Dear friends in Christ, today we gather to celebrate the mercy God shows towards His people. When God shows mercy, He delivers the oppressed from bondage. This is what the responsorial psalm puts across when it says; “When the Lord delivered Zion from bondage it seemed like a dream.” Indeed, when God set out to liberate His people, nothing can stand in His way. For, to Him alone belong power and might. So He is able to snuff out a powerful army like a wick. This is abundantly shown in the episode regarding the men who came dragging along a woman said to have been caught in adultery. Jesus did not condemn her. He forgave her, restored her dignity and gave her reason to live. At that point she understood that her past was dead, for if Jesus did not condemn her, her past was snuffed out.
Dear friends, the story of the woman caught in adultery is the story of every one of us here. Like her, we are always harassed by sin. Unfortunately however, we who are weak before temptation and easily fall headlong into sin behave like the scribes and Pharisees who dragged forth the woman to be condemned. We overlook our own weaknesses and magnify the weaknesses in others. We literally pull them forth for condemnation. And like the Pharisees, we expect Jesus to side with us and allow them to be destroyed. No! Jesus would not condemn. This is not the reason He agreed to be born in human form. Jesus made Himself low in order to show the abundance of God’s mercy to a people whose sins and misdeeds became a heavy yoke on their shoulders.
He came to set free and so reconcile with their God and Maker a people that had gone wayward.
Just as Jesus forgave the woman caught in adultery, so is he ready to forgive every one of us. And when Jesus forgives us, He would ask, “Has no one condemned you?” and He would add “neither do I condemn you. Go away and don’t sin any more.”
This is where the challenge is for every one of us. When Jesus told that woman to go away and not to sin again, it changed her life forever. She spent all her life to do the will of God. What about us? Do we really take these words of Jesus seriously? Some times it seems that we do not value our lives. Immediately we are forgiving, we fall back into sin.
What the Lord wants us to know is, if we abide by the teaching of His Son, our past would be snuffed out like a wick. The utter completeness of Christ’s forgiveness is incredible. When He says to us, “Neither do I condemn you”, the past is dead. It is forgotten. And so our hearts would be filled with Joy. For when God comes to redeem His people, it always seems like a dream.