WORD OF JUSTICE, WORD OF MERCY [1]

BROUGHT TO CHRIST

1.  Chapter 8 of John's Gospel tells the story of an unnamed woman apprehended in the act of adultery. A male posse comitatus presented her to Christ as he was teaching in the temple. As the woman's life hung in the balance, Jesus knelt down twice to write on the ground with his finger. What did Jesus write in the sand? Why does John's gospel recall this action twice without telling us what Jesus wrote? Was this simply a case of the evangelist's absent-mindedness?

2.  Was it also a case of absent-mindedness that John’s gospel, comprising 21 chapters, never clarifies the identity of the “beloved disciple”? In five instances, the sacred author refers to an apostle as the “disciple whom Jesus loved”.  [Jn 20:2; 21:1-2]  He never names him. (Sacred Tradition relates that the beloved disciple was the gospel author himself.)

INVITING ALL BELIEVERS

3.  Naming the name, however, is not important. Because the term “beloved disciple” is all  we are given, we must attach to it more than a passing significance. Indeed, “beloved disciple” goes to the heart of the gospel invitation to join God’s Kingdom. John's gospel omits the identity of the beloved disciple precisely for the purpose of inviting all believers to participate in the events of the gospel's narrative.  

4.  Jesus returned from Mount Olivet to the temple precinct in Jerusalem. After seating himself, he began to teach the people gathered around him. Scribes and Pharisees startled Jesus by thrusting forward a woman caught in adultery.

THESE FELLOWS

5.  In short, these men were motivated by two thoughts. They advocated death by stoning, the penalty of Mosaic Law for serious offenses against God and society such as the woman's adultery. Further, they sought to trap Jesus whom they perceived to be weak and lenient in interpreting the Law of Moses.

6.  If Jesus sanctioned leniency and the woman's release, he would violate Mosaic law. If he concurred in stoning the woman, his message of redemptive grace would be a sham. The Son of Man would then become the progeny of the pharisees and scribes.

IMPORTANT MOMENTS

7.  And too, it was the desire of Jesus' enemies that he would trigger the ire of the Romans. At this point in their governance of Palestine, the Roman authorities reserved the power of execution to themselves. As these developments unfold in the story, Jesus “bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground”.  [Jn 8:6]  Why?

8.  The image of Jesus writing in the sand with his finger echoes important moments in salvation history. Recall the two tablets God gave to Moses. The commandments were inscribed on “tables of stone, written with the finger of God”.  [Exo 31:18]  Consider King Belshazzar of Babylon who, in a riotous royal feast, profaned the sacred vessels of God pillaged by his father Nebuchadnezzar from the Temple of Solomon: 

IMMEDIATELY THE fingers of a man's hand appeared and wrote on the plaster of the wall of the king's palace, opposite the lamp stand; and the king saw the hand as it wrote...”You have been weighed in the balances and found wanting”.  [Dan 5:5,27] 

ANY SIGN OF HUMILITY

9.  Jesus apparently agreed that the woman was guilty of adultery. Of much greater consequence, however, was the sin of the scribes and Pharisees who, while happily applying the severity of the law to the unfortunate woman, excused themselves from its rigors. Their hearts evidenced not a shred of compassion. For our Divine Lesson today, I invite you to consider that, in the first instance, Our Lord inscribed a word of justice upon the ground, and in the second, a word of mercy.

10.   With his finger, Jesus writes a word of justice on the ground.^[2]  Perhaps he is searching the hearts of the accusers for any sign of humility—“you are dust, and to dust you shall return”  [Gen 3:19]—but there is none. The merciless scribes and Pharisees have been judged by Christ-the-Living-Truth and found wanting.

COLD DEEP HATRED

11.  This is not the first time Christ rebukes their hypocrisy:  “They bind heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on men's shoulders; but they themselves will not move them with their finger.”  [Mt 23:4]  Standing before Jesus, the haughty scribes and Pharisees continue to press their agenda. “As an apple tree among the trees of the wood”  [SongSol 2:3], Jesus stood nobly, unperturbed and fruitful. He declared with authority:  “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.”  [Jn 8:7] 

12.  Whereas the woman sinned against her husband—adultery in the Mosaic Law emphasized more the infidelity of a wife and less on the unfaithfulness of a husband  [cf. Dan 13:34-41]—her accusers commited adultery with respect to God's law. Their hearts were frozen by a cold deep hatred. The accusers’ motives were corrupt. Their purpose was evil. Obsessed with sanctions rather than the good intent of God’s law, the scribes and Pharisees were not interested in anyone's spiritual well-being.

THEIR BIG GAME

13.  They used the woman as bait and the Law of Moses as a snare. They were hunters, you see, and their big game was power and self-validation. Their prey was a man of prayer. His name was Jesus. The woman’s accusers presume they have the last word. But such people inevitably are disappointed. The outrageous sinner will enter heaven, while they stand outside complaining bitterly about injustice.

14.  The story of the woman caught in adultery suggests that the entire incident was exploited by the husband, the two witnesses, and the accusers from the start. “And once more (Jesus) bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground.”  [Jn 8:8]  During this interlude, the chastened accusers drift silently away one by one.  [cf. Jn 8:9] 

EXQUISITE BEAUTY

15.  These men were sinners who successfully avoided the public scrutiny they heaped upon the hapless woman. Perhaps they assumed that other's perception of their propriety actually rendered them just before God and the Law. Significantly, not one of the scribes and Pharisees dared to exchange his comfortable anonymity for a chance to throw the first rock. To do so would be to unmask the hypocrisy of the accusers and subject themselves to a charge of blasphemy under the law. The accusers abandoned the married woman to Jesus. Nothing remained to hinder the woman's grace-filled encounter with the Lord.

16.  At this point in the story, the gospel narrative achieves an exquisite beauty. Who among us could refuse to exchange places with this woman? To share time alone with Christ? To trust his grace and divine liberality? Suffering nurtures the hidden seed of blessing. Jesus' redemptive love rescues the adulterous woman from her fear and apprehension. His love saves her life! With great delight she rested in his shadow, and the fruit of his mercy was sweet to her taste  [cf. SongSol 2:3]:

BY THIS we shall know that we are of the truth, and reassure our hearts before him whenever our hearts condemn us; for God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything. [1Jn 3: 19-20] 

NOT EXEMPT FROM THE LAW

17.  The juridical proceeding against the woman collapsed. Nevertheless, the issue of the woman's sin remained and therefore an opportunity for redemptive grace. The woman knew her sin warranted censure irrespective of the motives of her accusers. What the night obscures, day reveals.  [cf. Rom 13:12]  Jesus desires us to fulfill, in our hearts, the divine purpose of God’s good law. He gives us his Spirit to free our love from egocentric division and isolation. Love, a force which joins and unites is the end to which God directs all human creatures.

18.  Freedom—sustained by virtuous living and the Sacrament of Reconciliation—is the essential condition necessary for the fulfillment of love. Christ restored the nobility of the woman’s humanity. He offered her a fruitful, authentic way to live. Liberating her from death by his gift of redemptive love  [cf. SongSol 2:4], Christ instructed the woman to pursue true freedom which comes only from self-mastery. She was not exempt from the law. For the sake of her own and her husband's humanity, she was not at liberty to sin.

EXPERIENCE YIELDS TO VIRTUE

19.  She learned a powerful lesson. We may express this truth using the words of Pope John Paul II from his work LOVE AND RESPONSIBILITY: 

LOVE AS experience should be subordinated to love as virtue, --so much so that without love as virtue there can be no fullness in the experience of love.^[3]  

This thought bears restating. To attain fulfillment, the experience of love must yield to the virtue of love. John Paul II underscored this essential hierarchy of love as a manifestation of God’s justice: 

FOR TO be just always means giving others what is rightly due to them. A person's rightful due is to be treated as an object of love, not as an object for use.^[4]   

Jesus knelt a second time to inscibe a word of divine mercy on the ground. As this gospel story makes clear, human justice progresses delicately, always susceptible to injury and impoverishment at the hands of those who administrate it.

20.  Indiscriminate and heedless condemnation allows no room for redemption. Punishment, without mercy and devoid of meaningful opportunity for rehabilitation, remains little more than thinly-disguised barbarity. No forms of anger or hatred bring illumination to the human mind. Leave anger to the devil and judgment to God. Neither of these illumine your humanity, and the practice of both will extinguish your future.

QUITE LIBERAL

21.  Jesus’ forgiveness of the adulterous woman was quite liberal in the context of his Jewish culture and with respect to the penitential discipline of the early Christian Church. God's Kingdom has overtaken sinner and accuser, the just and unjust alike—“But if it is by the finger of God that I cast out demons, then the Kingdom of God has come upon you.”  [Lk 11:20]  St. Augustine cried out:

THIS IS the voice of Justice:  Let her, the sinner, be punished, but not by sinners: let the law be fulfilled, but not by the transgressors of the law.^[5] 

Only the just Law-Giver can judge. Those who have received the Law, are themselves constrained by it. Obliged to observe it, they cannot claim authority over it. Only when justice directs itself to the conversion of the heart and not revenge for the crime committed can mercy triumph over justice. Divine love renews, transforms, and recreates man. Christ has entrusted his truth to the custody of his Church. The Church offers its members clear direction on how to fulfill God's divine Law of Love. We love the Church because we love the Lord.

OUR SINS ACCUSE US

22.  We are afraid of humbling ourselves. We are afraid of losing control if we submit ourselves to God, that somehow the priest or the Church might exercise power over us. We think it better to segregate our human condition from God. We will risk almost everything except handing control over to God. We do not want to go where the Lord is waiting to meet us.

23.  Man does not have the power to decide for himself what is good or evil. Neither is he permitted to simply forget about his sins. That the woman is not named in the gospel story should alert us to something. Was the gospel author respecting the woman’s privacy in the years after her grave sin was made public? Or did the evangelist intend that each Christian see something of himself in her? After all, our sins accuse us. Christ preserves us. Well, then, let us apply the woman’s experience of mercy to our own lives:

OUR VOCATION is not simply to (exist), but to work together with God in the creation of our own life, our own identity, our own destiny...by choosing the truth.^[6]

At the heart of sacramental confession abides the question:  What am I willing to change? Jesus assures us of his presence as we struggle with this challenge in the sacrament.

CONTEMPLATE THE TOMB

24.  The priestly prayer of sacramental absolution reprises the same merciful love Christ offered the adulterous woman. Likewise, the priestly prayer of forgiveness is an exceptionally powerful experience of divine grace. This gospel story reminds us that Our Lord's loving mercy is infinitely more powerful and life-giving than the unrelenting harshness of the world. Where man's sinful nature flourishes and brazen wrongdoing thrives, the glory of God's justice thrives all the more.  [cf. Rom 2:3-8]  
 
25.  God receives the words of innocent children as if they were deeds; he does not receive the words of men as deeds. God receives the deeds of men as deeds. And he judges their deeds against their words. God alone judges the worth of the human soul; he alone knows the intentions of the human heart; God alone assigns to each man an eternal destination. If anyone thinks this a harsh inevitability, let him contemplate the tomb of our Lord Jesus Christ from which arose the promise our salvation.

SPOUSAL LOVE

26.  There in the tomb, the Spirit of God hovered over the face of Jesus Christ asleep in death. In Joseph of Aramethea’s tomb, God judged the worth of the Son of Man. Our heavenly father discerned the sacrifice of Christ's Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity. And while of Our Lord was still yet in the black finality of the grave, the eternal father prepared for his only-begotten son a city of glory. He called him out from death on the third day to glorify him. And God desires to redeem us from the deadly sleep of our sins.

27.  Inevitably, however, redemptive love must be transformed into spousal love.^[7]  [cf. John Paul II, Address, 18 July 1982]  When will the moment of our maturity arrive? When will our love for Jesus Christ as redeemer mature into a love for Christ as our eternal spouse? As members of the one body, we betroth ourselves to an intimate and honorable covenant with our groom, Jesus Christ. To preserve this conjugal union--to honor Christ's body the Church--is to glorify the nuptial relationship of groom and bride. Men and women, whether married or single, are to image the spousal relationship shared by Christ and his bride the Church.

YOU ARE WITH JESUS

28.  Perhaps, in the end, Jesus merely traced his finger over the ground as a means to compose himself in the midst of an explosive situation. Serene and attentive, he spoke what is true. Not one word of his was without effect.  [cf. Isa 55:8-11]  With an exquisite balance of human surprise and divine prescience, Jesus gently addressed the troubled woman:  “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?... Neither do I condemn you; go, and do not sin again.”  [Jn 8:10-11] 

29.  Perhaps the woman's personal encounter with Christ foreshadows the possibilities of our own reconciliation in this life and our particular judgment in the next. You are with Jesus. You have been unfaithful to him. Your heart accuses you. In spite of your sins, Our Lord wants you to become his beloved disciple. He kneels down to write your story upon the ground. How should Jesus administer justice to you? In what way will he bestow his mercy? Why do you hesitate to speak with him?