Last week I asked my ninth grade students in one class “How many or you use Chat GPT when you write an assignment? All their hands went up. Then I asked them ‘who knows what Chat GPT stands for?’ Not a single hand went up. I find it surprising that they follow and use Chat GPT all the time, when they are doing assignments and especially to cheat on a quiz or exam. But they know so little about how Chat GPT actually works.
I myself had to look up the meaning of Chat GPT and here’s what I found out. I Googled it and found an answer to my question from Open AI, the same company that owns Chat GPT. “ChatGPT” stands for “Chat Generative Pretrained Transformer”, a large language model chatbot developed by OpenAI that uses deep learning to generate human-like text and engage in conversations.
In other words, the students are relying on a chatbot language model to generate human-like text to do their homework. I asked the same class “how do you intend to develop a personal relationship with Jesus Christ?” Are you going to let Chat GPT do it for you? When they do their writing assignments they involve Chat GPT in everything, but if you want to have a personal relationship with Jesus YOU have to be the only person (or being) involved.
In Paul’s second reading to the Philippians this Sunday Paul put a personal relationship with Jesus Christ at the very center of the Christian’s life. He joyfully accepted the loss of all other things for the greatness of this personal relationship. Paul counted all things of this world as a LOSS, but he counted them as a loss in view of the excellence of the knowledge of Christ Jesus.
Paul also says that he has “accepted the loss of all things and I consider them so much rubbish” (PH 3:8). Rubbish is a harsh word that in Greek means the grossest type of trash, like food waste. But Paul means that no matter how many times we look back on our accomplishments in this life, all that we have gained, all that we own, nothing compares to the value of our personal relationship with Jesus Christ.
The Gospel reading is the story about a woman caught in adultery. I ask my students to write a reflection on each Sunday Gospel. The last time we had this same Gospel reading on a Sunday was on the 5th Sunday of Lent in 2022. I looked back and found some of the Gospel reflections that my students wrote. One student wrote: I like the verse where they wanted to punish the woman because she committed
adultery. She cheated on her husband and according to their custom she should be stoned. I also liked when Jesus pointed out the hypocrisy of those men who wanted to stone the woman.
We know that the Pharisees were always trying to entrap Jesus. In Sunday’s Gospel story these wretched men were willing to sacrifice the woman to get Jesus to either break the law of Moses by allowing the woman to live or, support the execution of the woman thus breaking Roman Law whereby only Romans could execute people. Jesus sets that trap back on the Pharisees. They went away one by one, and in
doing so they broke the law of Moses for failure to prosecute.
If we must look at the sins of others, we must be aware that we have also sinned. There is still a place for exposing and rebuking and directly dealing with the sins of others in God’s family, but it must always be done with a heart that recognizes itself as a forgiven sinner. When done right, confronting sin is done more often with tears and a broken heart than with anger and condemnation.