Let the one among you who is without sin
be the first to throw a stone at her. In response
they walked away one by one,
beginning with the elders.
John 8
Like many
people today, I have had more than one job. I grew up milking cows, feeding chickens,
herding pigs and loading lumber. I once loaded semi-trucks at a pickle factory.
I have been a groundskeeper at a hospital, an orderly in an emergency room, a
house painter, a garbage truck driver, a desk clerk, a bar tender and a
campground minister for the United Church of Christ in Crater Lake National Park
in Oregon. As a priest, besides being a pastor of several parishes, I used to
write for THE RECORD every week for 15 years. I served as one of the trustees
on the J. Graham Brown Foundation Board here in Louisville, making large
monetary grants to charitable and educational organizations all over the state.
I traveled all over this country and nine other countries giving retreats to
priests, bishops and seminarians. I was a campus minister at Somerset Community
College down in southern Kentucky and here at Bellarmine University. I
developed a major continuing education program, did spiritual direction, built
a teaching kitchen and coffee shop and taught classes at Saint Meinrad Seminary
over in Indiana. I have published a few books, renovated several houses, and in
retirement, renovated my old grade school and unused rectory down in Meade
County into a new Family Life Center and Guest House. I was a volunteer in the
Caribbean Missions for several years. Right now, I am sponsoring a seminarian in
Tanzania and trying to finish building a church in Kenya. After all that, you might say that "I've never been able to hold a job!"
One of the last jobs I had over at
Saint Meinrad Seminary, before I retired, was to teach two classes a week to
the guys who were about to be ordained priests in the spring. That class was
entitled "The Transition Out of the Seminary and Into Pastoral
Ministry." We covered most of the issues they would face in their first
several months. Some have compared their transition out of the seminary and
into parishes to that of leaving home, graduating from school, beginning a
career, getting married and starting a family - but all at once. Some things we
covered were of a very practical nature, like paying taxes and starting a
saving plan for retirement, while other things were more psychological like
dealing with the grief of going off and leaving their seminary friends after
many years and the anxiety of entering a strange new community of people as a
new priest.
One of the important subjects we
covered was "how to enter a parish." I spoke of things like going in
and establishing trust and building a bond with people before they even thought
about correcting people from the pulpit. It seemed that some priests just couldn’t
wait to get ordained so they could condemn other people’s sins! I spoke
specifically about how unwise it is for them to say things in a homily like
"you people" and how much better it is to say things like "we
sinners." I warned them specifically about obsessing about condemning
sexual immorality all the time. In my book, doing that always says more about
the people doing the condemning than those they condemn!
This is exactly the issue Jesus
dealt with in today's gospel – a bunch of salivating religious fundamentalists
who just couldn’t wait to have a poor woman stoned to death for committing
adultery! The last time I checked, it
takes two to commit adultery. Since the text says she had been “caught in the
very act of committing adultery,” I have always wondered where the man was and
why they were not as eager to stone him! This story has three scenes. Let's
look at them one at a time.
(1)The religious authorities drag a
poor woman into an open area where Jesus was teaching and make her stand there
humiliated. She had just been caught in adultery. Yes, she was obviously used
in the committing of adultery, but the religious authorities were also using
her themselves - this time to trap Jesus in his speech so they could have
something for which to condemn him! They thought they had a perfect trap
because, on one hand, if he was too lenient, they could say "Aha! See! He
teaches something different from Moses who told us that such women were to be
stoned to death!" That could get him labeled as a heretic. If he were to
be in favor of stoning her, then they could say on the other hand, "Aha!
See! He is not as merciful and forgiving as he has been saying he is!" That
would turn the crowds against him!
(2) In the second scene, Jesus
realizes that they are using her to set up a "damned if you do and damned
if you don't" trap for him, so he doesn't answer one way or another!
Instead, he just stoops down and writes on the ground with his finger. What was
he writing? No one knows, but some say he was simply making a list of their
sins in the dirt. Once he had written his list of their sins, he stands up and
says to those who were so anxious to stone the poor woman, "Let the one
among you has never sinned yourself be the first to throw a stone at her!"
With that he stooped down again and continued to add to his list of their sins.
(3) Jesus did not have to say much
after that because her condemners began to drop their heads, to drop their
rocks, and to drop out of the crowd one-by-one. It even says, "They walked
away, one by one, beginning with the older ones." I suppose the longer we
live, the more sins we commit. This leaves Jesus and the poor woman there
alone. He stands up and says to her, "Neither do I condemn you! Go, and
don't commit this sin again!"
By saying that, Jesus does not wink
at the seriousness of the sin committed, he merely means that we would all be
better off if we spent more time being outraged at our own sins and less
time being outraged by the sins of others. Rather than focusing on the
woman's sin alone, by his actions Jesus simply says that everybody that day was
in need of forgiveness. Jesus offered the grace and mercy of God to all equally
- scribes, Pharisees, the woman, all who witnessed this event and all of us who
have heard it read aloud again today.
Fellow Catholics! Jesus spoke to us
often about judging others. He told us not to judge, lest we be judged. He told
us not to go around looking for specs of sin in other people eyes when we have
a 2 X 4 sticking out of our own and that we need to remove that 2 X 4 first. He
told us that the measure we use to measure others will be used to measure us!
He told us to forgive and we will be forgiven. He told us that all we can see
are externals and only God can see into the heart! Sin is real! Sin is
destructive - to ourselves and to others! We need, each of us, to become as
outraged about our own sins as we do the sins of others.
When I taught young priests of
tomorrow, some of whom were so anxious to get out there and condemn sin, I would
tell them a story from my early priesthood that I am reminded of every time I
read this gospel. There was a radio preacher in the area where I worked who
loved to be on the radio to rant and rave about "sexual promiscuity in our
culture today." He even went so far as to host a huge bon fire in front of
his church one Saturday where he invited people to bring what he called their “dirty
magazines, obscene clothing and other filth." The fire that day was huge.
The following Monday, he ran off with the church's teenaged organist! As
Shakespeare said. "The lady doth protest too much, methinks!"
Personally, I have always preferred how Billy Graham put it when he said,
"It's the Holy Spirit's job to convict, God's job to judge and my job to
love."
Fellow Catholics! With what's left
of this Lent, let us examine our own consciences, let us resolve to let go of
our own sinful ways, let us rely on the mercy and compassion of God and let us offer
that same mercy and compassion to our fellow believers who have also sinned!
