Dear Friends,
Today, on the Fifth Sunday of the Lenten cycle, we hear the story of the adulterous woman that the
Scribes and the Pharisees brought before Jesus for his judgment.
Stories of adulterous women keep reappearing in history. Remember
Nathanial Hawthorne’s famed masterpiece The
Scarlet Letter? A group of colonial New Englanders condemned a young woman as an adulteress and forced her to wear the letter “A” writ large on her
clothing, to acknowledge her sin. As
recently as 2000, newspapers reported that a seventeen year old unmarried girl in
Nigeria was flogged 100 times for having sex. It didn’t matter to the
authorities that the girl said she was pressured by her father to have sex with
three men. In our own jails, women are held for prostitution. To us, they are
unnamed, invisible. We don’t know their stories or their pain.
But why is this encounter of Jesus placed here on the Sunday
just before Holy Week? Two reasons come to mind.
First, this is one more instance of the Scribes and the
Pharisees looking for – devising ways of trapping Jesus. Who knows, perhaps
this woman is a pawn, a set up used to ensnare Jesus. And second, this passage
shows us still again that Jesus does not condemn the bruised, the broken or the
outcast.
In fact, Jesus demonstrates great tenderness for this unnamed
woman, and throughout the Gospel, for
all women.
When the Scribes and the Pharisees called for the death of
this woman, Jesus seemed to hesitate,
writing in the sand at his feet. But it
was a moment of grace. The accusers drifted away. Only Jesus and the woman were
left, taking each other’s measure.
With all this as a background, we finally come to the
connection between the 5th Sunday of Lent and Holy Week. He
who will not trap others, will himself be trapped. He who will not condemn,
will himself be condemned. He, who will send no one to their death because it
is the law, will be sentenced to death, because, as the Scribes and Pharisees
put it: “We have a law, and by this law, he must die.”
Jesus loved this woman
into new life.
Next week, who among
us will love Jesus into new life?
As we come to immerse ourselves into Christ on Holy Thursday, Good Friday and at the Easter
Vigil, will we bear the Jesus of today’s Gospel in our hearts? Will his mantle
be on our shoulders? A
mantle that proclaims “I will trap no one. I will condemn no one. I will love
the outcast into life.”
If we allow it, God,
as it says in today’s first reading from Isaiah, “ will be doing something new “
in you and me.
~Sister Joan Sobala
