Monday in the Fifth Week of Lent, March 18, 2024

John 8, 1-11

Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. But early in the morning he arrived again in the temple area, and all the people started coming to him, and he sat down and taught them. Then the scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery and made her stand in the middle. They said to him, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery. Now in the law, Moses commanded us to stone such women. So what do you say?” They said this to test him, so that they could have some charge to bring against him. Jesus bent down and began to write on the ground with his finger. But when they continued asking him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let the one among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” Again he bent down and wrote on the ground. And in response, they went away one by one, beginning with the elders. So he was left alone with the woman before him. Then Jesus straightened up and said to her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” She replied, “No one, sir.” Then Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you. Go, and from now on do not sin any more.” 

The meeting of Jesus and the woman caught in adultery took place during the seven day festival of booths, a feast commemorating the Fall harvest.  That would place this five or six months before the triumphal entrance of the Lord  that begins Holy Week.  The “booths” in the festival title were the tents in which the harvesters lived while engaged in their hard work.  The account of this meeting is set between scenes of the revelations Jesus makes about himself as the Son of God and the heated objections of the Jewish rulers and the Pharisees.  At the end of chapter seven, the guards sent by the chief priests fail to arrest Jesus, so dazzled were they with his teaching, and, defeated, “each man went to his own house.”  In the verses following the story of the woman caught in adultery, Jesus resumes his teaching, and begins by revealing that he is “the Light of the world” (John 8, 12).  We can read this story, then, as a demonstration of what his divine Sonship means for us.

At its start, St. John tells us, “Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. But early in the morning he arrived again in the temple area.”  Jesus, who “has nowhere to lay his head” (Matthew 8, 20), goes up to the top of the Mount of Olives outside Jerusalem after leaving the Temple area and spent the night in prayer there, with his Apostles roughing it as they had grown accustomed to doing.  Now he comes down to the Temple courtyards to teach again.  We should compare his persistence in this with his behavior in another place where he was rejected and persecuted, at  Nazareth.  When the townspeople rose up against him he left and never returned.  And in instructing the disciples how to preach in the Israelite towns, he told them, “And whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear your words: going forth out of that house or city shake off the dust from your feet” (Matthew 10, 14).  But he so loved Jerusalem, the heart of his Chosen People, that he would go again and again to it, even at the risk of his own life, until he left it to be crucified.  

Evidently he had not yet begun to teach when “the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery and made her stand in the middle.”  They made a public spectacle of her.  They brought her to Jesus for him to judge her.  They seem to yield to him and his claims that the Father had handed over all judgment to him.  It is only a crude trap, however.  The Pharisees think that Jesus will have to choose between ordering the woman’s death or speaking contrary to the Law.  If he orders her death, he will lose his popular support (which they think he courts).  If he speaks against the Law, he discredits himself as the Messiah.  We should understand that at this point in Jewish history, stoning for adultery almost never happened.  Instead, the offended parties settled for the payment of a steep fine.  The Lord’s scribbling on the ground shows the Pharisees, as though in a mirror, their own contempt for the Law by interpreting it wrongly and insisting that all Jews accept their interpretations.  How are they in a position to question him about the Law?  

“Let the one among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.”  Almost effortlessly, the Lord springs a trap of his own.  If the Pharisees stone her right then and there, as the Lord proposes they do, then they shed blood in a holy place, which they are bound not to do.  But if they do not stone the woman, they seem to let her off the hook by acting contrary to the Law.  And so they began to leave, the older men, more aware of their past sins through the reflection that comes with age, first.  Jesus waits for them all to go.  Then he turns to the woman, who has nowhere to go now.  “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”  That is, condemned her to death.  She answers no, and waits to see what Jesus will do.  It is a terrible moment.  Surely she knew who Jesus was or at least claimed to be, and the Pharisees acted as though they deferred to him.  What does she feel as she, a sinner, faces the Son of Man?  What will we feel?  

As for the woman, “Neither do I condemn you. Go, and from now on do not sin any more.”  He does not restore her to her former state.  He does not forgive her, for she has not asked for forgiveness.  He does not condone what she did.  But he saves her life in this world so that she might have the opportunity to repent.  He does with her as he has done with Jerusalem and as he does with each of us: his love for us is so immense that he offers us chance after chance to repent until we doe and our eternity is fixed.  This is the love he knows from the Father.  This is what his divine Sonship means for us.

Like the adulterous woman whose life is spared, after we have sinned and we realize the consequences of our sin, we must decide what to do.  Jesus tells her not to sin again, and he says it to us.  But the woman cannot go home for she has no home to which to return.  Does she adopt an evil way of life so to prolong her existence, or does she follow her Savior and join with his disciples?  Do we think, I have sinned.  Why should I not continue to sin?  Or do we follow the Lord Jesus from the darkness of sin and death into the world of Light?