But while life is certainly marked by such momentous, joyous occasions, it’s also true that it’s just as much defined by things we don’t celebrate at all. Illness, unemployment, divorce, and the like are just as real, just as significant for our lives as the happier moments. This is true also of sin. Our spiritual lives are certainly not reducible to our sins, but they do have a significant impact upon our relationship with God: whether we have sinned, whether we have repented of our sin, how we can keep from falling into sin again. We certainly don’t believe that God stops loving us when we sin; we know from the story of the Prodigal Son last week that the Lord’s love always draws us unto forgiveness. God does love us and yet our sins cannot be dismissed lightly. How do we balance these two things? How do we take sin seriously, while also not letting it define us?
The story of today’s Gospel is helpful in this regard. The scribes and Pharisees have brought to Jesus not just a hypothetical situation of sin, but an actual sinner, a woman apparently caught in adultery. The religious law of the Jews prescribed that those guilty of adultery had violated God’s law so severely that they deserved death. However, the Roman occupiers did not permit any group to put another to death; capital punishment was something reserved to them alone. Jesus, therefore, is caught in a trap. If he says the religious law should be followed, and the woman put to death, he will run afoul of the Romans and may be arrested for sedition; if he says the woman should not be put to death, then he’ll be guilty of clearly contravening the law of Moses and his prophetic authority before the people will be diminished.
Jesus doesn’t play their game. He refuses to answer their question directly and so avoids either of the political pitfalls that the Pharisees and scribes have laid out for him. But by answering in the way that he does, Jesus also shows that the Pharisees and scribes have subscribed to a false dichotomy between mercy and judgment. They think that the answer to sin is either to deny it or let it go unpunished, or punish it so severely that you end up hurting the person as well. This kind of dualistic approach to sin is too often our approach as well: either we deny the power of sin, and thus say there’s nothing that needs to be forgiven, or we make sin’s power so strong that we can’t think of the person (whether ourselves or someone else) separately from the sin.
Jesus shows us a third option: to acknowledge sin while also allowing God’s power to remove its hold over us. Notice that Jesus never dismisses or makes light of the woman’s sin. He doesn’t say anything to suggest that she does not deserve punishment, perhaps even capital punishment. The violation of God’s laws must always be answered with justice. But Jesus reveals that mercy is an aspect of justice: it’s the way that God’s justice is rendered to those who wish to be made right, who wish to be whole. Jesus doesn’t deny that the woman deserves punishment, but he shows that God’s mercy is powerful enough to withhold that punishment, to not allow the woman to be condemned along with her sin.
Christ and the Adulterous Woman (1869) by Domenico Morelli
The late archbishop of Chicago, Cardinal Francis George, once remarked that the culture we live in tends to permit everything but forgive nothing. The culture around us doesn’t believe in “sin,” so-called; but, if one does make a mistake, that person becomes branded for life, with the culture unable or unwilling to forgive. As Christians, we are called to take precisely the opposite approach – we are called to be different because our God is different. God does not permit everything; he very clearly tells us that certain things are sinful – they are harmful for us and harmful for our relationship with him. But if we do sin, he can forgive – he can forgive anything, everything – since he does not see us as defined by our sin.
Today’s Gospel should prompt within us a remembrance of our own individual experiences of forgiveness. If life is about joyous and sorrowful moments, when and where have you felt the sorrow of sin and then the joy of forgiveness following it? In what concrete instances and experiences of your life have you received the mercy of God? Those experiences of reconciliation should stay with us, as reminders in times of struggle and difficulty. They should continue to resonate within us, just as they must have for the woman in today’s Gospel. God’s power knows no limits except the limits we place upon it.
Just as importantly, the Gospel story today invites us to consider how we respond to the sin of others. Are we like the scribes and Pharisees, accusing and condemning others when they fall? Or do we take an approach like Jesus, not excusing the sin, but also not letting it define the person who stands before us? If we feel a demand for justice at the violation of God’s law, how can we fail to also feel the responsibility of forgiveness when he himself shares it so freely? Mercy is not just something offered to us; it’s something asked of us as well.
Friends, God says to us through the prophet Isaiah today, “See, I am doing something new!” Indeed, the best parts of life are when we experience that newness that only he can give. Sometimes it is the newness that comes with the birth of a baby girl, as my friends experienced this week; sometimes it is the newness that comes from mercy and reconciliation, receiving it and extending it to others, recognizing that just as we have been forgiven, so too we are called to forgive. God’s power knows no limits except the limits we place upon it.
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