What would you do to save a person’s life?

What would you do to save a person’s life?

The story today can see played out in many forms in media but also in small town gossip. A person may not be stoned but they can be ostracized, isolated and demonized. Their actions can be seen as the sum of the person. Worse still there can be a disassociation where the person is treated as a non-person. After a person is dehumanized it is possible to hurl abuse at them and essentially sentence them to death in our minds and hearts.

The gospel writer highlights this by not naming the woman at the centre of today’s drama nor does he name members of the crowd. Essentially, the story involves both but points at an essential difference. Jesus does not hold our actions against us nor condemn us for our sins. He waits, he listens, he understands. He recognizes that conversion only happens when a person knows that they have no one else to turn too, when forgiveness is not conditioned by what other people think or how other people behave but from a life giving encounter with a person who loves them unconditionally.

It also points to sin not as a thing which lives outside a person or a disease which can be easily eradicated if only we had the right medicine. The story of the conversion deals with a person accepted totally for who they are. The story of conversion does not mean that a person will not sin in the future but their reason for sin is lessened. There are no short cuts to God. Reconciliation is not simply a rubbish bin where you get rid of the bits you don’t like. It is taking on the mantle of God’s love and mercy which changes not only how we act, but also how we think and how we are called to relate to God. Reconciliation changes everything. It calls us to be transformed from the inside out.

Some of you may not have been to reconciliation for months or years. There may be a feeling that you have not committed any mortals or that God understands our failings. This is a true to a point but all our sacraments call us to a point of conversion. They call us to be people who are transformed into God’s image and likeness. You do not need to come to reconciliation with a whole shopping trolley of sins trying to pick the best ones out. It is more about saying that Jesus calls us to become people of mercy, who want their minds and hearts enlarged. None of us are too old or too young to become disciples who carry that mission of mercy into our world. If we reduce the sacraments to ourselves only rather than as opportunities to become one with Christ, then we miss the point.

Jesus calls us to become truly one with God so that we can be transformed. When we see the world and God only about ourselves then we live a privatized faith and a privatized religion. God asks us to be a missionary disciple who through our own conversion become authentic witnesses to what we believe, not because someone has told us, not because we have read it somewhere, but because it becomes life and bread from us at the core of who we are. We are loved and forgiven so that we can be missionaries of God’s love and forgiveness for our world.