Cycle C - Year II:  

3 April 2022: Fifth Sunday of Lent 

(Liturgical Color: Violet)

Readings:

First Reading:        Isaiah 43:16-21

Second Reading:   Philippians 3;8-14

Gospel:  Please Read  John 8:1-11 

God's mercy is for all!

Christians know and believe that we are sinful and imperfect beings. But sometimes it is easy for us to find faults with others but ourselves.

This human tendency to judge, often to condemn others as sinful, dates back even to the time of our Lord Jesus Christ as we will hear from this Sunday's Gospel proclamation.

The Scribes and Pharisees were upset that our Lord freely associates with public sinners. They wanted to entrap Him by confronting Jesus on the issue of  adultery and retribution.  Under the Jewish Law, adultery is a serious crime punishable by death, because it violates God's ordinance and wreaks havoc on the stability of marriage and family life.

So the religious leaders brought before Jesus a woman caught in adultery.  They wanted to put our Lord Jesus in a dilemma. In their evil plan, this is how it should work: If our Lord pardoned the woman they could accuse Him of encouraging people to break the Law of Moses; on the other hand, if Jesus agreed that the woman be punished for her crime, Jesus would lose His reputation of being merciful.

Jesus outsmarts them and escapes the trap laid down by the religious leaders. He turned the challenge towards the woman's accusers and said: "Let the one among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her."  

At the end of the story, the woman was left alone with Jesus as no one had the guts to throw the first stone at her. Now, Jesus does not condone adultery as He tells the adulterous woman firmly: "Go, and from now on, do not sin anymore."

There is a contrast in attitude toward others by the major players in the story.  The religious leaders wanted to condemn the sinful woman, but our Lord Jesus forgave and restored the sinner to "health". Clearly, Jesus is showing His followers the path to follow, the way of mercy and forgiveness to our lost brethren. So the message of the Gospel story is clear: our Lord Jesus condemns sins but pardons the sinners with a call to repentance. And we all need God's mercy and forgiveness.

In the Gospel's incident, Jesus does not allow anyone to use the Law of God to condemn our brothers and sisters when the person who condemns is himself or herself a sinner too.  This episode reveals that Jesus is indeed the Light which makes truth shine.

The much harder path to follow is that one letting go of the tendency to judge others.  It is a challenge to show someone who has wronged us the same mercy and forgiveness that our Lord Jesus has first shown us in respect of our own sinfulness and shortcomings in life.

Let us pray for God's grace that collectively as a Church we become the visible face of our merciful God here on earth, "of the God who manifests his power above all by forgiveness and mercy."  Because when we receive God's mercy for our sin, it helps us to show mercy ourselves to our erring brethren.

As we end our Lenten pilgrimage, Mother Church encourages us to experience the joy of repentance and a clear conscience through the Sacrament of Reconciliation and Forgiveness, even as we need to be merciful and forgiving as well to those who wronged us.

A blessed Sunday to us all. And thank you for a moment with God.

Ad Jesum per Mariam!