WORD OF JUSTICE, WORD OF MERCY
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TODAY’S THEME: 

The Gospel of John, chapter 8, tells the story of the woman caught in adultery. When she was brought to Christ in the temple, and her life was in the balance, he knelt down twice to write on the ground with his finger. What did Jesus write on the ground with his finger? 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?

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 a disciple as the “one whom Jesus loved”.  [Jn 20:2]  He never names him. (Sacred Tradition relates that the beloved disciple was the humble author himself.)

Naming the name, however, is not important. The term “beloved disciple” is all that’s necessary. “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 gospel story.

Our theme for today’s program is:  WORD OF JUSTICE, WORD OF MERCY.

Every faithful follower is the one whom Jesus loves. In every generation, each believer becomes the “beloved disciple” of the Lord. Therefore, the gospel narrative becomes our story. We were there then. We are there now. Let’s turn to the 8th chapter of John’s gospel for the story of the woman caught in adultery. Starting with verse one, we read:

JESUS WENT to the Mount of Olives. 2.  Early in the morning he came again to the temple; all the people came to him, and he sat down and taught them.

THE SCRIBES and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery, and placing her in the midst 4.  they said to him, “Teacher, this woman has been caught in the act of adultery. 

“NOW IN the law Moses commanded us to stone such. What do you say about her?” 6.  This they said to test him, that they might have some charge to bring against him.

JESUS BENT down and wrote with his finger on the ground. 7.  And as they continued to ask him, he stood up and said to them, “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.” 

AND ONCE more he bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. 9.  But when they heard it, they went away, one by one, beginning with the eldest, and Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him. 

JESUS LOOKED up and said to her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” 11.  She said, “No one, Lord.” And Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you; go, and do not sin again.”  [Jn 8:1-11] 

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TODAY’S LESSON: 

Our Divine Lesson today is called WORD OF JUSTICE, WORD OF MERCY.

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 had two objectives: 1.) they advocated death by stoning, the penalty of Mosaic Law for the woman's offense against God and society, and 2.) they sought to trap Jesus whom they perceived to be weak and lenient in interpreting the Law of Moses.

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

And too, it was hoped that Jesus would provoke the ire of the Romans. At this point in their governance of Palestine, they 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?

Jesus' finger on the ground echoes important moments in salvation history. Recall the two tablets God gave to Moses, the commandments 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] 

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.

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. With his finger, Jesus writes a word of justice on the ground.

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.

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]  The scribes and Pharisees continue to press their agenda upon Our Lord.

“As an apple tree among the trees of the wood”  [SongSol 2:3], Jesus stands magnificent, unperturbed and fruitful. He declares with authority:  “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.”  [Jn 8:7] 

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 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.

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.

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 story of the woman caught in adultery suggests that the entire incident was exploited by the lover, 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] 

These men were sinners who successfully avoided the public scrutiny they heap upon the hapless woman. 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 Jesus.

At this point in the story, the gospel narrative achieves an exquisite beauty. Who among us would 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 rests in his shadow, and the fruit of his mercy is sweet to her taste.  [cf. SongSol 2:3] 

The juridical proceeding against the woman collapsed. Nevertheless, the issue of sin remained. 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.

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.

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. [Karol Wojtyla, LOVE AND RESPONSIBILITY, trans. H. T. Willetts (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981) 120]

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. [Ibid. p. 42]

Jesus kneels down and writes 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.

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. Leave anger to the devil and judgment to God; neither of these illumine your humanity, and the practice of both will extinguish your future.

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.

The Kingdom of God 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.  [Augustine of Hippo, “On the Gospel of St. John” Tractate XXXIII, John 8:1-11, NICENE AND POST-NICENE FATHERS, vol. 7 (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1994) 198] 

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 the Church. We trust the Church because we trust Our Lord. The Church offers its members clear direction on how to fulfill God's divine Law of Love.

We're afraid of humbling ourselves. We're afraid we'll lose control if we submit ourselves to God, that somehow the priest or the Church might exercise power over us. We think it’s better to segregate our human condition from God. We'll risk almost everything except handing control over to God. We don't want to go where the Lord is waiting to meet us.

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.  [Thomas Merton, NEW SEEDS OF CONTEMPLATION (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1961) 32].

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.

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] 

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RECAP: 

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.

There, 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; he discerned the sacrifice of his Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity.

And while of Our Lord was still yet in the black finality of the grave, our heavenly Father prepared for his only-begotten Son a city of glory. He called him from death on the third day to glorify him. And God desires to redeem us from the deadly sleep of our sins.

Inevitably, however, redemptive love must be transformed into spousal love.  [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.

Perhaps, in the end, Jesus only waved 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?...And Jesus said, Neither do I condemn you; go, and do not sin again.”  [Jn 8:11] 

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. In spite of your sins, he wants you to become his beloved disciple. He kneels down to write your story upon the ground. In what way does Jesus administer justice to you? In what way will he bestow his mercy? Why don’t you ask him?

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