A homily for the Fifth Sunday of Lent, Cycle C, April 3, 2022
Is 43:16-21, Phil 3:8-14, Jn 8:1-11
We remember Alexander Pope’s most famous quote:
To err is human; to forgive, divine
And in this Lenten season of repentance and the seeking of forgiveness, we admit that we err occasionally. Or more than occasionally.
And we take comfort in knowing that our loving God forgives us and welcomes us home every time.
But there’s another quotation from this 18th Century writer that relates to all three of our passages from Scripture this weekend:
Be not the first by whom the new are tried, nor yet the last to lay the old aside
Today, we’re challenged to consider change. Or, more specifically, progress.
Progress is change that improves the status quo. Progress is change that leaves the Earth better than we found it. Progress amplifies and glorifies everyone and everything that God created.
Progress brings love and peace and justice to the world.
Progress scares the daylights out of us.
We like things just the way they are. Everything is awesome, just like the song says.
Except we know it isn’t. The world is in pretty bad shape. It needs changing for the better.
Progress forces us to be the change the world needs.
Progress leads us to revel in the originality of God that Isaiah proclaimed:
I am doing something new! Now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?
St. Paul wrote that progress calls us to
forget what lies behind but strain forward to what lies ahead
Jesus tells the accused woman — and us — that progress means to
go, and from now on do not sin anymore
We take it as a key belief that after God has forgiven us for straying from divine ways, we should not repeat that particular sin. That we should progress to a newer, more holy way of life.
Then how does that Alexander Pope quote about making changes conservatively fit in? How does it tie three Scripture passages about progress together?
Pope recognized that most of us need some time to make up our minds to move out of our comfort zone, or more accurately, to expand it. Because, frankly, we do like to be comfortable.
The quote also reminds us that we need time and effort to clean up our messes.
When we sin, there’s usually some sort of damage, to something or somebody. Simply saying “I’m sorry” doesn’t often repair what we broke, whether it’s a lamp, a relationship or a person’s trust. Before we can move forward toward something new, before we can go and sin no more, we must make amends. We must face the consequences.
Lent and our traditional Easter Duty remind us that we have the Sacrament of Reconciliation to begin our progress away from sin and toward the Light of Christ. To clean up our messes and get right with God and our sisters and brothers.
Thank you, God, for this wonderful gift!
So, getting back to Alex Pope, what about that “not being the first” part of the saying?
We don’t have to worry about that. Where we need to go, what we need to do, how we need to progress … that trail already was blazed by Jesus.
He was the first to challenge the status quo, the first to trash the notion of “But that’s the way we’ve always done it.” Maybe stoning a sinner to death was the way the Israelites always did it, but not in Jesus’s world.
His world of love, compassion and progress. His world and his ways, as chronicled in the Scriptures.
(By the way, where was the man in this adultery scenario? The woman wasn’t by herself when the sin was committed.)
No, we don’t always like change. Change takes work. Change means admitting that something could be better or, worse yet, something was downright wrong in the first place.
But change in the name of progress — and progress in the name of Jesus — is a clear sign that each of us is truly alive.
Or, to paint a simpler picture: Few of us are thrilled to spend the entire weekend doing spring cleaning. But that feeling of satisfaction when it’s done?
Yeah, that.
