April 6, 2025 – Fifth Sunday of Lent [C]

By Fr. Michael Brungardt
Isaiah 43:16-21  +  Philippians 3:8-14  +  John 8:1-11

I remember the start of the pandemic and the shutdown like they were yesterday. One thing I remember is that almost immediately as soon as it started, people immediately began saying, “I can’t wait until things go back to normal!” And fair enough, we were in a new and stressful environment, things were a mess. And anytime we’re forced into a new and uncomfortable situation our natural reaction is to want to go back to normal, to go back to something comfortable and predictable.

In fact, this is one of the subplots of the story of the Exodus. Moses frees the people from slavery, promises to take them to a land of freedom, and what do the people say once the journey gets a little uncomfortable? “Why did you take us out of Egypt?” (Ex 17:3). The people want to go back to slavery! Why? Because it’s normal, it’s comfortable and predictable. “Just take us back! I just want things to go back to normal.” Two options, and our default? “Let’s go back to what we’ve tried before and we know wasn’t working.”

This same dynamic is what is behind our first reading from the prophet Isaiah. Isaiah is speaking to the people who have been taken captive and exiled from their land. They watched their city and their temple be destroyed. They were forced to leave their homes.

But let’s not forget why they are forced to leave, why they are taken captive by Babylon: it’s because they had abandoned God, stopped following Him, weren’t keeping the Sabbath, were oppressing widows, and on and one. They were taken captive because they had really fallen off the wagon. Their “normal” was not one they should want to return to.

But there in captivity, they long for that“ normal.” They just want things to go back to normal. The situation they were in, their “normal,” was very comfortable, very nice. But “normal” was not a good thing.

So what does God say? When all of the people are praying and crying out to God, “Take us back to the land of our fathers! Take us back to our normal life!”—what does God say to them?

Through Isaiah, the Lord says, “Remember not the events of the past, the things of long ago consider not. Behold, I am doing something new!…Do you not perceive it?” (Is. 43:18-19).

This is the question for us, as it was for them: Do we perceive and desire the “new” that God is working in our lives? Or are we too preoccupied with returning to the “normal,” the comfortable and predictable?

The woman in our Gospel today thought, “If only I had a different husband, if only I had a better husband…then I would be happy!” She wanted a better “normal.” But then one day this man, this Jesus comes along and she discovers: “Here is what my heart has been looking for! Something completely new.”

I think if you’re honest, if you sit in silence and prayer, you’ll start to feel your heart expanding and stretching, yearning for something completely unforeseen, completely unforeseeable—

something completely new. Something don’t even know you want until it hits you between the eyes. “Behold, I am doing something new.”

We can have the same life-changing experience as this woman caught in adultery. But it means coming face-to-face with all of the ways we have deceived ourselves, all of the ways we have closed ourselves off from the newness that the Lord has tried (and continue to try) to give us—and then placing ourselves before the Lord and begging for the “new” he offers.