March 29, 1998 |
|
|
Fifth Sunday of Lent John 8:1-11 |
||
| Background: Superfluous questions that often arise when this story of the women caught in adultery include, "Where is the man?" and "What did Jesus write?" These questions, of course, miss the point of the story. What is important that Jesus knew the significance of writing with his finger and of writing twice. So did the scribes and Pharisees who were testing Jesus’ fidelity to the law of Moses that ordered that such a woman be stoned. .Moses needed God to write twice in order to replace the stone tablets he had broken when he found the people committing adultery. God forgives the Israelits for their sin and Moses for breaking the tablets. Those who follow the law of God should remember this when trying to judge others who have sinned while ignoring our own transgressions. God did not hold the people in their sin nor does Jesus want to hold the woman, or anyone else, in their sins. She, and we, are advised to sin no more. At the same time, we hear that we are not to identify a person with his or her sins. |
read the padre |
|
 |
Story: Once upon a time, a stranger sat in a coffee shop in a small town near the exit ramp of a toll road. Just as he finished his coffee and was about to pay the cashier, three teenage girls entered the coffee shop in a sate of major teenage girl hysteria. They and their male friends had been working all day on a float for the county parade that was to take place the next day. Just as they were about to finish the project, the float collapsed. Someone (probably one of the boys according to the girls) had miscalculated how much weight the base would hold. It was, in the opinion of the young women, a crisis of major proportion. The stranger, a very well versed do-it-yourself carpenter who had just taken a leave from his job as a high school teacher, was moved to offer his services at resurrecting the float. Once he had worked his magic, the young people and their teacher begged the stranger to stay on for the parade where, of course, they won the Best Float award. When the teenagers learned that their float savior was looking for a place to settle down and begin a new life, they prevailed on him to set up a carpentry business in their town. In time, the stranger married the high school teacher, became the father of three and was one of the town’s leading citizens. Ten years later, another stranger sat in the coffee shop where he noticed the carpenter talking to a group outside the shop. The new stranger commented to the waitress, "So this is where Joe settled." He then told her that ten years before Joe had come upon a father severely beating his teenage daughter. When Joe tried to stop the beating, the father pulled a gun on him. In the struggle that followed, the gun went off, killing the father, a prominent business man and church leader. Though Joe was finally acquitted of the charges against him, the people of the community demanded that he not be reinstated as a teacher and made it clear that he was no longer welcome in their midst. The new stranger wondered how this community would respond to knowing this. Imagine his surprise when the waitress told some of the float makers, now respectable married with children adults, and their response was, "We knew that all the time. Joe told us the first day he was here. We contacted someone we knew in that town who told us he was a good person, wrongly accused. That community’s loss was our gain." |
|
