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 certainly the most popular, and 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, but even more than that, they wanted
the crowd to 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 Jesus, they had not fully averted to
the significance of their actions; for, in the book of Numbers 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 first have the woman come
forward and stand before the LORD. (5:15-16)
The Scribes and Pharisees, having taken charge of the
adulteress handed over to them, and being completely absorbed in their planned
ambush of Jesus, actually set her before Him quite unaware of the significance
of their action before the Law!
After having thus 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 Jesus did not look the woman
straight in the eye; He was not seeking to cause her further embarrassment. He would look her in the eye later when offering
her His saving grace and giving her a final warning.
At this moment, the scribes and Pharisees were seeking to make
use of this woman’s adultery in order to call for Jesus’ opinion on the proper
procedure they should follow in such a matter, so that those of them who were
experts of the Law might be able to 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; the Scribes and Pharisees, on the
other hand, were publicly proud and secretly 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 – and would-be’s -- remember that famous
ending to the story and both misunderstand and abuse it. What so easily and so forcefully strikes them
is the vague, general, impression of Jesus rescuing an adulteress from the
Scribes and Pharisees, self-appointed upholders of the Law. 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 own perversity by imagining that the
gravity of sin is thereby seen to be easily excusable and their own personal sinfulness
less condemnable, easily condonable. Of
course, they cannot deny that Jesus did say “sin no more”, but, for them such
words are what we today might call ‘politically correct’ words, necessary in
such circumstances: satisfying Pharisaic 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 understand, 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-according-to-the-Law though they
were. She and they, yes, and all mankind,
were still slaves, not, indeed, to Egypt any longer, but most certainly 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, slaughtering them and all her worldly enemies; then
would the prescriptions of the Law 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. Neither slaves nor sinners
could do that. Yes, God’s 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 human beatitude. How was Jesus going to do this?
Do you remember the Gospel reading just a fortnight
ago? There, Jesus told 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 orchard tree of the parable figured the whole root and stock of sinful
Adam, represented today by the adulterous woman, by the self-righteous Scribes
and Pharisees her accusers, and by the surrounding crowd of curious but
faithless observers.
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, such was the very purpose of His life,
death, and Resurrection: He would loose the bonds of sin by pouring out His own
Most Precious Blood in 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, refusing to
recognize and unwilling to 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, not as a
heavenly gift inviting them to total love of God and 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 excessively 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 enveloped
in a protective cloth of supposed human rights and an overly sentimental understanding
of Jesus’ saving purpose. Many sinners
today neither have nor want true knowledge or clear understanding of Jesus; they
are stuffed up with pride at their supposed human right to live as they see fit
and delight in their ignorance both of God and the reality of sin.
But we, Catholics and Christians, most grateful disciples
of Jesus, 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 God’s will and 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 be present to us
and with us by His Spirit 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 still 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 … 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 ….
That we might attain to the Resurrection from the dead and
to praise God for all eternity, Paul 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, aspiring to maturity in Christ, adopt this
attitude with him.
