Path of healing

Today's readings: Isaiah 43, 16-21; Philipians 3, 8-14; John 8, 1-11.

As we approach the Great Week, the three readings on this Sunday reach out beyond the prisons we choose to live in or put people in at times. The message is one of a better future, of liberation from the past. The prophet Isaiah affirms there is no need to recall the past, and St Paul, writing from prison, says: "I forgot the past and I strain ahead for what is still to come".

The Gospel narrates one of the most moving episodes in the ministry of Jesus. After the parable of the prodigal son, Jesus continues to surprise. He is brought face to face with two kinds of evil, one redeemable, the other not. Wanting to show off their self-righteousness, the scribes and Pharisees asked Jesus to stand in judgment over a woman, but he refrains from condemning her.

This woman represents many people we judge continuously and whom we take before God not to be healed but to be condemned. In our churches we often turn intercession into interdiction. The God we believe in is a faithful God and one whose major concern is not over our past but with our salvation.

One of the major issues facing the Church today is how to be a comfort zone for all who need compassion on the one hand, and on the other, how to be bold in proclaiming the truth that saves.

In The Diary of a Country Priest by Georges Bernanos, the elderly Curé de Torcy gives his young priest friend a bit of advice about this: "The Word of God is a red-hot iron," he says. "Truth is meant to save you first, and the comfort comes later."

In some sense, today's Gospel enters this tension zone. As Timothy Radcliffe, OP, writes: "for better or worse, vast numbers of people are either divorced and remarried, or living with partners, or practising contraception or are in gay relationships. So they will either feel excluded from the Church, or else, if they do wish to belong, then they may either be nagged by guilt or else must mentally shut out this part of the Church's teaching."

Many percieve the Church as standing in judgment over them. Often, we try to find a middle way, proclaiming the teaching but quietly letting it be known that it's OK to come to communion. This is called the pastoral solution. But as Radcliffe writes, and rightly so, it can simply look like dishonesty.

Blending orthodoxy with openness has always been the crux issue within Catholic circles. What can the Church do? Is today's Gospel enlightening in this regard? Surely we need to shun the two extremes of a watered-down form of secularised religiosity on the one hand and, on the other hand, an angry form of Catholicism which knows only how to excorciate and condemn.

But Isaiah, Paul and Jesus show there is no cage for the soul. The three situations illustrated in today's readings coincide in the message they convey at this point in time when we are entering the most solemn of liturgical times, that of Christ's death and resurrection.

In his book Eternal Echoes, John O'Donohue writes that "one of the most crippling prisons is the prison of reduced identity". Jesus radically changes the woman's identity from one identified with her past, as the scribes and Pharisees would maintain, to one of a redeemed and bright future.

It reminds me of Rudyard Kipling's poem 'If': "If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming you, if you can trust yourself when all men doubt you...". Whichever way our judgment goes, Christ stands always by the sinner. "Go away, and don't sin anymore", is Jesus' injunction to help us find the true path of healing.