Misery and mercy

Jesus is in the Temple when "the scribes and Pharisees bring him a woman caught in adultery". Like the Samaritan woman we met last month, she is a victim of society and of the Law, condemned by the men of the Law, but by Jesus defended and valued in his dignity as a person.

In a patriarchal society, adultery is the gravest sin a woman can be guilty of, because marriage is the image of God's covenant with his people. The law punishes adultery with stoning. In reality, the accusers do not intend so much to condemn the woman as to put Jesus to the test.
Here is the woman, alone "in the midst" of the judging assembly. Not even the lover caught in the act of adultery is there with her, perhaps he has fled, making her loneliness even heavier. Jesus does not judge the woman, nor accepts the provocation of the accusers, but he displaces them with a mysterious and important gesture: "leaning down she began to write with her finger on the ground". What did she write? A question that has arisen over the centuries. No answer, because the important thing is not what he writes, but the gesture with which he wants to respond to the men of the law and to us today.

The importance of the gesture is underlined by the evangelist who repeats it by framing a phrase drawn from the Law and still repeated today: "Let whoever of you is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her" . Words that do not intend to reproach the accusers, but to sanction the principle of "not judging". A principle inherent in the depths of human conscience that the Lord wants to awaken: a judgment can take place, but it must remain in the depths of the heart, where each one discovers that he is not without sin and therefore inadequate to judge. I like to cite the clarity of Pope Francis who defines the seriousness of the external judgment, of the chattering: «a destructive aggression that begins with a very small thing, with the tongue... which destroys the identity of the person ».

The men of the Law, struck in their truth, move away. Jesus and the woman remain alone, one facing the other. Jesus questions the woman who until then had not had the right to speak. "Woman where are they? Has anyone condemned you? I don't condemn you either." He does not call the woman for her moral behavior, but he opens her to the future, to that possibility of goodness and novelty present in every heart, which requires to be activated. By meeting Jesus, both this woman and those who condemned her discovered God's mercy. "Go and from now on sin no more". It is not so much a moralistic exhortation, but an invitation to become aware of a new reality: from now on, women are free, not only from the risk of stoning, but from the oppression of sin and are immersed in the freedom that only logic of God gives, the logic of Love that forgives anyone without measure, as long as they let themselves be forgiven. It is the great turning point of Jesus' message: salvation, the antithesis to sin, does not lie in the scrupulous observance of the Law, but in the overabundance of love with which God surrounds us, without judging our faults.


Anna Maria Del Prete
NP August / September 2022