5th. Sunday of Lent (C)
(Isaiah. 43:16-21; Phil. 3:8-14; John 8:1-11)
Today’s gospel passage is famous, exemplifying, as it does,
what is perhaps the best-loved aspect of Jesus: His compassionate understanding
of our human weakness. Let us therefore
take a closer look at it.
First of all notice that the scribes and Pharisees brought
the woman -- quite possibly surreptitiously trapped in the act of adultery – to
Jesus and set her standing in full view of the assembled crowd; they wanted
everyone to be able to see her clearly, and knowing the serious and emotive
charge against her, have their attention fixed on Jesus whom they confidently
hoped to trap in His words. However, it
would seem that, in their eagerness to entrap and condemn, they had not averted
to the full significance of their actions; for, in the book of Numbers
(5:15-16), the Law prescribes that, in the case of a woman guilty of adultery:
The man shall bring his
(adulterous) wife to the priest, and the priest shall bring her near, and set
her before the LORD.
The Scribes and Pharisees, having taken charge of the
adulteress handed over to them, and completely absorbed in their planned ambush
of Jesus, actually set her before Him, totally unaware of the significance of
their action before the Law. After
having ostentatiously proclaimed the charge against her, they then asked Jesus
to tell them the best way of dealing with her.
In response, Jesus, we are told,
bent down and began to write on
the ground with His finger.
Notice that in His compassion He did not look the woman
straight in the eye; He was not seeking to give her further, gratuitous,
embarrassment; He would look her in the eye later when giving her His saving
grace and final warning
At this moment, however, the scribes and Pharisees --
seeking to publicise the fact of this woman’s adultery -- call for Jesus’
opinion on the proper procedure they should follow in the matter, so that they
might, hopefully, ensnare Him in legal technicalities. Jesus,
in other words, was their principal target, and that is why:
When they continued
asking Him, (Jesus) raised Himself up.
Yes, when they persisted in questioning Him, Jesus
straightened up to face them directly.
The woman was publicly humiliated and contrite enough already, the
Scribes and Pharisees, on the other hand, were proud and malicious: Jesus most
certainly did want to face up to them, He wanted to both knock down their pride
and thwart their malice; and so, standing up and facing them, He said:
He who is without sin
among you, let him throw a stone at her first.
Those baying and eager accusers melted quietly away one by
one until Jesus was finally left alone with the still-standing woman, to whom
He said:
Neither do I condemn
you. Go, and from now on do not sin any
more.
Many sinners remember that famous ending to the story and
both misunderstand and abuse it. What so
easily and so forcefully strikes their imagination is the vague, general,
impression of Jesus rescuing an adulteress from the self-righteous Scribes and
Pharisees. They rightly consider that it
shows how Jesus, knowing our sinfulness and compassionating our weakness, is
always prepared to forgive rather than to punish. However, they then show their perversity by
imagining that the gravity of sin is thereby seen to be easily excused and
their personal sinfulness, in some measure, condoned. Of course, they cannot deny that Jesus said
“sin no more”, but, for them, such words are what we might call ‘politically
correct’: satisfying public proprieties but having no real significance or
meaning.
Now, what, for us, is the real meaning and significance of
Jesus’ actions here? Recall what the
prophet Isaiah said in our first reading:
See, I am doing something new!
Now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? In the desert I make a way, in
the wasteland, rivers. Wild beasts
honour me, jackals and ostriches; for I put water in the desert and rivers in
the wasteland for my chosen people to drink, the people whom I formed for
myself, that they might announce my praise.
Water, then, as now, was precious in Israel: it meant life
for a people who could see in the desert wastelands so close at hand the
ever-present threat of death: for them, the greatest miracle imaginable was to
make water flow in the desert and streams run in the wastelands. Moreover, this new thing would lead even the
wild animals to praise and honour God, before finally achieving its ultimate
purpose of forming a new people to sing worthily the praises of their God:
This people I have formed for
Myself that they might announce My praise.
What would this new thing be? How was God going to bring it about?
The Scribes and Pharisees had recognized aright that the
woman taken in adultery was a sinner.
What they did not recognize, however, was that this woman’s bad living
was a symptom of the whole world’s sinfulness, a sinfulness from which they
themselves were not exempt, learned and devout though they were. She and they, yes, and all mankind, were
still slaves; not, indeed, to Egypt any longer, but still to sin. The Scribes and Pharisees could not
understand what the prophet Isaiah had foreseen: he had spoken of a new thing,
a new act of God that would make all who heard of it forget even the miracle at
the Red Sea, which the authorities in Israel revered as the supreme act of God
that could only be repeated, never transcended.
God, they thought, could and would repeat what He had done at the
Red Sea: as He had slaughtered the Egyptians there long ago, so the time would
come when He would lead Israel to triumph over the Romans and all her worldly
enemies, and then the prescriptions of the Law would be perfectly fulfilled and
God would be King. Isaiah, however, had spoken
of a new act of God that would totally transcend the former physical
deliverance, because this new act that He would perform through Jesus would
save not simply Israel but also the whole of mankind from a captivity far worse
than Israel’s former slavery in Egypt, that is, from the spiritual and
potentially eternal thraldom to sin.
God’s new spiritual act would prepare, as you heard Isaiah foretell, a
people able and worthy to sing God’s praises.
Sinners, slaves, could not do that.
Yes, that new act would bring about a new creation, a new
People of God able to sing a new song, expressing both the beauty and
goodness of divine glory and the fullness of human beatitude.
How was Jesus going to do this?
Do you remember the Gospel reading just a fortnight
ago? There we heard Jesus tell a parable
about a landowner wanting to cut down an unfruitful tree whilst the gardener pleaded:
Sir, leave it for this year also,
and I shall cultivate the ground around it and fertilize it; it may bear fruit
in the future. If not you can cut it
down.
Jesus knew it would be Himself Who, in real life, would fertilize
the failing tree of God’s own planting with His own most Precious Blood; and
that tree figured the whole root and stock of sinful Adam: adulterous woman,
Scribes and Pharisees, Jews and Gentiles: all mankind.
We are now in a position to understand the whole
picture. How could Jesus condemn this
woman for whom He was soon to give His life on the Cross? In fact it would be easier to save her
because she had just been made aware of and, we trust, ashamed of her
sinfulness. Jesus was going to give all
sinners, like her, one last chance: He would loose the bonds of sin by the
outpouring of His own Most Precious Blood in His sacrifice on Calvary. His final words on both these occasions have
the same significance:
It may bear fruit in the future. If
not, you can cut it down.
Neither do I condemn you; go and
sin no more.
The Scribes and Pharisees, on the other hand, unable to
recognize and admit their own sinfulness, thereby made it much more difficult
for Jesus to set them free. And why were
they so blind to their own sins and failings?
Because they saw the Law as a list of commandments to be obeyed and prescriptions
to be carried out, they took it up as a challenge that would demonstrate their
own personal integrity, instead of receiving it as a heavenly gift, inviting
and provoking them to a grateful response of total love for God and humble service
of their neighbour. As a result they
were centred on and satisfied with what they regarded as their own
achievements: they gave tithes of everything they earned, they prayed at
prescribed times and observed the requirements of liturgical purity, and in
this respect their achievements – thanks to the grace God had bestowed on His
chosen people -- were indeed more than those of all others. But in all this they had only learnt to love
themselves, not God; they trusted in their own punctilious performance, not in
God’s goodness to them and mercy for all; and instead of serving their
neighbours they could only criticise and condemn them along with the adulterous
woman. Therefore, for their own sakes, Jesus
had to try to make them realize and admit the truth about themselves:
Let the one among you who is
without sin, be the first to throw a stone at her.
Now, dear People of God, let us look at our own sinful selves
and at our sinful times. Jesus in no way
condones sin. When He dealt so kindly
with that adulterous woman He was in fact giving her a last chance. However, those firm last words of Jesus, ‘go
and sin no more’ have, for many, become wrapped up in the cosy, soft, and
sentimental memory of Jesus saving a woman from self-righteous Scribes and Pharisees: many
sinners today neither have nor want true knowledge or clear understanding of
Jesus, they prefer to have nothing more than a vague impression of His kindness
and mercy, a dull awareness that allows them to feel comfortable despite their
continued sin.
We must never forget that our God is a God of both Truth
and Beauty, and that, as physical beauty is built upon the sure basis of a good
bone structure, so spiritual beauty calls for a firm foundation of obedience to
Christian truth. The Goodness and Holiness
of God are likewise co-ordinated, for His goodness toward us is only fully
realized by calling us upwards, out of our earthly condition, towards Himself
and a share in His holiness. He is
indeed compassionate, He knows our sinfulness and our weakness, our ignorance
and our blindness, that is why He sent His own Son to die for us, and why He
sustains and guides Mother Church, so that through her, His Son might -- by His
Spirit -- be always present to us, and ever abiding with us, throughout the
ages. However, His Son in no way
intends to allow His disciples to live for an earthly destiny: He was sent and
He intends to lead His own with Himself heavenwards. Remember what the prophet Isaiah in our
first reading said:
I have formed My chosen people for
Myself that they might announce My praise.
That is indeed our ultimate calling in Jesus: to sing the
praises of God in heaven for all eternity in total joy, peace, and
fulfilment. Thinking of that, St. Paul
told us in the second reading:
I even
consider everything as a loss because of the supreme good of knowing Christ
Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have accepted the loss of all things and I
consider them so much rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not
having any righteousness of my own based on the Law but that which comes
through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God, depending on faith to know
him and the power of his resurrection and (the) sharing of his sufferings by
being conformed to his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the
dead.
Spurred on by that
desire to attain the resurrection from the dead, to praise God for all
eternity, he advises us:
Forgetting what lies behind but
straining forward to what lies ahead, I continue my pursuit toward the goal, the
prize of God’s upward calling, in Christ Jesus.
Let us, then, who are mature, adopt this attitude.