The Sacrament of Reconciliation
Dear Sisters and Brothers in Christ,
Wow, Lent is quickly passing by; today is already the 5th Sunday of Lent! In the Liturgy of God’s Word, we hear the account from the Gospel of John of the woman caught in adultery.
The Scribes and Pharisees bring to Jesus a woman who had been caught in adultery. They humiliate her by making her stand in the middle of the crowd. They are using her to trip-up Jesus. After quoting the Mosaic law (as if Jesus doesn’t know it well) which prescribes death by stoning, they ask Jesus, “So what do you say?” He said nothing at first but bends down and writes something on the ground. Scholars have long speculated what he wrote, nobody really knows. But there is a passage in the writings of the Prophet Jeremiah that says:
O Lord, the hope of Israel, all who forsake thee shall be put to shame; those who turn away from thee shall be written in the earth, for they have forsaken the Lord, the fountain of living water.
Jer 17:13 RSV
Was Jesus writing the names of all those who were passing judgement on the woman? The one’s who didn’t really care about her soul, but were merely using her to get at Jesus?
Jesus stood up and said, “Let the one among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” He then continued to write on the ground. One by one the woman’s accusers went away, beginning with the elders and Jesus was left alone with the woman. Jesus said to the woman, “Has no one condemned you? Then neither do I condemn you. Go and from now on do not sin anymore.”
Some behaviors are sinful and some are not and we must use our gift of reason to recognize what is objectively good and what is evil; we must make judgements about acts. But it is never our place to judge hearts, to condemn the person versus the sin. God alone can judge the human heart. Our focus should be first on ourselves so that we heed the Lord’s words “to sin no more.”
Sincerely yours in Christ Jesus, the Way, the Truth and the Life,
Christ instituted the sacrament of Penance for all sinful members of his Church: above all for those who, since Baptism, have fallen into grave sin, and have thus lost their baptismal grace and wounded ecclesial communion. It is to them that the sacrament of Penance offers a new possibility to convert and to recover the grace of justification. The Fathers of the Church present this sacrament as ‘the second plank [of salvation] after the shipwreck which is the loss of grace.’
Catechism, No. 1446
Take advantage of the many opportunity for the Sacrament of Confession before Easter. Find Communal Penance Service and regularly scheduled confession times here)