5th Sunday of Lent 03-25-07

Scripture Readings
First Is 43:16-21
Second Phil: 3:8-14
Gospel John 8:1-11

Prepared by: Rev. Jonathan Kalisch, O.P.

1. Subject Matter
• Loss, possession by Christ – forgiveness, judgment, coming, going, following
• Freedom and responsibility at the heart of the encounter with Christ,
• Jesus’ delicate mercy and his majestic and serene judgment
• The “new” things God seeks to do in us
• How the judgment of a truth in our life can transform us

2. Exegetical Notes
• Most scholars attribute this passage to Luke for several reasons: parallel with Jesus’ drawing
aside for prayer at night; use of the exaggerated statement “all the people” also found in LK
21:38; the grouping of the opponents of Jesus as “the scribes and Pharisees” is a Synoptic
tradition never found in the Fourth Gospel. See Moloney for a review of the debate.
• Most scholars trace this passage to a Synoptic writer and see it fitting in well after LK 21:37-
38: “In the daytime he would be in the Temple teaching, but would spend the night on the hill
called the Mount of Olives. And from early morning the people would gather round him in the
Temple to listen to him.” (Jerusalem Bible)
• While the passage is clearly a later insertion, a good case can be made for its ancient
Eastern origins. Eusebius states: “Papias relates another story of a woman who was
accused of many sins before the Lord, which is contained in the Gospel According to the
Hebrews.” Brown: “The ease with which Jesus forgave the adulteress was hard to reconcile
with the stern penitential discipline in vogue in the early Church. It was only when a more
liberal penitential practice was firmly established that this story received wide acceptance.”
• Jesus is isolated from the crowd as He withdraws to Mt. of Olives to pray – which often
occurs before major events
• The Scribes and the Pharisees are not interested in Jesus’ interpretation of Mosaic Law, but
only want to trap him. See Mt 19:3, 22:18, Mark 10:2, 12:15
• Jesus makes a nonverbal response (bending down to write) and a verbal response
(straightening up to speak).
• The woman has been “caught” in adultery – seized while actively involved – her situation is
one of considerable distress, aware that she is facing death – yet she is of no concern to the
Pharisees. They are not interested in her fate nor that of her unmentioned husband – but in
the possibility of finding fault with Jesus. Her public and tragic exposure is merely an excuse
to debate the Law. She is instrumentalized for the purpose of trapping Jesus.
• This is the only passage in which Christ writes. Was Jesus writing the sins of the accusers
on the ground (St. Jerome and Armenian Tradition)?
• In Roman legal practice of the time, the judge first wrote the sentence and then read it aloud,
• Jer 17:13: “Those who turn away from you shall be written on the earth, for they have
forsaken the Lord, the fountain of living water.”
• Moloney: Jesus’ writing is “best understood as a sign of indifference, and even
disappointment with the proceedings. Jesus turns away from this dramatic scene and
ignores the question asked of him.”
• Brown: “There is simply not enough evidence to support conclusively any of these surmises;
and one cannot help but feel that if the matter were of major importance, the content of the
writing would have been reported.”

• Moloney: “Jesus resumes a standing position, entering the debate as he reestablishes

communication, insisting that the one without sin cast the first stone. Although Jesus’
challenge is not explicitly stated, it is most likely that it refers to sin the sexual area.”

• Has no one condemned you? – “condemned” means technical verb katakriein vs. John 3:17:
“For God did not send the Son into the world to condemn (means both to judge and to
condemn) the world, but that the world might be saved through him.”
• “The picture of the sinner and the Sinless standing face to face exemplifies the call to
repentance. Thus, though Jesus himself does not judge (8:15), it is nevertheless for
judgment that he has come into the world (9:39)” Vawter
• Connection to Lk 21:34-36 (final public words of Jesus) and the moment of judgment before
the Son of Man: “Watch yourselves or your hearts will be coarsened with debauchery and
drunkenness and the cares of life, and that day will be sprung on you suddenly like a trap.
For it will come down on every living man on the face of the earth. Stay awake, praying at all
times for the strength to survive all that is going to happen, and to stand with confidence
before the Son of Man.” (Jerusalem Bible)
• “Stand with confidence” – is to “stand erect” – comparison with Jesus twice “straightening up”
• Stuhlmueller: “How a person lives now, determines how he will “stand before the Son of
Man.’” Echoes the Beatitudes in LK 6:20-23, the seed on the rock “they believe for a while,
and in time of trial, they give up.” LK 8:14; and conditions of discipleship – “For anyone who
wants to save his life will lose it…what gain, then, is it for a man to have won the whole world
and to have lost or ruined his very self?” LK 9:23-27
• John 8:15 “You pass judgment according to human standards, but I pass judgment on no
one.”
• Brown: “The statement that Jesus did not come to condemn does not exclude the very real
judgment that Jesus provokes.”
• “Jesus’ reply refers to the way the stoning was carried out: those who witnessed the crime
had to throw the first stones, and then others joined in, to erase the slur on the people which
the crime implied (cf Deut 17:7)” Navarre Bible
• The judgment of the Pharisees is one of evaluation; the judgment of Jesus is the judgment
that pertains to salvation and condemnation.
• Relationship to John 7-8’s theme of the proper interpretation of the Law (7:19-24, 48-49,
8:15-16). The difference between judging by appearance (Scribes) or by right judgment
(Jesus)
• Jesus negotiates the scribes and Pharisees’ tests. His writing on the ground is a refusal to
engage their categories – His unwillingness to allow them to control the situation. When
Jesus does speak, He speaks to the situation of each.
• NIV: “Jesus offers all his conversation partners in this story the opportunity to break with old
ways, where the power of condemnation and death are determinative, and to enter a world
marked by freedom and acquittal. The woman is invited to embrace a new future that will
allow her to live as a free woman, not a condemned woman. The scribes and Pharisees are
invited to give up the categories according to which they had defined and attempted to
control life, because their presumed control leads only to the distortions of vv. 4-6”
• Moloney: “Jesus pinpoints the life-giving nature of the woman’s encounter. It is a turning
point for her and she must not fall back into the way that leads to death: ‘do not sin again.’”
• Moloney: “From this moment on (apo tou nun), the moment of her encounter with Jesus, he
offers her the double possibility of a new life: ‘Go, and from this moment on do not sin again.’
The men (Scribes and Pharaisees) in the earlier part of the story would not even allow her
the physical life. That has been restored to her through the intervention of Jesus. But the
command to sin no more offers her the possibility of a newness of life in a right relationship
with God.”
• “He had an irresistible, intelligent way of discussion matters. The Pharisees and the Scribes
were renowned for their dialectic; however, before Him they were powerless.” (Luigi
Giussani)
• “The trap is sprung and it challenges their hypocrisy. The Master’s word is so compelling
and so difficult not to take seriously that it is overwhelming and even paralyzing.” (Luigi
Giussani)

3. References to the Catechism of the Catholic Church

• CCC 2466: “In Jesus Christ, the whole of God's truth has been made manifest. ‘Full of grace
and truth,’ he came as the ‘light of the world,’ he is the Truth. ‘Whoever believes in me may
not remain in darkness.’ The disciple of Jesus continues in his word so as to know ‘the truth
[that] will make you free’ and that sanctifies. To follow Jesus is to live in ‘the Spirit of truth,
 ’whom the Father sends in his name and who leads ‘into all the truth.’ To his disciples Jesus
teaches the unconditional love of truth: ‘Let what you say be simply 'Yes or No.’”
• CCC 679: “Christ is Lord of eternal life. Full right to pass definitive judgment on the works
and hearts of men belongs to him as redeemer of the world. He "acquired" this right by his
cross. The Father has given ‘all judgment to the Son’. Yet the Son did not come to judge, but
to save and to give the life he has in himself. By rejecting grace in this life, one already
judges oneself, receives according to one's works, and can even condemn oneself for all
eternity by rejecting the Spirit of love.”
• CCC 1781: “Conscience enables one to assume responsibility for the acts performed. If man
commits evil, the just judgment of conscience can remain within him as the witness to the
universal truth of the good, at the same time as the evil of his particular choice. The verdict of
the judgment of conscience remains a pledge of hope and mercy. In attesting to the fault
committed, it calls to mind the forgiveness that must be asked, the good that must still be
practiced, and the virtue that must be constantly cultivated with the grace of God: ‘We shall .
. . reassure our hearts before him whenever our hearts condemn us; for God is greater than
our hearts, and he knows everything.’”
• CCC 1428: “Christ's call to conversion continues to resound in the lives of Christians. This
second conversion is an uninterrupted task for the whole Church who, ‘clasping sinners to
her bosom, [is] at once holy and always in need of purification, [and] follows constantly the
path of penance and renewal.’ This endeavor of conversion is not just a human work. It is the
movement of a ‘contrite heart,’ drawn and moved by grace to respond to the merciful love of
God who loved us first.”

4. Patristic Commentary
• Fray Luis de Granada: “Your feelings, your deeds and your words should be akin to these, if
you desire to be a beautiful likeness of the Lord. And therefore the Apostle is not content
with telling us to be merciful; he tells us, as God’s sons, to put on “the bowels of mercy” (cf
Col 3:12). Imagine, then, what the world would be like if everyone arrayed themselves in this
way.”
• St. Augustine: “His answer is so full of justice, gentleness, and truth….O true answer of
Wisdom. You have heard: Keep the Law, let the woman be stoned. But how can sinners
keep the Law and punish this woman? Let each of them look inside himself and enter the
tribunal of his heart and conscience; there he will discover that he is a sinner. Let this
woman be punished, but not by sinners; let the Law be applied, but not by its transgressors.”
• St. Augustine: “The two of them were left on their own, the wretched woman and Mercy.
But the Lord, having smitten them with the dart of justice, does not even deign to watch them
go but turns his gaze away from them and once more writes on the ground with his finger.”
• St. Augustine: “I think that the woman was the more terrified when she heard the Lord …
fearing now that she would be punished by him, in whom no sin could be found. But he, who
had driven away her adversaries with the tongue of justice, now looking at her with the eyes
of gentleness…And he says, ‘Neither do I condemn you; I who perhaps you feared would
punish you, because in me you have found no sin.’”
• St. Augustine: “Lord, can it be that you favor sinner? Assuredly not. See what follows: ‘Go
and sin no more.’ Therefore, the Lord also condemned sin, but not the woman.”
• St. Thomas Aquinas: Jesus “wrote on the earth because the Old Law was written on tablets
of stone (Ex31, 2Cor 3), which signify its harshness: ‘A man who violates the law of Moses
dies without mercy (Heb 10:28). But the earth is soft. And so Jesus wrote on the earth to
show the sweetness and the softness of the New Law that he gave us.”
• St. Thomas Aquinas: Jesus bends down again, “out of consideration for their
embarrassment, to give them complete freedom to leave. The effect of his justice is their
embarrassment, for on hearing this, one after the other departed, both because they had
been involved in more serious sins and their conscience gnawed them more.”
• St. Thomas Aquinas: “And he forgave her sin without imposing any penance on her
because since he made her inwardly just by outwardly forgiving her, he was well able to
change her so much within by sufficient sorrow for her sins that she would be made free from
any penance.”
• St. Thomas Aquinas: “But our Lord does not love sin, and does not favor wrongdoing, and
so he condemned her sin but not her nature, saying, ‘Go, and do not sin again.’ We see here
how kind our Lord is because of his gentleness, and how just he is because of his truth.”

5. Examples from the Saints and Other Exemplars

• Daniel and Susanna (Dan 13:1-64)
• St. Francis of Assisi’s encounter with the leper who was transformed into Christ.
• St. Teresa of Avila from her Life: “As I began to read the Confessions {of St. Augustine}, it
seemed to me I saw myself in them. I began to commend myself very much to this glorious
saint. When I came to the passage where he speaks about his conversion and read how he
heard that voice in the garden, it only seemed to me, according to what I felt in my heart, that
it was I the Lord called. I remained for a long time totally dissolved in tears and feeling within
myself utter distress and weariness. Oh, how a soul suffers, God help me, by losing the
freedom it should have in being itself; and what torments it undergoes! I marvel now at how I
could have lived in such great affliction. May God be praised who gave me the life to rise up
from a death so deadly.”
• Alfred Delp, SJ, wrote shortly before being hanged by the Nazis in Berlin: “The origin of
human freedom lies in the encounter with God.”
• Dag Hammarskjold from Markings: “It is when we stand in the righteous all-seeing light of
love that we can dare to look at, admit, and consciously suffer under this something in us
which wills disaster, misfortune, defeat to everything outside the sphere of our narrowest self-
interest. So a living relation to God is the necessary precondition for the self-knowledge
which enables us to follow a straight path, and so be victorious over ourselves, forgiven by
ourselves.”
• Soren Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing: “But there is a concerned guide, a
knowing one, who attracts the attention of the wanderer, who calls out to him that he should
take care. That guide is remorse. He is not so quick of foot as the indulgent imagination,
which is the servant of desire. He is not so strongly built as the victorious intention. He
 comes on slowly afterwards. He grieves. But he is a sincere and faithful friend. If that
guide’s voice is never heard, then it is just because one is wandering along the way of
perdition. For when the sick man who is wasting away from consumption believes himself to
be in the best of health, his disease is as the most terrible point. If there were someone who
early in life steeled his mind against all remorse and who actually carried it out, nevertheless
remorse would come again if he were willing to repent even of this decision. So wonderful a
power is remorse, so sincere is its friendship that to escape it entirely is the most terrible
thing of all…”

6. Quotes
• Pope Benedict: “If this ‘yes’ of the Lord really penetrates me so that it makes my soul
reborn, then my own ego is saturated with him, is marked by sharing in him: ‘It is no longer I
who live, but Christ who lives in me’ (Gal 2:20).”
• Pope Benedict: “There is a freedom that is not cancelled out even by grace and, indeed, is
brought by it face to face with itself: man’s final fate is not forced upon him regardless of the
decisions he has made in his life.”
• Pope Benedict: “In himself man lives with the dreadful knowledge that his power to destroy
is infinitely greater than his power to build up. But this same man knows that in Christ the
power to build up has proved infinitely stronger. This is the source of a profound, a
knowledge of God’s unrepentant love; he sees through all our errors and remains well
disposed to us.”
• Pope Benedict: “It is not a stranger who judges us but he whom we know in faith. The judge
will not advance to meet us as the entirely Other, but as one of us, who knows human
existence from inside and has suffered.”
• John Paul II: “Jesus is newness of life for those who open their hearts and, after
acknowledging their sins, receive his saving mercy. In today's Gospel text, the Lord offers
this gift of his love to the adulteress, who is forgiven and restored to her full human and
spiritual dignity. He also offers it to her accusers, but their spirit remains closed and
impenetrable.”
• John Paul II: “Here is an invitation to meditate on the paradoxical refusal of his merciful love.
It is as though the trial against Jesus were already beginning, a trial that we will relive in a
few days during the events of his Passion: it will result in his unjust sentence to death on the
cross. On the one hand, the redeeming love of Christ, freely offered to everyone; on the
other, the closure of those who, moved by envy, seek a motive to kill him.”
• John Paul II: “Jesus does not fall into the trap. By his silence he invites everyone to self-
reflection. On the one hand, he invites the woman to acknowledge the wrong committed; on
the other, he invites her accusers not to shrink from an examination of conscience…The
woman's situation is certainly serious. But the message flows precisely from this situation: in
whatever condition we find ourselves, we can always open ourselves to conversion and
receive forgiveness for our sins.”
• John Paul II: “The greater the penitent’s moral misfortune, the greater should be the mercy
shown.”
• John Paul II: “…Christ does not invite man to return to the state of original innocence,
because humanity has irrevocably left it behind, but He calls him to rediscover – on the
foundations of the perennial, and so to speak, indestructible meanings of what is ‘human’ –
the living forms of the ‘new man.’ In this way a link, or rather a continuity, is established
between the ‘beginning’ and the perspective of redemption.”
• John Paul II: “Therefore, what is salvation? It is the victory of good over evil, achieved in
man in all dimensions of his existence. The very overcoming of evil has already a salvific
character. The definitive form of salvation for man will consist in being completely freed from
evil and reaching the fullness of God. This fullness is called, and in fact is, eternal salvation.
It is realized in the kingdom of God as an eschatological reality of eternal life.”
• Luigi Giussani: “The word ‘encounter’ implies, first, something unexpected and surprising.
Second, it implies something real, that really touches us, is of interest to our lives.
Understood in that way, every encounter is unique and its determining circumstances will
never again be repeated because each encounter is a particular example of the ‘voice that
calls each one by name.’ Every encounter is a great opportunity offered to our freedom by
God’s mystery.”
• Luigi Giussani: “If the encounter is accepted simply, it gives us a great freedom of spirit that
never hinders us but allows us to act independently of our cultural attainment or shrewdness
and even beyond our heart…Even if darkness closes in on us a moment later, we will no
longer be the same. A possibly indifferent disposition on our part can only reflect a state of
the heart that tries to suppress the memory of that encounter; but that encounter remains an
indelible fact in our life.”
• Luigi Giussani: “Inherent in Saint Thomas’ definition of truth: ‘adequatio rei et intellectus,’
that is, the discovery of a correspondence between what is placed before me (the ‘proposal’)
and what I am aware of as being the structure of my nature. That is to say, the call implies
the proposal of a truth so existential, of something so pertinent to our nature and life, that we
feel compelled to try to understand where it is taking us: we feel motivated to adhere to it.”

7. Other Considerations
• The question put to Jesus was couched in legal terms; he raises it to the moral plane (the
basis and justification of the legal plane), appealing to the people’s conscience – their
freedom and reality.
• Irony that the woman is placed in the center of “all the people” but plays no part in the
discussion (is really peripheral to it) until Jesus addresses the first words in the story to her.
She is now no longer an object, but “you” – one who can enter into a relationship with Jesus.
She addresses him as “Kyrie” – Lord. On the basis of the relationship established by their
dialogue, Jesus can challenge her to sin no more.
• Note the movement of the Gospel and of Jesus Himself – arrival, their coming, sitting,
teaching, standing, bending, writing, straightening, commanding. Jesus sits and teaches, but
not when the Scribes and Pharasees come and invoke (the Chair of) Moses.
• Connection to Phil 3:8-14. The woman initially loses all she has, but then finds and gains
Christ. Her forgiveness comes through the “righteousness from God.” She is literally
 “conformed to his death,” by being forced to stand for judgment. Once she has been “taken
possession of by Christ” she is told to go and sin no more. To make this encounter count.

Recommended Resources
Aquinas, St. Thomas Commentary on the Gospel of St. John, Part II Petersham, MA: St. Bede’s
Publications
Brown, Raymond E. The Gospel According to John (i-xii) in The Anchor Bible, Garden City, NY:
Doubleday & Company, 1966
Giussani, Luigi The Journey to Truth is an Experience, Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s University Press,
2006
Groeschel, Benedict and Kevin Perrotta, The Journey Toward God, Ann Arbor: Servant
Publications, 2000
Moloney, Francis J. The Gospel of John Sacra Pagina Series, Vol 4, ed. by Daniel J Harrington,
SJ Collegeville, MN: the Liturgical Press, 1998
The Navarre Bible: The Gospel of Saint John, Four Courts Press, 2nd ed, 1998.
O’Day, Gail R. “John” in The New Interpretater’s Bible, vol 9, Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1995
Ratzinger, Joseph Cardinal, Introduction to Christianity, San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004