Homily for the Fifth Sunday of Lent (C)
St. Joseph’s Neier/SFBRHS (Junior Unity Mass) March 16-17, 2013
Rev. Kevin Schmittgens
Central Idea: The message of the Scriptures is to resist the urge to turn someone into a sound bite.
“Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”
She replied, “No one, sir.”
Then Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you.
Go, and from now on do not sin any more.”
In high school, Jack, according to his teachers, was quiet a man of few words. But he used his terse, concise and economical style to his advantage. Boy howdy, did he use it to his advantage. His estimated net worth is currently 1.3 billion (with a “b”) dollars. And everyone from politicians, to athletes, to movie stars, and I would even bet, the Pope uses the tools that Jack made. His name is Jack Dorsey and he co-founded a little company called Twitter. What you may not know about Mr. Dorsey is that he is from St. Louis and he is a product of Catholic education having graduated from Bishop DuBourg High School in South St. Louis city in the mid nineties.
To be honest, I don’t use Twitter, not because I have anything against Mr. Dorsey, I just am inundated with technology and I have sorta reached a saturation point. Believe it or not, I don’t have room in my psyche for 140 characters. To be further honest, I really don’t care what people are thinking about 24/7 and I figure that if anyone does say something important on Twitter, I will hear it elsewhere. I think it is amazing the number of people who have “tweeted” something off the cuff and have grown to regret it almost immediately. Two Olympic athletes lost their right to compete because they said something stupid on Twitter.
But the real reason I have resisted the Twitter is that I just don’t think you can reasonably condense truth into 140 characters. Twitter seems to me to be the product of a society which seeks to reduce complex and dense issues into something portable, something convenient, something simple. For funny little tweets it is perfect, more power to you. For things which are more complicated, deeper, involved, the simplicity of Twitter can be a dangerous route.
And that is especially true when you try to compress and squeeze a human being into a sound bite. Which is exactly what our gospel is about today.
The story of the woman caught in the act of adultery is riveting theatre. The cast of characters is amazing. You have the crowd, the mob: self-righteous, scheming, two-faced and ultimately shamed. You have the woman: frightened, alone, betrayed, damaged. You have Jesus: serene, confident, clever and compassionate. The only character you don’t see is the man the woman was with. He is notoriously absent from the scene, which poignantly highlights the brutal hypocrisy of the crowd.
Ultimately, the mob has reduced the woman to a tweet. They have taken this human being, with obvious flaws, sins and hurt and boiled her down to one word: Adulterer. Worse yet, they are using her as bait to catch Jesus making a mistake. The world has been shrunk into an either/or situation, kill her or set her free. They have squeezed reality into a sound bite hoping to trap Jesus.
But Jesus has a sound bite of his own. He replies with a tweet. Go ahead and execute her. Go ahead and do what you will with her. You are correct; you have the law on your side. She was wrong, you are right. Stone her. But under one itsy bitsy condition: the one among you without sin has to be the first to throw a stone at her.
And in one of the classic lines in all of the Bible the author of the gospel writes: And in response, they went away one by one, beginning with the elders.
We do live in a Twitter world. We tend to abbreviate people, compress them into 140 characters. It is easier that way. But I warn you that life is not that simple. Resist the urge to simplify others. Resist the urge to simplify yourself.
Ironically, I leave you with a tweet to ponder today. It was written by the writer Oscar Wilde and it summarizes perfectly our amazing gospel. And it is a reminder to us about how we should treat others, how we should be humble, how we should be hopeful, how we should be compassionate, how we should be challenging.
Every saint has a past, every sinner has a future.
51 characters! I have room for 89 more!
Congratulations! Class of 2014! May God continue to bless you as you celebrate today!