It may come as a shock to some of you that I got in trouble as a kid. Oh yes, there were days in the life of little future Father Tom where I was in deep trouble! I can remember one time in particular in fifth grade where I had sabotaged one of the computers in the school computer lab. Of course everybody was at a loss for how to fix it and somehow, I knew just what needed to be done. So it was one of those situations where the apparent hero was also the villain. I created the problem and then swooped in to save the day. Just one problem, everybody saw through the act. I may have even talked about it with some of my classmates, who may have snitched on me to the teacher. It was not a proud moment.
The thing that I dreaded the most was having to apologize to my teacher. He lived only a few blocks from my house and my parents told me that I should go over and apologize to him in person. This teacher was Mr. Kaune, my first male teacher who I really looked up to. Walking those few blocks to his house seemed to take an eternity. Have any of you ever been in that place where you know you need to make things right with someone but are absolutely dreading it? Yeah, that was me. When I got to Mr. Kaune’s house, as I remember it, he was out working in his yard. I remember him saying how he was disappointed in me. Of course, those words stung, but I knew that I had messed up. I apologized and went back home feeling a weight lifted off of my chest. It was an important moment in my young life to realize how my sins could affect a whole network of people beyond myself.
In today’s Gospel we meet a woman at an absolute low point of sin. She has been caught out in adultery and is literally at the point of death by stoning when Jesus steps into the breach. This moment is depicted in the movie, The Passion of the Christ, and I absolutely love it. It shows the woman, portrayed as Mary Magdalene, prostrate on the ground, ready to meet an untimely end, but then, in slow-mo, you see Jesus tracing letters in the dirt and stones begin to fall. Finally, it is just Jesus and the woman, and you see her turn her battered face up to Jesus, who looks at her with deep compassion and love. She grasps his outstretched hand.
This scene has always stuck with me. It is so powerful to recognize the mercy of Jesus as He stands in the way of the mob ready to kill this woman because of her sin. So many of us dread moments like that woman faced, dread the possibility that we might be caught in a moment of weakness and exposed before others. Think about the web of relationships that this woman had damaged or even broken by her sin. Imagine what her parents would have been thinking or feeling if they had been witness to this scene. What would her siblings have thought? What would the wife of the man she had sinned with been thinking and feeling? What if she had children and a family of her own?
Sin is never truly personal. We like to think of our sin as something that doesn’t really affect anybody but us, but that is wrong. In truth, sin affects so many others, beginning with those closest to us. Sin affects the whole body of the church, just as any diseased part of our physical body affects the rest of the body as well. As St. Paul puts it, when one member of the Body suffers, all suffer with it.
But into our shame, brokenness and isolation in the midst of sin, Jesus enters. As God says through the prophet Isaiah in the first reading: “In the desert I make a way, in the wasteland, rivers.” God makes a way for us in the midst of the desolation of our sins. He gives us the opportunity over and over to drink of the water of His forgiveness, mercy and grace. He looks at those scattered and battered webs of relationships lying around us and sees how they can be healed. He extends His hand of mercy, and invites us by His grace to take it.
This is the hand of Reconciliation, and it extends to each of our hearts today and every day in those little and large ways that we sin. He invites us to cooperate with His grace and mercy that He pours out on us to help our hearts turn from our mistakes and back to Him. When we do, He lifts us up and He tells us, like He told the woman caught in adultery: “Go, and from now on do not sin any more.”
At the end of the Sacrament of Reconciliation, there are multiple different dismissals that a priest can use. The one I most commonly go to is: “Your sins are forgiven, go in peace!” This is similar to the words of Jesus with the woman caught in adultery. I am saying, you have been made whole again through Christ, go and live in that wholeness. The word peace that we use in English here most closely correlates to the Hebrew word, shalom, it denotes a wholeness of person. So when God draws us close to Himself and draws us out of our sin in Confession, He sends us forward with grace to not sin again, to remain in His wholeness. This is our task, to live in the newness of life that He restores in us through the Sacrament. Remember that in the act of Contrition, we mention that we will avoid sin with his help. This is the important thing!
We can’t do it on our own. We need Jesus and His help every hour of every day. He calls us to live in Him and be renewed, to break free from the chains of sin that bind us and through His grace, to go forward and allow Him to help us mend those other relationships that we damaged along the way. There was such a lightness in my spirit as I went home after making things right with Mr. Kaune. There are likely people in each of our lives that are just waiting for us to clear the air with them and heal the relationship. This is sometimes a slow process, but it best starts when we take the Lord’s hand of mercy in the Sacrament of Reconciliation and allow Him to send us forth in peace, in His shalom.
+ Heavenly Father, thank you for reconciling us to Yourself and others through Your Son. Lord Jesus, thank you for the amazing gift of grace you give us in the Sacrament of Reconciliation! Holy Spirit, help us to recognize those relationships that need healed in our lives and help us to start that healing with you through the grace of the Sacrament. We ask this through Christ, our Lord. Amen. +