04 APRIL 2017
Tuesday, 5th Week of Lent
1st Reading: Num 21:4–9
Gospel: Jn 8:21–30
Jesus said to the Pharisees, “I am going away, and though you look for me, you will die in your sin. Where I am going you cannot come.” The Jews wondered, “Why does he say that we can’t come where he is going? Will he kill himself?”
But Jesus said, “You are from below and I am from above; you are of this world and I am not of this world. That is why I told you that you will die in your sins. And you shall die in your sins unless you believe that I am He.”
They asked him, “Who are you?”; and Jesus said, “Just what I have told you from the beginning. I have much to say about you and much to condemn; but the One who sent me is truthful and everything I learned from him, I proclaim to the world.”
They didn’t understand that Jesus was speaking to them about the Father. (…)
D@iGITAL-EXPERIENCE
(Daily Gospel in the Assimilated Life Experience)
Sin isolates one’s spirit from God. Cut off from God who is the source of life, the spirit dies. The lethal effect of sin on a person is exponential, that is, to the power of ten. This is because the first target of habitual sinning is conscience. When conscience is shut down, the person maneuvers in life like an airplane without a reliable Tactical Air Navigation System (TACAN).
A story is told of a woman who had to give birth to her child after several failed abortion attempts. She went to a hospital to deliver the baby and escaped thereafter. The baby was a boy, and he came out normal despite the abortion attempts of the mother. With the mother gone, the hospital bill was piling up and the hospital considered the baby boy a burden. Poor infant, birth did not give him a break from rejection. Meanwhile the mother went scot-free and probably played with men again. This is a shocking story, but not to a mother with a dead conscience.
While it is true that mortal sin won’t kill the body, it kills the person’s conscience especially when committed habitually. Sin takes the person to an irreversible state of spiritual destruction. There is no way of returning to the Lord. One may be exceptional and manage to return to the Lord. But the Lord may no longer be found. This is the gist of Jesus’ message to the Pharisees in today’s Gospel reading: “I am going away, and though you look for me, you will die in your sin.” Very few people succeed in finding the Lord at the last minute, probably because the devil will always stand guard beside a bad person’s deathbed like a landlord demanding his share of the produce of his land.
In this season of Lent, let us hone our conscience by steering it away even from mere possibilities of sin. – Rev. Fr. Dan Domingo P. delos Angeles, Jr., D.M.
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