FIFTH SUNDAY OF LENT C
This is the political season for our country, so there’s a lot of noise these days about what the pundits and commentators and even the candidates call “the narrative.” The narrative turns out to be just another way of saying “the spin.” What story does the candidate or the party want people to believe? What interpretation of facts or trends or presuppositions which are afoot in the culture will you believe is the most correct interpretation of our current reality? Which is the narrative that will determine how you think, how you argue, how you choose your values and, most importantly, how you will vote?
Into to a culture of competing, even sometimes contradictory narratives, Pope Francis has inserted the narrative about the nature and essence of God and our identity as human beings in relation to God.
The Holy Father’s narrative emphasizes that the name of God is mercy, that there is nothing you or I could ever do, nothing you or I have done, or said or become, that would make God love us less. Absolutely nothing. Our scriptures affirm over and over again that there is no way, absolutely no way we could ever lose the love of God.
Contrast this narrative with the one that Richard Dawkins put out there when he wrote in his book called “The God Delusion” that: “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all of fiction; jealous and proud of it, a petty, unjust, unforgiving control freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”
What the narrative Pope Francis has going for it is what Pope Benedict taught us over and over again: “God has a human face and His name is Jesus Christ.” Whatever we see in the face of Jesus, we see as the face of God. Whatever we hear from the lips of Jesus, we hear as the voice of God. Whatever we see Jesus do in the gospels, when he heals the sick, when he forgives sinners, when he raises the dead, when he calms the storms, when feeds the hungry, when he challenges the entitled and the self-righteous, and the selfish – whenever we see Jesus in action, we see God in action.
In today’s gospel reading, we hear Jesus say to the woman caught in the act of adultery: “I do not condemn you. Go your way and leave your life of sin.” The encounter between Jesus and the sinner results in always in mercy: mercy, as in the words of Pope Francis, “always, everywhere, in every situation, no matter what.” And not only that, while granting the woman absolute forgiveness (because it is obvious that she was guilty), Jesus affirms that He Himself will pay the price and serve the sentence she incurred in breaking the law, and that He will do so with His own life.
Jesus paid a debt He did not owe because we owe a debt we cannot pay.
This narrative about God is as far away from Dawkins’ narrative as one could get. Which one do you believe?
The forgiveness of our sin is only part of the reflection on the face of God into which Pope Francis is inviting us. The other part is the call each of us receives to be the face of mercy ourselves. You and I, as we take great joy and hope in the fact that our sins are forgiven, are called to bear witness to God’s mercy to everyone without exception, not only to those who have hurt us, but to those who have been forgotten by our culture. Pope Francis is incessantly calling us to repudiate the indifference toward the forgotten and the powerless and the poor and the elderly and to bring the sunshine of compassion and mercy into their lives. He is calling us to defend human life and humanity wherever and in whatever circumstances it exists. He is calling us not only to become more aware of the sad reality so many of our sisters and brothers face, but to do concrete deeds to pour on them the “oil of consolation” and to be the face of mercy to them. He is calling us to go beyond our superficiality, our tendency to simply not see the suffering around us.
Most of all, the Pope is calling us to reverse the narrative we listen to most of the time: the narrative that some people are more important than others, that the rich or the powerful or the beautiful or the famous are the only ones that matter and that we should spend our brief time on earth trying to be just like them.
Being the face of mercy is the opposite of what we see in the attitudes and behavior of the people gospel reading today. In their self-righteousness and arrogance and their hypocrisy, they have gathered to see someone humiliated in public and to be able to tell their neighbors all about the stoning of an adulteress when they get home. Their faces betray both their rigidity toward the law and their secret joy at the downfall of this woman as they give thanks that it wasn’t them who had been embarrassed.
But Jesus calls their bluff and says simply: “If you can honestly say that you are without sin, then go ahead and cast the first stone.” And, after some time, when some might have been tempted to test Jesus’ ability to read hearts, they left, one by one, beginning with the oldest.
Having mercy begins with God forgiving us and, simultaneously, choosing and sending us to be ambassadors of mercy and forgiveness into the world. This, in brief, is what the gospel of Jesus Christ, the good news Jesus came to reveal to us, is all about: “God never tires of forgiving us, and God sends us as missionaries of mercy to everyone who needs it.”
Today’s gospel asks us to become more deeply involved in the dynamic of mercy by: accepting and living out of the mercy of God for us, forgiving those who have harmed us, asking for forgiveness from those we ourselves have hurt in action or omission, and, very importantly, forgiving ourselves for not being perfect, for making human mistakes with the resolve and the hope that we can, with grace and desire, be different, that we can be better.
In a sense, what Pope Francis is reminding us is, ironically, summed up well in a quote from Oscar Wilde: “Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.”
It is the mercy of God, the mercy we unfailingly receive and the mercy we habitually render to others, that ennobles and emboldens the narrative we Christians are proud and blessed to proclaim loudly in this wounded, broken, sad, dramatic, yet wonderful world.
Amen