Monday of the Fifth Week of Lent
We hear once again the well known account of the woman brought to Jesus, having been caught in the act of adultery. Some of us may find this intense drama about shame and sin and stoning hardly “good news.” To this I offer the following quote from Irish writer Fr. Martin Hogan:
The men who brought the woman to Jesus saw her only in terms of her immediate past, while being blind to their own past. Jesus’ way of looking at her was very different; he saw the whole picture of her life, not just one little bit of it. Seeing the whole picture of her life, he also saw that she had a future as well as a past, a future that those who brought her to him would have denied her.
When the Lord looks at us he sees the whole picture too; he does not become obsessed with one or two dark details of the picture. The Lord is attentive to the full story of our lives, not just to a couple of lines of that story. He also knows that the story of our lives is always an unfinished story.
Now that is good news!
As disciples, we must do as our teacher did. We are to see one another in light of the “whole picture,” and not in terms of only our immediate past. None of us are the sum total of “a few dark details.” Otherwise “a couple of lines of our stories” would condemn us all. And Jesus did not come to condemn the world, but to save it.
Seeing the whole picture. As he did, so we must do.
-Timothy J. Cronin