Where love reigns, the law disappears

Homily
5th Sunday of Lent Year C
21 March 2010
St. Lawrence Catholic Center KU

For daily readings, click here.

Archbishop Naumann has asked us as Catholics to pay close attention to the health care reform bill that perhaps will be voted on by Congress today. The bishops of our country are confident in their assessment, after having done extensive research, that the Senate version of the health care reform bill will not adequately keep taxpayer funds from being used to fund abortion. There are many who disagree with the bishops, and indeed, it has been quite embarassing to see Catholic politicians and Catholic religious women over the last week sign off in support of the Senate bill. I would ask as your pastor that whether or not you think this health care bill is a good idea overall, to listen closely to what Archbishop Naumann is saying, and to pray and to advocate that the language against abortion be strengthened in these final hours so that there is no confusion or disagreement possible over what the final bill says and what it does not. I would ask that whatever your position on health care reform is, that you honor the principle that where the right to life is not guaranteed, no other rights can be guaranteed, or can be guaranteed only arbitrarily.

In today's Gospel, we are placed in the middle of quite a scene. An adulterous woman is brought before Jesus moments after being caught in the act of adultery. It is not a bad question to ask what happened to the man in this adulterous relationship? But it's a question of speculation only. We know neither whether he got away nor whether he was caught. We do not know what would have happened to him if he had been caught. We have what we have, the woman brought before Jesus, in a most precarious position.

The woman is dragged before Jesus to trap him. He is about to be forced into making a choice between justice and mercy. One must prevail, to the detriment of the other, at least in the minds of those who brought the woman to Jesus. But Jesus is not trapped. Justice and mercy, being attributes of God, are not in opposition to each other. Nor can they be put in opposition by any earthly situation, at least in the mind of God. The answer is both justice and mercy, not either, or. Jesus in not agreeing to stone the woman however shows that ultimately God's mercy lies at the heart of who He is, while God's justice lies at the periphery. Although it is not either, or, mercy always triumphs over judgment (Jm 2:13).

Jesus, as he does time and time again to those who wish to trap him, escapes. Not only does He escape, He uses the sin of the woman to expose the sins of those who wish to stone her. The punishment of stoning a person who commits adultery was a punishment rightly proscribed by God through Moses, so that adultery could never be rationalized or minimized, nor should it ever have a chance to grow worse as a cancer through the community. Yet Jesus shows that this punishment should not be executed swiftly, nor should it precede giving a person a chance to repent of his sin. What is more, Jesus shows that the discovery of another's sin, rather than making us quick to judge, should have the opposite effect. The discovery of another's sin should remind us of our need to judge ourselves, not others, and to root out any sin that threatens our own vocation to love and to be holy as God is holy.

Jesus in showing mercy, and in being slow to judge the woman before him, is not ignoring the righteousness proscribed by the law. In fact, Jesus speaks very plainly to the woman and tells her not to sin any more. He doesn't say don't worry about it. He doesn't say that's it's only human to make mistakes. He didn't say that she was good enough as she was, and that the other people were wrong to point out her sin. But in being quick to forgive and slow to punish, Jesus reveals the love of God beautifully, and He reveals a deeper form of righteousness that He himself possesses, the righteousness that comes from his relationship with the Father.

This is the righteousness that comes not from the law, but from God's offer of friendship through Jesus Christ, that made St. Paul so excited. He writes effusively in today's letter to the Philippians, that he finds righteousness based on the law to be 'rubbish' compared to the righteousness based on faith in God. St. Paul has found that following the law only makes you righteous in comparison to others, which is the righteousness favored by those who dragged the woman in front of Jesus. Yet He has found something far more valuable, having been taken possession of by Christ. For St. Paul, realizing that he had been personally chosen by Christ for a friendship with Him, and being attentive to this intimate friendship with Christ, made it impossible for Paul to sin, or nearly so. It important only superficially that Paul was righteous based on adherence to the law, but what was deeply important was the righteousness that came from Christ Jesus. What was ultimately important was that Christ, who had no need of the law because He was righteous through his perfect union with God the Father, and was now sharing this righteousness with Paul out of love for Paul. That is why Paul counted any righteousness he could achieve on his own as 'rubbish', compared to the righteousness Christ was ready to share with him.

Christ shows in his reaction to the woman caught in adultery that those of us who have been made righteous by faith, will join him in reacting to sin in the same way He did. First, discovering the sin of others should make us sad, not happy, and should cause us to desire to eradicate sin from our own lives and in the world however we can. Just as Jesus used the sin of this woman to help others examine their lives, so we should always work to remove the log from our eye before noticing the splinter in another's eye (Mt 7:5). Second, having experienced personally that God's mercy is deeper that his justice, and having had our sins forgiven by God, should make us joyfully ready to share that mercy with whomever is in need of healing. Encountering the sin of another should make us more interested in helping them, not more ready to condemn them. Finally, knowing that the righteousness found in Jesus comes not from his adherence to the law, but from the love that He shared with the Father, so we should never be satisfied in a righteousness that is worldly, a righteousness that is satisfied by comparing ourselves to others. We should instead always look forward in hope to that new righteousness that comes from our having been taken possession of by Christ, a righteousness that makes it no longer possible for us to sin.