Deacon Michael's Homily for the 5th Sunday of Lent - April 2-3, 2022

Here’s Deacon Michael’s homily for the 5th Sunday of Lent - April 2-3, 2022

  You can find the Sunday Readings for this homily HERE

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Well, with this week’s and last week’s Gospels we certainly are concluding Lent with a bang.  

These stories of the Prodigal Son and the Woman Caught in Adultery certainly do have a “lean in”, almost TV drama, kind character to them.  

And the foil in both are those dread Pharisees. 

Lots of details, lots of angles. Lots of lessons.  

Where to start? 

A good place may be a very contemporary spin one can hear on these passages 

…one in sympathy with the younger brother who wasted his life on wine, women and song 

…and the woman, caught ‘in flagrante delicto”. 

Who hasn’t wasted a bit of their life in youthful indiscretion after all?   

Maybe the faithful “stick in the mud” stuck-up older brother in last week’s Gospel was just jealous…because he missed all the fun. 

What's the big deal about these sins of the flesh anyhow? 

Maybe those guys with the stones in their hands in today’s Gospel just need to “get over it”...and maybe some of them were just dirty old hypocrites. 

Jesus seems to have THEIR number after all. 

In this view the “problematic” people in the story are not so much the two sinners,  

…but much more so the “faithful” with some standards, who are insisting on them. 

Here, the REAL problem are those “older-brother, Pharisee types”, those overly religious “judgemental types” 

…they’re the much bigger, “real” sinners these days. 

But to interpret these stories in this way would be to nearly stand them on their head, or at least on their side,  

…and so miss their point. 

To understand these stories it helps to know just who the Pharisees are.  

They were Jews who who were seeking to live their lives, rigorously in accordance with the law and the covenant of Israel, as they understood it 

…encouraging the people of Israel to do likewise.  

They would have been seen and respected by most as “good guys”, righteous and persistent and faithful.  

This jibes, in some large measure, with what Jesus himself points out about the law. 

He says he did not come to abolish the law 

…that not one scrap of it would pass away until heaven and earth pass away 

…that those who broke these laws and taught others to do likewise will be called least in the Kingdom of heaven 

..that those who teach others to sin would be better to have “a great millstone hung around his neck and be thrown into the sea”. 

Whoa…here Jesus sounds much like a Pharisee himself, and kind of a “stricty” to boot. 

This is a classic case of “both/and” rather than “either/or’. 

Jesus does not dispute that the younger brother and the woman sinned 

…and the notion that he would have affirmed what they did is simply fanciful 

…if not ridiculous from any fair reading of texts.  

In fact he admonishes the woman to “go and from now on do not sin any more”. 

But he is also calling his disciples to a greater righteousness as well  

…that exceeds that of the older brother and the men with the stones in their hands. 

That just can’t be achieved by ignoring standards of right and wrong 

…blurring, or denying that we can know, the difference between good and evil 

…or even denying that such categories even exist at all.  

Ultimately this leads to a world where no one sins and no one needs to repent, or change. 

This is just delusional 

…making the call to “repent and believe in the Gospel” useless or irrelevant. 

“Let he who is without sin cast the first stone” he says, snapping us back to reality. 

No stones were thrown.  

Exactly.  

Give them credit for their honesty. 

They were in effect confessing that they had sinned, maybe in their thoughts, maybe in their words, maybe in what they had done or failed to do.  

For Jesus this admission is just the essential starting point for us all, from which he calls for going the next extra mile.  

Taking that admission about ourselves, and our own need for mercy, forgiveness and reconciliation, and   

…working to restore and heal what was divided and damaged by sin 

…writing off neither the sinner or the sin,  

...but by urging and supporting a rightly lived life on the other side of it.    

Jesus often told his disciples that their righteousness needed to exceed that of the Pharisees. 

The Gospels of the last two weeks have shown them and us what that needs to look like… 

…balancing the boundless mercy of God  

…with the admonition to go and sin no more. 

As we bring our Lenten journey to a close, we should consider just how we might be able to make this real in our own lives.