FIFTH SUNDAY OF LENT C

[cappie]

It began early one morning when a crowd gathered in the temple courts to hear Jesus teach. The Feast of the Tabernacles has just come to an end, which meant that crowds would still be in Jerusalem. As Jesus teaches, he is interrupted by a crowd of men surrounding an embarrassed woman.  

Who were these men? They are “teachers of the law” and Pharisees. As the story unfolds, we discover that they are proud, self-confident, arrogant, ruthless, cunning, clever, calculating, and thoroughly hypocritical. Who was the woman? We do not know. This text tells us all we know about her; everything else is speculation.

How did they catch her in the “very act of adultery?”  Something fishy seems to be going on. Since adultery was a capital offense, the law demanded that any accusation have eyewitness testimony.   So how did these men “happen” to catch her “in the very act?” We don’t know. And that leads to a crucial question. Where is the man? Adultery requires two people. It is not likely that the man somehow escaped but the woman didn’t. Perhaps it was a set-up.   As the succeeding verses make clear, these men didn’t care about the woman one way or the other, so great was their hatred of Jesus. One final question. Why did they expose her publicly?  There was no need to bring her to Jesus. Clearly,  something much more sinister is at work here. These religious men could not help her; they could only condemn her.  They could condemn but they could not save. They could destroy but they could not restore.

By presenting this woman to Jesus, the Jewish leaders hoped to  catch him out. If he said she should be put to death, he might be seen as rebellious to Rome since the Jews did not have the right of capital punishment. If he said she should not be put to death, that would appear to be a violation of the Scripture and would put him at odds with Moses. Either way he would be in trouble, or so they thought. To them she is simply “this woman.” Not a person, it was all a sham that led them to publicly degrade this woman in an attempt to ruin Jesus’ reputation.

“ But Jesus bent down and started writing on the ground with his finger.” When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, ‘ If there is one of you who has not sinned, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.’   it is the words he spoke that matter.   He wasn’t forbidding judgment against adulterers, but he was requiring that the witnesses against the woman be morally qualified to put her to death.

Our Lord saw the woman’s sin and he saw their hypocrisy.  Their sin was far greater because it was couched in terms of pious religiosity. In the end, there was more hope for this sinful woman than for the Pharisees. Having been caught in the act of adultery, she was closer to the Kingdom than they were. She doesn’t deny her sin; they don’t admit they have any. So it ended this way: They wanted to trap him, they ended up trapped by him.

Here is how our Lord treated this sinful woman, with total honesty. He imparted grace and hope. He forgave her sin and sent her out to start a brand-new life. “ There is more to your life than your sin. You can be much more than you have been. You can turn from this sin once and for all. You can have a new life.”

All of us are like this woman. We are truly guilty in the eyes of a holy God however we have been spared by the Lord’s compassion. We have heard His words of forgiveness, His urging to repentance, to be sinners no more. Some people may have grumbled that day that sin should be paid for. But it was paid for on a cross outside the city walls of Jerusalem when Jesus died for the sins of the world. Jesus didn’t condemn this woman because he knew that not many days hence, he would be condemned for her when he died on the cross. This is what Paul means when he says in Galatians 3:13 that Christ has become a curse for us. He took our pain, our shame, and our guilt, and the heavy load of our sins was laid fully on him. This woman was not condemned by Christ, but he was condemned on the cross for her sake.

A meeting with Jesus is always a life-giving experience, as he himself has said “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life”.