In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.
Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.
Immaculate heart of Mary, pray for us sinners, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Today in the Gospel we hear the story of the woman caught in adultery.
There's always something that should kind of strike us a little bit odd about this,
is that they caught the woman in adultery, but where is the man?
Because in the Jewish law, both the man and the woman who were caught in adultery were to be stoned.
It's interesting that maybe what our Lord was writing in the dirt was,
each and every time that one of the men that was there accusing this woman,
maybe every time they had committed sin with her, maybe that's what he wrote down.
The fathers of the church say it's not certain what our Lord was writing,
but obviously he struck the Pharisees with something that caused them to turn away
from their devious trap that they had laid for our Lord,
for it was a trap that they had laid for him.
The trap was that if they were to bring a woman caught in adultery before our Lord,
if he were to let her go, then he would not be fulfilling the command of the law,
which said she should be stoned.
But at the same time, if he condemned her to death,
he would be guilty of violating the Roman law,
which said that the Jews did not have the power to fulfill corporal or capital punishment.
So either way, they kind of put our Lord in a very difficult situation
in which if he acted one way or the other,
he could be therefore taken to whatever particular authority and he could be discredited.
And so our Lord, being God most prudent,
knew how to handle the Pharisees.
And so he didn't do either one.
He just began to write in the dirt something which struck them
and turned them away from their plot.
Our Lord then did not dismiss the woman and say, you know, go ahead and carry on.
He said, go and do not commit this sin again.
He was giving her in a certain sense.
He saw there was repentance in her and gave her forgiveness.
He gave her absolution, you may say, from her sin.
We see in this gospel also a spiritual, you might say,
you can take it on another plane, on another level,
that the woman caught in adultery represents each and every one of us.
You know, in the Old Testament, God compares Israel,
when it was unfaithful to him, as an adulterous woman.
Because each and every one of us, by our baptism,
has made a vow to be faithful to God.
And so every time we violate that vow, to love God above all things,
you know, with our whole heart, with our whole soul, with our whole strength,
every time we choose sin, we're like an adulterous woman.
We have broken our commitment to the one who loves us.
We have vowed to love.
And so she, in one sense here, stands for each and every one of us.
It's for all those who have been unfaithful to God at some point.
You know, if we have chosen to...
to choose sin over God,
we have, in a certain sense, committed adultery,
spiritual adultery.
It's always interesting, in the Old Testament,
that it compares idolatry to adultery.
Whenever the Jews went and worshipped false gods,
and committed idolatry,
it always seemed to also include the sin of adultery,
the violation of the Sixth and Ninth Commandments.
And so,
when we choose to sin,
we choose to choose...
we choose something, a lesser good, above God.
And so we are like an adulterous woman, in that case.
And so, our Lord here,
in...
in standing here, before this woman caught in sin, the adulterous woman,
the Pharisees are representing here the devil,
who will be the one to accuse us on our last day, if we haven't,
you know, asked forgiveness and received forgiveness,
for our sins.
The devil will be there at our judgment to accuse us of all those things.
And so, the Pharisees are here as a type of the devil.
And our Lord, of course, shows that His purpose is not to come to...
He does not wish the death of the sinner,
as we hear in the Scriptures during the season of Lent so powerfully.
He does not wish the death of the sinner, but that he be converted and live.
One of the things I think we forget when we strive to serve God is that,
we need a healthy hatred of sin.
You know, every time we say the act of contrition, we say,
I detest all my sins.
But I wonder sometimes, if we're truly understanding what that means.
Detest is a certain, not just hate, it's a very strong hatred.
I detest them.
Not only must we love God, but we must hate something, if we love God.
We must hate anything that's opposed to Him.
Recently, I met a gentleman,
when we got into a conversation, the reason, he asked me what I was.
And I said, I'm a Catholic, and I'm a Catholic priest.
And he said, oh, he said, I'm semi-Catholic.
And I said, well, how can you be semi-Catholic?
He said, well, I married a Catholic woman.
I said, well, that doesn't make you a Catholic, a semi-Catholic.
But as we got on to our conversation, this gentleman had a little too much to drink,
but he had said to me, he said, you know, he says,
I love everybody, and everybody loves me.
And I said to him, well, I hope the devil doesn't love you.
And he said, why?
I said, because I wouldn't want to be in friendship with him.
So you have to have a certain hatred, I said.
And because, in one sense, I said, because you've had a little too much to drink,
what have you ever thought about the fact that Scripture says
that no drunkard will enter the kingdom of God?
He said, well, Father, I'm not a drunkard, I'm an alcoholic.
I said, you know, so we see how we can always try to excuse ourselves from our sin.
But what the point I was trying to make to him is that this,
you know, I love everybody and everybody loves me,
is really not necessarily, you know, it's a rather false characterization of what true charity is.
We must, of course, love God above all things, and our neighbor is ourself.
But we must also hate something if we love God.
I have to hate anything that's opposed to that love.
I have to have a detestation of it, as I say in the Act of Contrition.
And so we must maybe pray a little more during the scene of Lent
that we see that we should ask God to give us a greater hatred for our sins,
so that we can maybe, you know, be more resolved to turn away from them.
St. Augustine says that anger is a virtue.
He said anger can be a virtue when it wasn't for the virtue of anger
that we would never resist or fight sin.
So we must pray, you know, that we will have a greater detestation of our sins.
Because as we know, you know, sin is a great offense to God.
One time I heard a meditation on the Passion, and it said, you know, my sins have hurt God.
But hurt is not what we say in the Act of Contrition.
Because hurt, you know, you can bump into somebody or step on their foot,
and you say, oh, I hurt you.
But to offend God is what we do when we sin.
To offend God would be more like you ask somebody, is that your foot?
And they say yes, and then you stomp on it.
Because to offend someone has a certain malice attached to it.
Our sins, every time we sin against God, we're being malicious,
either to God or to our neighbor, and indirectly we're offending God.
And so I think that, you know, during this season of Lent,
that if we don't hate sin, we won't turn away from those habitual
or those sins that we tend to fall into on occasion.
We need to ask God for a greater hatred of them so that we can not only,
you know, it's part of the living the life of virtue.
We have to turn away from sin, but we have to replace it with something else.
And that is where the practice of virtues comes in.
Well, whatever vice it is, we have to practice the opposite virtue.
And so we need to know what the virtues are, you know, faith, hope, and charity,
temperance, prudence, justice, and fortitude.
We need to put them into practice and to know how they are corresponding
to what particular vice that we need to overcome.
And to ask Our Lady, you know, one of the meditations from Saint John Eudes,
he talks about that Our Lady's Immaculate Heart is a fiery furnace,
you know, like the three young men that were thrown into the fiery furnace
of King Nebuchadnezzar.
He said that fiery furnace is in a certain sense a type of Our Lady's Immaculate Heart.
Because in that Immaculate Heart, you know, the people who are just and virtuous
are not burned up, but sing the praises of God.
But those who are wicked, like the men who threw them into the fire, were consumed.
And he says, you know, when we think of Our Lady's Immaculate Heart,
we think of the great love with which she had for God, for Christ her Son.
She loved Him intensely, more than anyone else.
But he said also we must remember that the Immaculate Heart had a great hatred for sin.
Our Lady's Immaculate Heart loves sinners, but she hates sin.
We need to ask her, as she said at Fatima, and she told, you know, the children,
she hates sin so much that she wanted them to make reparation for it.
But she also told them, you know, make reparation because I don't want to see
all these sinners going to hell.
And so Our Lady and her Immaculate Heart is a model for each and every one of us
that as we continue in this season of Lent to ask her that we may grow in a greater love for God,
but also have a greater hatred for our sins and for sin altogether.
Because I think if we knew, you know, if we saw the offense, you know,
we look at the crucifix, that's what our sin has done.
And then we must also, you know,
we see even our own afterwards when we fall into sin,
we see how much it has done to us.
But first and foremost we must see the offense that it has committed to God
and to really, you know, when we offend somebody, we're really sorry for it,
we really hate the fact that we have hurt them.
And so let us today, as we continue during this season of Lent,
ask God for this great grace to have a greater hatred for sin
and a greater love for God.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
Amen.