Meditation is an ideal way to pray. Using God's word (Lectio Divina) allows me to hear, listen and reflect on what the Lord wants to say to me - to one of his disciples - just like He did two thousand years ago.
The best time to reflect is at the beginning of the day and for at least 15 to 30 minutes.
Prior to going to sleep, read the Mass readings for the next day and then, in the morning, reflect on the Meditation offered on this website.
I hope these daily meditations allow you to know, love and imitate the Lord in a more meaningful way.
God bless you!


Saturday, March 16, 2013

John 11:1-45 Defender and Lover!

The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery and made her stand in the middle.  They said to him, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery.  Now in the law, Moses commanded us to stone such women.  So what do you say?  They said this to test him…Jesus bent down and began to write on the ground with his finger.  But when they continued asking him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let the one among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.”
This is the 5th Sunday of Lent and hopefully you have been faithful to your Lenten resolutions.  Remember, your goal is not simply to have completed your resolutions, for resolutions can be very cold and impersonal.  Rather, make sure to wrap them in warmth and embrace them with love.  The idea of Lent is to become someone new (cf. Is 43:16-21); to become more like Jesus Christ.   
They brought a woman caught in adultery.  This scene should not be overlooked.  We have a bunch of highly influential and powerful men condemning a very weak and lonely woman.  Is this something of the past?  Heck no!  This is something that is happening today, especially in the Middle East, especially in many Muslim countries.  Is it only happening there?  Of course not!  Have you not read the newspapers lately?  Two teenagers from Steubenville, Ohio were recently convicted of viciously abusing a 16-year-old child who was drunk at a party.  I can’t even begin to describe what they did to her.  What I can say is that they used their power to abuse her, and this child's friends did nothing to stop it.
We are very good at watching other people get dragged around.  We are not very good at taking a step forward and lifting someone up.
Not too long ago, a pornographic video surfaced on the Internet that showed a woman that apparently resembled Miss Delaware.  Immediately, she renounced her crown and denied the allegation.  However, a few days later another video surfaced in which she stated her full name. 
What I find shocking about this incident is that Miss Delaware did nothing illegal.  Now in the old days, if you were burned alive it was for an obvious reason:  you were a heretic.  And no heretic was ever surprised for being burned at the stack.  Today, Miss Delaware was burned alive for doing what our culture most cherishes:  expressing herself and exercising her rights.  She got burned alive by the same media and Internet that make billions of dollars a year for doing just that.  How ironic!
We are all very good at condemning.  We are not very good at all in loving.  We are all very good at giving our opinions.  Only a few of us are very good at accepting someone else’s opinion.  We are great at encouraging people to go off the deep end, to be different, to be radical!  We are not very good at searching for them and rescuing them.  We have a marvelous system for convicting criminals.  We do not have a marvelous system for preventing crime or rehabilitating criminals.  We do a good job in correcting other people’s faults.  We don’t do well at pointing out their strengths.  We are all very good at noticing the splinter in someone’s eye.  We are not very good at noticing the plank in our own.
It would be fanciful to think that this adulterous woman was a good woman.  She wasn’t.  Like any adulterer, she was destroying someone’s marriage and family.  But what is not so fanciful to think about are the men stalking her, besetting her and torturing her.  They have no heart.    
To be fair and accurate, the scribes and the Pharisees were absolutely right.  Moses had commanded that adulterers be stoned.  But the problem with the Law is not so much the Law but those who apply it.  They apply it so unevenly, to everyone other than themselves, even to the wrong people, the meek and humble of heart.
Pope Benedict XVI wrote the following a few years back:  “The crucifixion of Christ is that of the whole of human history, a history where the good are humiliated, the meek are assaulted, the honest crushed, and the pure of heart roundly mocked” (Holy Friday, 2006).  He knew this all too well.  For eight years, he was the focus of constant ridicule.  And when he realized he was becoming a distraction to the mission, he resigned.  That’s true humility! 
The media can be so infantile.  Last night I glanced at the Drudge Report.  In it, there were numerous close-up pictures of Pope Francis’ black shoes.  The secular media, it appears, is going goo-goo ga-ga over the Pope’s shoes.  They say it shows great “humility.”  Wow!  Is humility that easy?  I wish!  But when in the world did black shoes represent “humility”? 

Listen, what makes this Pope humble are not his shoes but his heart!  What makes him humble is not his shoes but that he admits he needs God and our prayers!  What makes him remarkably “humble” is his courage to speak the truth charitably, and right smack in the presence of vulgar, profane and disgusting people and their comments.  Pope Francis will be what most people (especially atheists) find so hard to be:  A defender of God's Laws and a lover of all souls.
We need to learn the Law, especially God’s Law.  But what we equally need to learn is how to apply it.  The Law is good but tough; hence, it must be tenderized.  It is good yet painful; therefore, it must be applied with love.  Jesus Christ is the applicator.  He is the ointment for those who have been burned.
He who is forgiven little, loves little (Lk 7:47).   What would you expect from someone who has been forgiven?  You would expect them to forgive as well, correct?  We are good at feeling sorry for the downtrodden.  What we are not good at doing is feeling sorrow for the offenders.
This is what the Lord did.  He bet on it!  He believed in it!  What was it?  He believed that the more you forgave someone, the more they would end up loving someone.  The Lord’s greatest converts were the biggest sinners and his biggest detractors.  Christ did not go out of his way to embarrass the adulterous woman.  Nor did He go out of his way to ridicule Pharisees and scribes.  He went out of his way to save all souls!
I think there were some people in the world that had hoped that the Cardinals would have elected a Pope that was not Catholic.  You know someone in favor of contraception, “gay-marriage”, and abortion.  What people do not understand (or can’t even imagine) is the fact that these things will never change.  Why?  Because Christ is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow.
If it were not for the widespread influence of Judeo-Christian values, man would still be pointing the finger at woman; for as the story goes, man immediately blamed woman for the fall.  But as we soon learned, God faulted them both.  We are all sinners.  Let the one among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone. 
What should we do?  The Pharisees and scribes were itching for an answer.  Christ knew their hearts.  He knew their tricks.  It is true she committed a grave sin.  It is also true they had as well, for using people is also a grave sin and the Pharisees and scribes were more than willing to torture a young woman to kill a young man.  How many times have we won an argument and lost a soul?  The Lord does not want to do that.  He wants us all to be converted to Him.  

This morning, Pope Francis said, "People are often harder on each other than God is towards sinners."

Heavenly Father, rescue us from our pride, vanity and sensuality so that we can be bearers of your truth and lovers of all souls.  We ask this through Christ our Lord.  Amen.
Resolution:  I will strive like St. Paul for maturity: a defender of the Law and a lover of all souls.

7 comments:

  1. Father, if I may ask, what are your thoughts on:

    a) The notion that this passage is not actually accurate since it does not appear in earlier versions of John, but does in later versions?

    b) There is no accused male figure in this story? It takes (at least) two to tango.

    ReplyDelete
  2. This passage from John provides some reason for comfort, for most people will identify with the adulteress. They feel judged by the world, and Jesus swoops in to save this woman from judgment by questioning her judges. However, many people seem to conveniently forget the second part of this story in which Jesus tells her to sin no more. The conclusion of this episode suggests something much deeper than the easy lesson of not being judgmental.

    By his own logic, Jesus could very well judge the woman since he himself has not sinned. He doesn't, not because the act of judgement itself is sinful, but because the judgment practiced by the Pharisees lacks mercy. Jesus forgives her, yet that does not mean he tolerates or excuses her behavior. He acknowledges her sin; he does not justify her actions at all. While he saves her from her accusers, he nevertheless admonishes her not to sin again. Two wrongs--the accusers and the adulteress--do not make a right; two wrongs are just two wrongs and need to be corrected with love and honesty. This act of mercy and forgiveness offers the woman new life, if she decides to accept it. If she goes against the Lord's command, then she forfeits that life and will need Jesus to save her once more.

    People wrongly assume that passage condemns judgement altogether, thus giving a world in which no one judges anyone or themselves. In other words, this story suggests that everyone should tolerate everything and let bygones be bygones. Christ does not save the woman by tolerating her. He saves her by judging her judges, and revealing his authority as the only judge who has power over life and death, and the only judge who can ultimately forgive. He, the Law made flesh, supersedes those who accuse. This suggests that people should obey the law as something higher than abuse the law as some tool of moral chastisement. Law, particularly God's law, should empower all souls, not reinforce the injustice between the weak and the strong. This means defending the weak against the strong, both through protection as well as correction.

    The Pharisees actually did well to heed Jesus' words and drop their stones. If that were the end, this world would look very different. Unfortunately, they only dropped their stones for the meantime until deciding to crucify Jesus and his disciples instead--this is coupled with stoning, which they resume in the soon afterward in scripture with the disciple Stephen. People today do the same. They may not condemn the adulteress, no they'd probably celebrate her liberation, but they do condemn her redeemer and his disciples because they remind them that they are sinners. Hence, they condemn the Catholic church as a scandal-ridden irrelevant institution heading for the dustbin of history and ardent Catholics as an aging group of superstitious hypocrites. They make the mistake of seeing a world without a church as a world without accusers. The reality is that the world without a church, like the world before Jesus, is a world full of offended people armed to the hilt with stones to throw.

    ReplyDelete
  3. This passage from John provides some reason for comfort, for most people will identify with the adulteress. They feel judged by the world, and Jesus swoops in to save this woman from judgment by questioning her judges. However, many people seem to conveniently forget the second part of this story in which Jesus tells her to sin no more. The conclusion of this episode suggests something much deeper than the easy lesson of not being judgmental.

    By his own logic, Jesus could very well judge the woman since he himself has not sinned. He doesn't, not because the act of judgment itself is sinful, but because the judgment practiced by the Pharisees lacks mercy. Jesus forgives her, yet that does not mean he tolerates or excuses her behavior. He acknowledges her sin; he does not justify her actions at all. While he saves her from her accusers, he nevertheless admonishes her not to sin again. Two wrongs--the accusers and the adulteress--do not make a right; two wrongs are just two wrongs and need to be corrected with love and honesty. This act of mercy and forgiveness offers the woman new life, if she decides to accept it. If she goes against the Lord's command, then she forfeits that life and will need Jesus to save her once more.

    People wrongly assume that passage condemns judgment altogether, thus giving a world in which no one judges anyone or themselves. In other words, this story suggests that everyone should tolerate everything and let bygones be bygones. Christ does not save the woman by tolerating her. He saves her by judging her judges, and revealing his authority as the only judge who has power over life and death, and the only judge who can ultimately forgive. He, the Law made flesh, supersedes those who accuse. This suggests that people should obey the law as something higher than abuse the law as some tool of moral chastisement. Law, particularly God's law, should empower all souls, not reinforce the injustice between the weak and the strong. This means defending the weak against the strong, both through protection as well as correction.

    The Pharisees actually did well to heed Jesus' words and drop their stones. If that were the end, this world would look very different. Unfortunately, they only dropped their stones for the meantime until deciding to crucify Jesus and his disciples instead--this is coupled with stoning, which they resume in the soon afterward in scripture with the disciple Stephen. People today do the same. They may not condemn the adulteress, no they'd probably celebrate her liberation, but they do condemn her redeemer and his disciples because they remind them that they are sinners. Hence, they condemn the Catholic church as a scandal-ridden irrelevant institution heading for the dustbin of history and ardent Catholics as an aging group of superstitious hypocrites. They make the mistake of seeing a world without a church as a world without accusers. The reality is that the world without a church, like the world before Jesus, is a world full of offended people armed to the hilt with stones to throw.

    ReplyDelete
  4. As I see it, if we have a healthy attitude toward Jesus and His mercy, we thoroughly understand that He will forgive us every time we sin. The down side to this way of thinking is that we tend to sin “easier” knowing that He WILL forgive us. We presume too much. “Father, forgive me for what I am about to do.” The not so healthy attitude toward His mercy is that we still think we somehow should not be forgiven because we knew better, we knew that we shouldn’t have sinned. It’s more of a fear. The up side to this is we will think twice before sinning. I think it takes a lifetime (for me anyway) to get to the point where the two collide on the positive side: that we are so in love with Jesus crucified & forsaken that we will not do anything to hurt Him (sin), but that we just want to spend some time with Him…. on the cross….. suffering with Him in my small way….and by doing just this, we understand more and more of His Love and mercy for us precisely because we are living a glance of his sacrifice. He shares His wisdom with us.

    I see your point Scott. However, there are always two or more perspectives to every side of a story. I am just grateful that I only rely on God's judgment - He's the only one who knows my heart, my struggles, my intentions. It's just harder to live in this world when others judge me and don't have the whole story.... but, at least I have some cross to carry!
    Love the sinner, hate the sin. How do you do this in this world today?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. John 8:1-11 answers your question. "How do you do this in this world today"? Well, look at what Jesus did, He did not judge the adulterous woman for her sin, nor did He judge the pharisees. He loved, without embarrassing the pharisees nor the woman. I believe that we can do the same. I fail at this all the time however. But, I try to het back up again and wait patiently for a new day. The sun will come up again, souls will walk into my life, will I then teach what I've been taught? Will I choose to love them? But I must be gentle with myself, in order to be gentle with others. I cannot give something that I do not have.

      As Anne of green Gables said, "Tomorrow is always fresh with no mistakes in it".

      My resolution: Today, I will strive to love, without humiliating others. To be gentle with others, as I should be with myself, and as God is with me.

      Katie Giangiulio

      Delete
    2. Katie,
      I love your point: be gentle with myself in order to be gentle with others. I find (in myself & others) that the measure we measure ourselves (strictness or lenient) is the measure we measure others. It cannot be otherwise. It's just how God made us. But if one hasn't experienced the immense mercy or love of God, we fall back on the letter of the law instead of the spirit of the law. The more we love the cross, the more we know Christ.
      Thanks for your reply.

      Delete
  5. :) love your homilies in Mass Today !

    Father Alfonse

    ReplyDelete

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