Lent 5 C

John 8:1-11

March 17, 2013

Last Sunday we read the parable of the Prodigal Son.

It is the story of the two bad sons of a good father.

The younger son lived a bad life, then realized his waywardness and returned to the embrace of his father.

The elder son lived a law-abiding life, but ended up outside the father’s house and absent from the big feast of the fat cow he had helped to raise.

Which of these two sons can we compare to Saul, who later became the apostle Paul?

Many of us will quickly answer, “the younger son.”

Paul lived a wayward life and then experienced a total conversion to the ways of God, right?

Wrong.

Paul never lived a wayward life? Right from his youth he lived a strict religious life. As he said before the tribune in Jerusalem,

“I am a Jew ... brought up in this city at the feet of Gamaliel, educated strictly according to our ancestral law, being zealous for God, just as all of you are today” No, Paul was not wayward at all.

He was a religious Jew of strict observance.

He was like the elder son in the parable of the Prodigal Son, who was always law-abiding and intent of doing his father’s will.

Paul’s conversion was not a change from a life of waywardness to a life of discipline.

It was a conversion from one form of righteousness to another form of righteousness.

The younger son in the parable needed a conversion of the unrighteous, to return to the father’s house.

The elder son needed a conversion of the righteous, from self-righteousness to true righteousness in Christ or,

 as Paul describes it in today’s second reading, “not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith.

This is the kind of conversion that Paul had.

Which goes to show us that, whether we judge ourself to be righteous or judge ourself to be unrighteous, we all need a conversion, “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23).

Which is better, the self-righteousness of the law-abiding Pharisees or the unrighteousness of the tax-collectors and sinners?

You know the answer.

Jesus was harder on the self-righteous Pharisees than he was on the sinful tax-collectors and prostitutes.

Don’t get me wrong.

Both the Pharisee and the tax-collector have gone astray and wandered from the path of true righteousness.

But whereas it is easy for sinners to recognize their sinfulness and turn back to God, it is very hard for the self-righteous to recognize that they too are in error.

This is because when they compare themselves with others they say, “I am not doing too badly, after all. I am better than most people.”

How can we tell when we are entangled in the sinister web of self-righteousness? The test is pretty simple:

How tolerant are we of those we perceive as sinners?

Am I an easy person lo live with?

Jesus was an easy person to live with.

But look at the self-righteous elder brother of the prodigal son.

He was so intolerant of his “sinful”junior brother that he walked out on him, on his family and on the feast.

Look at the life of the rabbi Saul before his conversion.

He was so intolerant of those who had left the synagogue and joined the Christian church that he was prepared to kill.

He unleashed a campaign to visit suffering and death on Christians who, he believed, were messing up the good, old religion that came down from their ancestors.

But when he converted and came to Christ, he realized that the sign of true zeal for the faith is readiness to die for one’s beliefs, not readiness to kill for one’s beliefs.

From then on Paul’s goal became, “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death” (Philippians 3:10).

Paul, the killer of Christians, would one day give his life to die as a Christian.

He had attained his life’s goal to suffer and die with Christ.

This, brothers and sisters, is true righteousness.

 Let us today pray in the words of Peter Marshall:

Lord, when we are wrong, make us willing to change.

And when we are right, make us easy to live with.