5th Sunday of Lent: Year C 2016

DOCTRINE AND FAITH
(Isaiah 43,16-21; Philippians 3,8-14; John 8,1-11; 5th Sunday of Lent:  Year C  2016).

In the first reading, God, through the mouth of prophet Isaiah, promises to perform a new exodus and a new liberation in favour of the exiled Jews in Babylon. The new liberation will be as prodigious and marvelous as the first one during which he rescued his people from Egypt. God does extraordinary and even seeming impossible things for those He loves.  What is required of the beneficiaries of God’s new exodus is trust in, dependence on and collaboration with Him. The new exodus and new liberation, which God performed for his people in the OT, serve as anticipation of the real newness of life which God wishes to bring about in every soul through his Son, Jesus Christ. What is precisely being referred to as the newness of life is First of all, God’s wish to bring man out from the slavery of sin into the liberty of the son of God. Secondly, it is God’s desire to cause to spring up streams of living waters of grace from souls killed by sin. These aspects of the newness of life were realized concretely, in Paul’s experience and in the life of the adulterous woman of the gospel reading of today.

Paul was caught up by Christ, he was conquered by Christ. After his encounter with Christ on the way to Damascus, his life changed radically. He was no more interested in the privileges of his past life as a rigorous pursuant of righteousness derivable from the observance of the law of Moses. He was rather interested in the salvation or justification that came as gift from God through faith in Jesus Christ. All other privileges he had or whatever he regarded as important were regarded as loss in comparison with the knowledge of Christ. Everything else was like refused to him and he was disposed to lose it in order to gain Christ, have experience of him, know the power of his resurrection, participate in his suffering and become like him in death in order to rise with him. In the face of all these, Paul did not, however, relax his effort as if he had achieved the goal, reward and perfection of his life. Rather he tried to forget the past and put all his energy in what lay in the future. Like an athlete, he ran towards the goal, in order to obtain the extraordinary recompense which God calls him to receive in Christ Jesus. In the apostle Paul, we see how the infinite mercy of God, through Jesus Christ liberates, redeems and saves man. God manifested his divine omnipotence that changed human person from the interior and made him a new creature, putting him in the condition of newness of life. 
   

 In today’s gospel story, we have another instance where God, through his Son Jesus Christ, changed an adulterous woman into a new creature. The scribes and the Pharisees wanted to stone her to death following the prescription of the Law of Moses. But Jesus told them: He who has no sin, let him be the first to throw the stone. By this, he challenged them to look inside themselves in order to understand that they had no right to arrogate themselves the authority to judge and condemn others, while their interior were full of hypocrisy and wickedness. Alone with the adulteress, Jesus gives his sentence: No one has condemned you, woman? I do not condemn you either. This is a sentence of divine mercy.  He then added: Go and from now, do not sin again! These words of Jesus have two meanings. It is a command that she should not sin again. At the same time, it is a gift (I give you the power not to sin again). God’s pardon, does not only cancel the past, but also creates a new and better future, opens new possibilities and new ways, even for a soul that sin has irremediably rendered useless.

On this 5th Sunday of Lent, when the preparation for the great feast of Easter is taking final shape, we should, seriously, ask ourselves: What does God want from us today and what does he want us to learn from the Sacred Scriptures? Our reply could be: First, He wishes that we should believe in his vast, or rather his quasi prodigal (scandalous) goodness; he is always disposed to pardon our faults. He wishes us to seriously believe in his omnipotent (infinite) mercy by which, through his son, He wishes to make us new creatures, by radically transforming our situation of sin, degradation and death into that of life, grace and salvation. Secondly, God wishes that we should not arrogate to ourselves the authority to judge our brothers and sisters, talk less of condemning them, but rather look into ourselves to discover that we ourselves are in dire need of the mercy of God. Finally, God desires, that following Paul’s example, we are to strive with all the power and forces in us, to arrive at the sanctification of our lives and obtaining the reward of eternal life.  Happy Sunday! +John I. Okoye