Just a word before we go...Fifth Sunday of Lent...April 6, 2025

How many of us would like to be judged by our behavior in our weakest moments?  To be hauled out in front of others, ridiculed and taunted? The unnamed woman in our gospel today was surrounded by self-righteous bullies, and set before the teacher to be condemned.

(And where was the man, one might ask...after all, the law said both parties were to be punished...hmmm.).  But, Jesus, aware of their motives, beats them at their own game.  Instead of shaming the woman, Jesus, with the finger of God, writes twice on the ground, challenging the crowd’s innocence, shaming them who would shame her, and causing them to disperse. This leaves only the unnamed woman and Jesus, misery meeting mercy, in the words of St. Augustine.  Having been treated as less than a person by the crowd, our woman has her humanity and dignity acknowledged and restored by Jesus, who treats her with compassion.

The crowd was enforcing the system of justice that was their culture’s way of dealing with sin.  Jesus turns that system on its head, letting the past be the past, and forgiving the woman, freeing her to move forward to new life.  “See, I am doing something new, now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?” as Isaiah tells us. Jesus refused to hold the woman in her sin, knowing that conversion is not achieved by throwing stones or by castigating, but by giving and accepting love.  Something new, indeed.  Being forgiven and recognizing that we are so loved changes everything, and naturally impels us to go and do likewise.

God is always doing something new; we need only develop the eyes to see it. “See, I am doing something new, now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?” As we move ever closer to the Triduum, the holy days of Holy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter, let us not hold onto our weakest moments or those of another, but forgive ourselves and others.  Let us sharpen our eyesight that we might perceive the something new that God has waiting for us all.