Today’s readings: Isaiah 43, 16-21; Philippians 3, 8-14; John 8, 1-11.

The important message conveyed to us all today is that as our stories unfold in daily life, there is always the seed of God’s redeeming love that can still shape our future and liberate us from our past. The worst that can happen in life is when one remains blocked in the past, losing hope and the capacity to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

The God we believe in is a God who through Jesus Christ entered human history to empower us to transcend history. This is what the three Scripture readings powerfully transmit to us on this last Sunday of Lent before we enter the Great Week of Easter. This is the new life of the resurrection that can impact on our experience and liberate us from whatever blocks a new beginning.

Isaiah in the first reading is crystal clear: “See, I am doing something new: there is no need to recall the past, no need to think about what was done before”. Jesus in the gospel stands precisely for this “something new”. But, as we read from John’s gospel, the scribes and the Pharisees were always in the way, interrupting what he was trying to convey. Their fundamentalism blinded them and in the name of the law they failed miserably to discern God’s healing love.

Many today still experience their ‘Babylonian captivity’ referred to in Isaiah – blockages that make it impossible to envisage a brighter future. Others carry the weight of the judgement of their detractors, denying them the possibility of being liberated from their past. While others still experience St Paul’s chains in the various prisons they choose to live in.

St John, in this scene of Jesus standing alone with the accused woman, challenges the God of intolerance and violence and opens up to a presence of God which manifests itself in the sacramentality of the human person. God’s glory is made manifest not when we uncover the sins of others but when the dignity of the human person is honoured. Whenever our humanity is defaced or abused, God is not there.

Jesus stoops down to write in the soil as if to contrast the writing in stone of the Decalogue which the scribes and the Pharisees were invoking. He challenges the first among them to throw a stone, as if feeling licensed to kill in the name of God’s law. What is mostly highlighted in this gospel account is not that Jesus in any way is condoning sin, but that he is taking to task the judging community.

The role of the faith community is not to point fingers and prosecute but to heal. Our duty is not to recall the past but to convey God’s mercy and render it manifest and efficacious. Any community worthy of being called a faith community has this prophetic role to bring people on the edge back to life, to include and welcome rather than to stand in judgement. This is what both Isaiah and Jesus stand for.

Throughout the entire Lenten journey the Scriptures have been marvellously encouraging and soothing. They constantly provide us with the right standpoint from where to behold our life, that of others and reality at large. Very often we opt for a different standpoint and end up being judgemental on all and everything, seeing around us an almost hellish world. God’s standpoint is totally different.

This is the power of prophecy with which Isaiah, addressing Israel’s suffering in Babylon, makes the people look ahead and overcome that suffering with foresight. With this same power of prophecy Jesus, confronted with the rigidity and legalism of the scribes and Pharisees, liberates the accused woman from her past and from her detractors. St Paul, with the same power of prophecy, claims to “forget the past and strain ahead for what is still to come”.

In a nutshell, this is what the resurrection is about, what our belief in life everlasting means. This is the breadth of vision that faith can give to life as we live it. The more we are provoked by whatever is shaping the future of the world to give up whatever we hold on to, the more God’s powerful word provokes us to collect the pieces and reconstruct the vision that keeps the world going. Looking back kills. Finding the energy to look ahead brings back life.

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