Lord's Day Reflection: Learning to live with compassion
By Fr Edmund Power, OSB
On the Sundays of Lent there is the option of using the traditional Gospel which today would be the raising of Lazarus; let us take the opportunity, however, of meditating on the exquisite, dramatic moment when Jesus welcomes the woman caught in adultery into the ambit of His compassion. Although this well-known text is found in John, its language and feel make it unusual for the fourth Gospel; someone described it as a fugitive piece from the Lucan tradition.
We may notice that the anonymous woman brought before Jesus as He teaches in the temple is treated as an object, a mere visual aid in a game of challenge (note the disrespectful way of referring to her: this woman … such). The real drama seems to be the contest between the scribes and the Pharisees and Jesus, whom they address with feigned respect as Teacher. But let us, at least, not imitate them and objectify the woman: how might this human person feel, anonymous, humiliated in public, defenceless, vulnerable, alone? Why is she alone, anyway, when it takes two to tango? Where is the man? Could he even be among the crowd, waiting to throw the first stone? Where is the real sin here? Is it in fact adultery, or rather the hypocrisy, the self-righteousness, the judgment without compassion, the legalism?
There are two manifestations of the divine mercy here, not one. Yes, the woman is recognised, respected and forgiven: the twice repeated verb “condemn” is twice negated. Has no one condemned you? … Neither do I condemn you. But the other manifestation of grace is the gradual conversion of the scribes and the Pharisees, beginning with the eldest. We see a moment in which the challenge posed by Jesus, Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her, penetrates the carapace of self-righteousness, enabling the finger of truth to touch the hardness of heart. We may indeed be witnessing the conversion story of the woman; but we are also seeing the transformation of the hostile men.
The enigmatic gestures of Jesus might provoke perplexity: why bend down, rise up (apparently) and then bend down again? This is the only moment in the Gospels when we see Jesus write. What was He writing and why? There’s a verse in Jeremiah, those who turn away from thee shall be written in the earth (Jer 17:13), leading some to speculate that he was writing guilty names in the dust. But we cannot know.
The challenge for us is clear: live with compassion rather than rigidity; be totally honest with our own shortcomings before daring to judge others; treat everyone as a person meriting respect; welcome into our hearts the forgiveness and mercy that the Lord constantly offers us. There is great hope for us in our Lenten journey, forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, as Paul urges us in the second reading today.
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