and hoping to be able to do the reverse soon ( it’s trickier)., With a huge hit to the retirement savings we need to become as independent of expensive care as possible. I’m getting PT now for my bad knee but also for my right shoulder, which I damaged by pulling myself up the stairs with the banister rail after we got home because of my left knee problems. Jim, you and your wife are still young enough and healthy enough to improve your health further, (exercise and weight management) and maybe look into long- term care insurance, although I have heard that some policies don’t pay off and the companies fold before people need the care insurance. And stay off tall ladders, and don’t ride your bikes in traffic!
ReplyDeleteI might add that when knowing a couple of women who sought divorces in late middle age (50s-60s) the problem wasn’t worrying about wiping their spouses bottom when they were in their 80s but about still doing everything at home - all the cooking, cleaning, doing the dishes, laundry etc while husband sat in front of a TV watching a game- or was out playing golf . My husband was never line that, thank goodness. Or I wouldn’t still be married after 52 years. I will care for him as well as I can to the end. But I know some women whose husbands never would do “ women’s work”. There is a reason so many educated young adult women postpone marriage or never marry at all - they don’t want the life their moms had. One of my nieces told my (late) sister in law that to her face. Because my husbands’s brother (nice guy as long as you’re not married to him) is an evangelical Christian male whose notions of complements meant he was the boss and they would have traditional gender roles. He even dictated where she could buy groceries and clothing ( Walmart for both). Unfortunately the Catholic teachings on complementarity too often echo the evangelical teachings.
ReplyDeleteWe were all surprised when our niece did marry - in her 30s ( making it known that she did NOT intend to have children). But he was supported by her for ten years while he was “ finishing “ his PhD ( he never did) and expected her to do it all at home also. She dumped him after ten years, moved to Connecticut from NM for her dream job, and has a live in younger male partner ( a really nice guy) and will never marry again. She owns the (gorgeous) house 100% so he had better be careful! 😉