"Let the one among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her" John 8

Fifth Sunday of Lent
Mark Payne, OSB

There is nothing at all pleasant about the scene in the Gospel today. The accused woman stands alone before Jesus and the elders and all those who happened to be nearby in the temple that day. She was accused of a sad and serious offense. The powerful people who were pressing the charge were taking advantage of her vulnerability and would be pleased to see her stoned to death. Finally, it really was Jesus himself who was the target of their hatred and their misguided zealotry - all together a very unpleasant scene.

We might wonder how the innnocent Son of God found himself in the middle of such a grim and unholy situation. We want to imagine a joyful Jesus, surrounded by beauty and peace. But, of course, it is exactly because of the unpleasantness, the evil, and the horror of life that Jesus presence and Jesus redemption is so important for us.

It's a bit the same for plumbers, lawyers, doctors, and surely the police. These professionals are often found in grim and dangerous places, places of confusion and ugliness. That's their job; those are the situations they are trained to deal with. Jesus came to save us because we need to be saved, because our selfishness and thoughtlessness and weakness create suffering and saddness that we cannot get out of by oursleves.

To this day, no one denies the charge against the woman nor the necessity of having laws and enforcing those laws. Order in society and peace between people require justice. In fact God is the source and the guarantor of justice. How often in Scripture is it God who demands punishment as the consequence for wrongdoing? It is God who raises up and God who throws down. But we really do have to admit that the punishment, like the sin itself, is really our own fault; none of the consequences for human sin is God's fault. The predicaments we find ourselves in result from our own thoughts, desires, and decisions. God's plan, after all, was that his sons and daughters would live forever in a garden and live forever in joyful harmony. God's energy is still directed towards bringing that about.

Was justice done in the Gospel story? In a purely human evaluation of today's story, it appears that Jesus at least suspended justice. Did Jesus let the woman get away with her crime? The Church believes that Jesus, Word of God, is the ultimate fulfillment of the whole law and all of the prophets. How can Jesus not be just? Or maybe it is our idea of justice that is inadequate. We remember that at the same time Adam and Eve were expelled from the garden God also promised that we would someday be restored to paradise. A huge debate within Christianity throughout history concerns whether salvation requires God to pretend that we are good or that God really will, someday, makes us really good.

The lesson of the Gospel today does not appear to make sense. Don't mercy and forgiveness contradict justice and fairness? But the lesson doesn't make sense because we ourselves, our own sins, wrecked the system. We need to remember that, like anything else in God, justice is another aspect of God's saving love. Even our hard hearts and our deliberate sins are not strong enough to thwart God's plan to save us or to turn God's mercy away from us. In God, mercy and justice, forgiveness and fairness are one.

The church wants us today to consider the end of the world, that time in the future when God's justice will triumph. Jesus Christ in himself is the end of the world, the goal of all creation. For the present time, while we are all still on the way to perfection, the exercise of justice must be expressed with understanding and compassion and must end up with forgiveness. We have the power admit our sins and to forgive sins against us only because the judgement and the justice of God, the compassion and the forgiveness of God is already making us, even us, innocent, good, and holy.