Lent Sunday 5 Year C

Readings: Isaiah 43:16-21; Psalm 125; Philippians 3:8-14; John 8:1-11

From the very beginning, the Church, the community of believers in Jesus, was unsettled by this story. We have evidence for this in the earliest manuscripts of the gospels. This story wandered around the New Testament before finally settling at the beginning of John 8. The most ancient authorities actually omit it, others add it here, or after John 7:36, or after John 21:25, or even in St Luke's gospel, after Luke 21:38. Not only does it wander from place to place in an unusual way, there are also differences, as we would expect, in the text.

What does it mean? It seems to mean that the first Christians were pretty much like us, unsure how to show forth mercy without it seeming to be indulgent, unsure how to illustrate justice without it seeming cruel and lacking in compassion. We can note in passing that the word of Jesus from the Cross, 'Father forgive them for they know not what they do', suffered similar treatment before it finally settled as part of Luke's passion narrative: the believers were unsure about it. Might Jesus seem too soft, tolerant of evil?

We need to be grateful, therefore, to the Holy Spirit who found a way to fasten this story into the Gospel of St John in spite of the perplexity of believers. It has come down to us in spite of the doubts of believers and thank God that it has.

The treatment of the woman caught in adultery reminds us of something seriously wrong in human beings. We have an interest in thinking about other people's sins and, even more, we do not hesitate to use other people's sins to serve our own purposes and agendas. The people who bring her before Jesus have no real interest in the woman, they are using her to trap him. But they are no match for the combination of intelligence and love that we see in Jesus, they melt away miserably before the combination of justice and mercy we see in him. One of the Fathers of the Church wrote of it, 'quam dulcis est Dominus per mansuetudinem et rectus per veritatem', 'how sweet the Lord is in kindness and how right in truth'.

One of the places where this story ended up in the early manuscripts was after John 21:25, after the Resurrection. And there is lots here about newness and about the re-creation that forgiveness is, reconciliation, the new creature made right before God through the love and obedience of the Son. The other readings at Mass support this view of it: 'I am doing a new deed' (Isaiah), 'I forget the past and strain ahead for what is still to come' (Philippians). The opening of the story draws us towards the cosmology of the resurrection: 'it was early in the morning', the encounter is at the dawn of a new day. The finger of God writes something in dust as the hand of God brought the first human being out of the dust.

The iron trap set by his enemies and by the woman's tormentors seems to leave no way out, no resolution. But the intelligence, love, justice, and kindess of God transforms the situation. It can be a model for us as we think about approaching Christ in the sacrament of reconciliation this Easter time. No matter what 'iron traps' bind our hearts or paralyse our lives, God is in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, through the grace of the sacrament spring forth freedom and new life.

Lent Week 4 Saturday

Readings: Jeremiah 11:18-20; Psalm 7; John 7:40-53

We are well into the second part of Lent. We have left far behind our concern with ourselves and with our efforts at repentance. The concern now is Jesus and the growing opposition to him. The first readings tell us of innocent people unjustly persecuted – Joseph, Jeremiah, Susanna, the just man of Wisdom 2 – while the readings from Saint John's gospel show how the pressure is mounting on the leaders of the people as the questioning about the identity of Jesus grows more intense.

Today’s gospel reading ends strangely: ‘then each went to his own house’. It seems like an insignificant detail, as if it were to say ‘then they went home for their supper’. There is a contrast between the ordinariness of this return home and the significance of what they had been talking and arguing about.

One of the main questions for now is this: ‘where is Jesus’ home?’ Some prophecies said he would come from Bethlehem while others seemed to indicate that he would be a Nazarene. The gospels give reasons for believing that he comes from each of those places, Bethlehem the home in which he was born, Nazareth the home in which he grew up.

But there is a growing contrast between these ordinary senses of ‘home’ – the comfort of knowing where people come from gives us the comfort of knowing something of their identity – and a sense that the true origins of Jesus are mysterious. They are mysterious not just in the sense that historical scholarship will fail to prove things one way or the other. They are mysterious in a much more profound and transcendent sense. The true home of Jesus is the one he shares with the Eternal Father. The true origin of Jesus is his being sent from the Father. When St John says that ‘each went to his own house’ it means in the case of Jesus that he went to the Father. For the moment he does this in prayer and prayer permeates his life: he is always in the presence of his Father. As the story unfolds he will return home to the Father in the mystery of his death, resurrection, and ascension.

Jesus is more and more a stranger whom the people and their leaders try to pin down, to find out whether or not he is the messiah, whether he is the prophet who was to come. Jesus simply gets on with his work, which is to open the doors of his home to all who will become his disciples. We are being prepared for further instruction about the indwelling of the Blessed Trinity in the hearts of believers. If we keep his commandments and live according to his way of love, then God will dwell in us and with us. God will share His home with us, so that where the Son is, when he goes home at the end of His day, we will be there also to share the glory that was His before the world was made.

Lent Week 4 Friday

 Readings: Wisdom 2:1a, 12-22; Psalm 34; John 7:1-2, 10, 25-30

From her work with very young children, Melanie Klein concluded that envy is a basic and perennial aspect of human experience. In her account of things, envy becomes the ‘original sin’ of humanity, a negative reaction to the source of good when it is being good towards me. It is a kind of resentment that the source of good is so good. The generosity of ‘the good breast’ is experienced as a kind of power over me which obliges me to be grateful and causes me to feel humiliated.

The first reading of today’s Mass is a powerful description of the effects of envy. The good person, simply by being good, is experienced as passing some kind of judgement on my way of living. Klein spoke of envy driving people into what she called the paranoid-schizoid position and we see these things described also in the first reading. The other person’s holiness is experienced as a threat to me even when that holiness places itself at my service. ‘Even to see him is a hardship for us’. We can presume that the just one is not making the judgements that the wicked attribute to him but their paranoia projects these judgements on to him. ‘In their thoughts they erred’: the deadly sins originate always in fantasies, thoughts that we find rising up within us without our having put them there. Of all these deadly thoughts, envy is one of the most insidious.

Envy hates to see others happy, or good, or holy. It experiences the happiness, goodness and holiness of others as some kind of deprivation. Thomas Aquinas describes it as a kind of sadness which results from feeling that God’s gifts to another person somehow take away from my worth and excellence. In this it is, of course, a kind of madness, but then all the deadly sins are forms of madness. Envy prevents me admiring and respecting others. I will feel obliged to pull them down in some way, to attribute wicked motives to them, to undermine the reputation they have for goodness.

Envy cannot bear to be grateful which is why it resents the source of good not only when it is being good to others but even when it is being good to myself. To be grateful is to acknowledge dependence and this is something envy cannot bear, it feels like a loss of self. At its worst envy becomes violent and physically destructive. The sense of humiliation and resentment that accompanies it makes it feel justified in trying to destroy the good one whom it feels has brought about this terrible feeling of denigration, dependence and even annihilation in itself. So Jesus becomes the victim of envy, the motivations of his eventual destruction at the hands of men following exactly this analysis of envy and what it leads to.

To ‘begrudge a brother his grace’ is one way of describing what arises from envy. Not only does the envious person feel that God's gifts to others are a threat to him, he also envies the Holy Spirit who is the source of grace. We see clearly the kind of madness it is, not only to resent God’s gifts to others as if this were some kind of slight in my regard, but to envy the generosity of the Spirit, the abundant kindness of God’s good breast.

Envy would prefer that all should be equally unhappy and is the most debilitating of sins. It seeks to pull everybody down to the same level of misery. After it has done its worst to others it becomes self-consuming and self-destructive. In his Canterbury Tales, Chaucer says that envy is the worst sin – all other sins are only against one virtue whereas envy is against all virtue and against all goodness.

For Thomas Aquinas the cure for envy is charity. We see how powerful a vice envy is: only the most powerful of the virtues can dissolve its power. Loving others enables us to enjoy, rather than envy, their achievements and blessings. The gifts of God to those I love I will experience as gifts in which I share. It is essential that we understand the roots of envy in us, that we understand its madness, and that we grow in the virtue of charity, which alone conquers the violence and destruction wrought by envy.

The kindergarten, Melanie Klein's 'laboratory', is a place full of sweet and innocent children. It is also a place where envy first raises its ugly head and begins to distort and destroy any possibility of communion and friendship. Our hope depends on the One who, destroyed by our envy, is raised to a new life. This new life means even more abundant kindness and blessing for the world, along with the capacity to rejoice in, rather than to resent, the love that is beyond all envy.

Lent Week 4 Thursday

Readings: Exodus 32:7-14 ; Psalm 106; John 5:31-47

It is strange how the conversation between Moses and God in Exodus 32 parallels the conversation between the prodigal father and the elder brother in Luke 15. In the parable, which we have heard a few times recently, the elder brother disowns the prodigal son, referring to him when speaking to his father as ‘your son’. The father reminds his elder son that the prodigal is not just his (the father’s) son but is his (the elder brother’s) brother: ‘this, your brother, was lost and is found, he was dead and is returned to life’.

In today’s first reading it is God who seeks to disown the prodigal people, saying to Moses ‘go down at once to your people whom you brought out of the land of Egypt, for they have become depraved’. Moses then takes the place of the prodigal father saying back to God, ‘why should your wrath blaze up against your own people whom you brought out of the land of Egypt?’ Jesus in the gospel reading sends his listeners back to this point also: if they will not believe what Moses wrote then they will not listen to what Jesus is saying.

The most fascinating thing about this combination of readings is that it seems to be the Lord, the God of Israel, who was the first to listen to Moses and to believe in him! Moses called God back to Himself, as the prodigal son needs to come to himself. Moses reminds God of who He is, as the prodigal son needed to remember who he was. You are the One, says Moses, who brought your people out with mighty hand and marvelous works. They are not my people, thank you very much, they are your people, whom you brought out of the land of Egypt. What are the nations to say now about your purpose in doing this? Was it with an evil intention, to deceive and mislead this people and only, in the end, to destroy them?

And if that does not work, Moses makes a deeper, more ancient appeal. Remember Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, he says to God, and your promises to them. You are the God of our fathers, not just the God of this recent wonder at the Red Sea, these recent marvels in Egypt. You are the God who has been involved with your people from way back, fashioning a people for yourself from ancient times. You swore to these promises by your own self: are you to be true to yourself, to who you are, the God of our fathers, now revealed as the Lord, the God of Israel?

It is stirring stuff, these dramas of betrayal and reconciliation, of forgetfulness and remembrance.  And we are approaching the final act of the definitive drama. Now, says Jesus, there are many witnesses to me. There is John the Baptist and there are the works I have been doing. There is the testimony of the Father speaking through these but to accept this you must believe in the Son whom the Father has sent. There is the scripture, the Word of God, written down by Moses but also remaining in the hearts of believers. With all these witnesses, a great cloud on every side we might say, why is it that you still do not believe?

Because you are stiff-necked, we hear God saying to Moses in the first reading. And Moses’ response is not to deny the people’s sinfulness and forgetfulness, just as the prodigal father does not deny the prodigal’s mistakes. Moses’ response is to remind God of who they are and who God is – they are your people whom you called long ago, and you are the God who swore by your own self that you would be their God and they your people.

Like an old married couple who have fought long and hard God and the people are inextricably bound to each other, they have grown into each other. This is not to minimize the consequences of their sins, which are great. It is to exalt the way in which God will now once again swear by His own self that He is committed to this covenant: He will seal it now in the blood of the Son, a new and eternal covenant which is yet as old as Abraham.

So God relents and repents of what he intended to do. Once again He visits His people and once again He faces into their sins and forgetfulness, to remind them and to restore them to His family: He forever their God, they - we! - forever His people.

Lent Week 4 Wednesday

Readings: Isaiah 49:8-15; Psalm 144; John 5:17-30

Christ is our judge, appointed to this office by the Father who has seated him at his right hand. What do we hear in the sentence 'Christ is our judge'? It may be that the word 'judge' stands out, making us fearful. Contemporary culture encourages the non-judgemental which strengthens what seems like a natural anxiety about our lives, our work, or our actions being judged.

It is, however, part of the wonderful good news that Christ is our judge. The word in the sentence that stood out for the first Christian believers was the word 'Christ' and not the word 'judge'. What a blessed relief it is, and what a gift, that the judge of our lives, our work, and our actions, is Jesus Christ. Nobody else, in the end. Of course we are all the time judging others and being judged by them. But the import of this gospel is that in the end, fundamentally, and most radically, we are judged by Christ, and by him alone.

There is even more, since for those who believe in him there will be a judgement without judgement - 'without being brought to judgement they pass from death to life' (John 5:24). Those who believe in him know the truth and there is no need for a further moment in which the relationship between their lives and the truth needs to be pointed out. In seeing the truth, those who believe see the distance between themselves and truth. They see their lives, their work, and their actions, in the light of truth, at once perfectly just and infinitely compassionate - and so they are judged without being judged.

Two great representations of the Last Judgement illustrate the point. The best known Last Judgement scene is that of Michelangelo, in the Sistine Chapel. A huge, brooding Christ comes to separate sheep and goats, just and unjust, and his presence is formidable and terrifying. The fact that this has become the best known Last Judgement scene serves to confirm that we know more about fear than we do about love.

A less well-known Last Judgement, whose theology is much sounder than Michelangelo's, is that of Fra Angelico in the priory of San Marco in Florence. There is the same separation of sheep and goats, of just and unjust, but Christ is not terrifying. He is gentle, and beautiful, and all he does is show his wounds. Those who believe in him do not need any further evaluation or criterion for assessing their lives, work, and actions. They are judged by the truth of his loving sacrifice and glorious resurrection and in the light of that truth can judge themselves: they see what is the case.

The saintly person knows that he falls seven times a day. Those of us whose consciences have become less sharp are not equipped to see the true state of our lives, work, and actions. Then judgement is needed, we need help, that things be pointed out and made clear for us. Jesus says further on in Saint John's gospel, 'the word that I have spoken will be (your) judge on the last day', the Word from the Father that is truth (John 12:48; 17:17).

Lent Week 4 Tuesday

Readings: Ezekiel 47:1-9,12; Psalm 45; John 5:1-3,5-16

There is a wonderful hospitality in Jesus' question, 'do you want to be well again?' It can seem a bit strange: surely the answer is obvious. But Jesus does not presume. As well as his hospitality there is his obedience in the literal sense of the term: his listening, the way he provides a space in which the other person can speak and be heard. It is at the heart of all loving, that we allow the other to be, to speak, to tell us what it is they want, to listen to what they want to say and not just hear what we think they want to say.

It makes Jesus' comment towards the end even more perplexing: 'be sure not to sin any more, or something worse may happen to you'. Worse than what, we might wonder. Worse than being ill for thirty eight years? But surely Jesus himself has been fighting hard against this connection of sin and suffering, has been trying to break that link. In Chapter 9 of St John's gospel we will find him resisting the idea very strongly, in the case of the man born blind.

'Something worse' can only mean spiritual paralysis, worse than the physical disability from which he had suffered. It brings this story close to that of the paralysed man let down through the roof to whom Jesus says 'your sins are forgiven'. Which is more difficult, to say your sins are forgiven or to say arise and walk? To forgive sins must be the more difficult, the healing of humanity at that radical level where desire is confused, understanding is clouded, and the will is distorted.

But this is the healing promised by the paschal mystery. All who have entered the waters of baptism (the Sheep Pool) are made new, born again, set right, made able to walk in the way of Jesus. He is never sentimental and always truthful. The sick man is brought into the light of that truth. He is healed but he must continue now to walk in the same light. And so the man becomes an apostle, telling them that it was Jesus who had cured him.

Lent Week 4 Monday

Readings: Isaiah 65:17-21; Psalm 29; John 4:43-54

Here we are told that Jesus is going down well with the Galileans. Perhaps it was only in his home town of Nazareth that he was not welcomed. But a mis-match continues between people's expectations and desires on the one hand, and the teaching and call of Jesus on the other. We find it here again. The man's request seems innocent and straightforward: his son is ill and he would like him to be healed. It is now Jesus who seems to get it wrong: 'so you will not believe unless you see signs and portents'. We can imagine the poor man saying, 'well no, actually, I just want my son to be well again'.

But Jesus receives the expression of any desire - for healing, for teaching, for more wine - as a desire for faith and seeks to lead all who approach him to the deeper level of faith. So it is with the disciples, the Samaritan woman, the man born blind, Martha and Mary, even his mother Mary. God's gift is not simply the meeting of our need. Faith is a gift that opens us beyond our need to the reality and truth of God.

So all gifts of God also have the character of 'signs and portents' because they always point beyond themselves to God who is infinite and eternal. God is not just 'our size'. He has become our size - the Word was made flesh - in order that we might grow beyond our immediate needs and basic desires. The theological virtues of faith, hope and love open us up in this way. These are the capacities or virtues of the new creature, the one who is being transformed by God's grace, the one who is being divinised.

So the court official receives the gift of his son's healing but he - and all his household - also receive the gift of faith in Jesus. From now on the liturgies of Lent focus more and more on the coming paschal mystery through which Christ not only fulfills the thirst of creation but reveals the thirst of God for creation. The fulfillment of that divine thirst is the new creation established in the Resurrection, a new heavens and a new earth, a city that is 'Joy' and a people that is 'Gladness', things beyond what the human heart can imagine, what God has prepared for those who love him.