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07 apr 2019
07/04/2019 – 5th Sunday of Lent - C

07/04/2019 – 5th Sunday of Lent - C

Reading 1, IS 43,16-21 * Psalm 125 * Reading 2, PHIL 3,8-14 * Gospel JN 8,1-11

 

It is easy to look back in order to discover faults and try to accuse others; if we look forward we are overcome by fear, because we do not have any safe support to sustain us. Today’s three readings help us both to look back and to look forward.

Isaiah can see God’s power working in the people’s benefit, that does not need to let himself being overcome by the fear of past things, already fallen under God’s love! Whatever in the past has frightened us does not have to influence whoever has received benefits from the God’s unexpected intervention: “Remember not the events of the past”. We look forward now, and in front of us we can see the same God, with the same love as before: He is preparing some news. We are waiting for His love to show itself bringing surprises! Would we be able to get used to look back only to see our sins and the great love of God that is saving us? Would we be able to look forward with the same trust that has who does not forget to have a Father who loves him forever?

The page from Saint Paul’s letter to the Philippians tells us about some secret of the apostle’s. He too would prefer “forgetting what lies behind”, a past in which human skills had great importance: works accomplished, merits conquered through obedience to earthly rules, like Jewish traditions like circumcision, ablutions and other rituals: but those things were always leaving some margin for uncertainty: will we be saved? He wants to be “straining forward to what lies ahead”, a future filled with the presence of Jesus! Jesus Christ is never in the past, He is always before us. We will be never able to say that we have already followed Him, we have already obeyed Him, we have already loved Him. Jesus is always before us in order to be followed, listened to and loved now! Saint Paul says that he has “accepted the loss of all things” (that is to say, the merits he gained through external works) considering them “so much rubbish” because life is about to get to know Jesus and to be in Him. It is through His death and resurrection that we can be saved! ‘To be in Jesus’ happens while taking part in His suffering and in His death hoping to “attain the resurrection from the dead”.

We need to learn to be able to look back at the past and look forward at the future. Jesus is teaching us. When reputable people bring Him a woman caught cheating on her husband, Jesus looks at the past and at the future of that woman. In the past He can indeed see the sin, an authentic sin that would deserve to be punished with death, but from the past also come God's promises. Then, in the future He can see holiness, from the moment, besides the sin, we meet with Him, the Son of God, and we welcome his Word. Jesus came exactly in order to lift the sins and give us His Spirit! Therefore, sin does not make us despair, because on our path we can find Jesus. Jesus can redeem the past, so we can see in the future a new reality, a new life with Him! In addition, in the past, with the education coming from Jesus, before seeing someone else's sin we see our own. In this way, other people’s sin, even if it is serious and reproachable, will not make inflexible judges of us. With the education coming from Jesus, we learn to have towards sinful men the patience and hope God has already had many times towards us.

Writing in the dust, Jesus has shown that He is not worried to show that He is judging the sinner: surely she can already hear her conscience judging her and, above all, the important judgment cannot be the men’s one, but only God's. And God's judgment is a Father’s judgment! The Father wants to heal the hearts hurt by evil, He wants to make His light shine on His children's face, and therefore He wants to renew and encourage them!

There, in the court of the temple, no sinner has condemned the woman, because all of them have understood that, first, they should have condemned themselves! Jesus is the Son of God, the only man without sin, and this is why He is compassionate, He offers the Father’s mercy and calls us to live in a new way without sin and without infidelity. Jesus looks at the woman only when she is left alone with Him and all men are gone away; nobody needs to interfere with the conversation He is having with her. With the strength of this tender love, of this respectful look, of the voice full of love, the woman can really start living as she has never lived before. It is not going to be her husband's love to give her satisfaction, to make her feel fulfilled, but the love she received from Jesus!

Once met Jesus, the sinner (and that sinner is me) can look at the future joyfully: “See, I am doing something new! Now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?” I look only for Jesus, I look for His judgment that saves me, I try to find myself alone with Him, cheek to cheek. I can do it, because He, through the baptism, has given me a heart that is able to create this intimacy.

Jesus, you are my life, you are my treasure, the prize of my running towards happiness! With you I can hope, both for myself and for others, I can live benevolently with others, even if they are sinners! Enlightened by You, I see the Father’s mercy enveloping all men!