“I have indeed been taken possession of by Christ Jesus.”

          Maybe the woman “caught in adulty” has not committed adultery at all. The whole episode is likely an elaborate ruse. We’re in “in the temple area,” under the watchful eyes of the Roman soldiers who were perpetually guarding the Temple precinct as the most likely site of the beginning of a rebellion. This would especially have been the case around the feast of Passover, when this all took place. If Christ endorses the stoning of the woman, He will be in trouble with the Romans, who reserved the right to enforce capital punishment. If He lets her off too easily, the Pharisees can sway the crowds against Him for His moral laxity.

          Christ refuses to play this game and points out another precept of the Mosaic law: The one to execute the punishment must himself be blameless. Let’s be clear: These words of the Lord – let he who is without sin throw the first stone – in no way negate the law against adultery. They cannot be interpreted through a contemporary lens of moral relativism, and they do not represent any significant departure from the Old Law, which required the blamelessness of the executioner. But Christ has turned the tables on the Pharisees. If they pick up stones, they will be the ones in trouble with the Romans. The elders are the first to walk away, because they are smart, and know they have been fooled and that the game is up.

          If this woman has not actually committed adultery she has allowed herself to be used and manipulated by the Pharisees in this political ploy. (The man she was committing adultery with would be liable to the same punishment, but where is he? Other details about the story don’t line up either with Jewish practices of the time.) They claim that she has been caught “in the very act of committing adultery.” Really, she has been “caught” by Christ.

          Christ’s behavior here, then, does not at all justify contemporary moral relativism (the kind typified by the all too easy response of, “Who am I to judge?”). But that does not in any way lessen the value of His extravagant forgiveness. What she has done is far worse than adultery. She has committed fraud, a sin of malice – much graver than a sin of weakness like adultery. And against not her husband or her accomplice’s spouse but against God Himself! And yet Christ is willing to forgive her, lovingly admonishing her to sin no more.

          What has motivated her to take this step? Maybe she resents Christ for disrupting her comfortable life by the convulsions gripping Hebrew society through His ministry. Maybe she’s convinced that He is a fraudster who is leading people astray from the right path of the Jewish religion. What she’s doing might be a lie, but isn’t it worth it to protect innocent people from this distorter of God’s law?

          All of this changes, then, with the encounter with Christ Himself. When He ceases to be merely a stand-in for a religious system or an ethical code, and is seen as a person, as God made flesh, who is above and apart from the jockeying for power of the Pharisees and the Romans, then His words of loving forgiveness have the power to break through her and our preconceived notions of what it means to be a good and respectable person. She thought that She was laying a trap to catch Him. Really, her good fortune is that He has caught her.

          Christ invites us to let those comforting words, “neither do I condemn you” echo in our own ears. “I know,” He tells us, “that you have been caught up in this world, that you’ve been manipulated and made to choose sides in a debate whose terms are impossible to understand, where there seem to be no right answers and no way out.”

          Christ’s words that, “Let the one among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her” are often taken to support the moral relativism that refuses to recognize anything as objectively wrong. But rather than excusing behavior that is harmful to oneself and others, Christ forgives what is ultimately a sin against Him – a sin that treats Him as just another part of the struggle for power.

          Isaiah tells us today: “Remember not the events of the past, the things of long ago consider not; see, I am doing something new!” Christ is doing something new as He breaks the false dichotomy between mercy and justice. There is a third way between hypocrisy and hedonism. And when the woman caught in adultery turns out to be sinning not against a husband but against Him as a part of the Pharisees’ evil conspiracy, He does something new in offering forgiveness. He can forgive her because her sin was really against Him – just as all sin is really against Him.

          Christ is “doing something new” in opening wide the doors of His Father’s mercy. This Lent, we have been confronting those parts of our lives where we experience the chains of sin – the part of you that needs to die, the part of you that only knows how to be a slave. We’ve used the weapons of Lent – prayer, fasting, and almsgiving – to bring clarity and focus to our spiritual sight. Through them, the Lord shows us where to dig into those dark places of our lives to expose those areas of slavery, to give the gardener one last chance to cultivate the unfruitful fig trees in our souls, so that you might not be a part of the generation that had to die because they only knew how to be slaves.

          Last Sunday, He invited us to get up, to arise, and go back to the Father. And now He is there to greet us, while we are caught like that woman in an incredible trap – not a trap of condemnation, but of a trap mercy and love. His words of forgiveness are a soothing balm to the soul who is striving to be a part of the “upward calling” of which St. Paul speaks today. Paul writes that he is “forgetting what lies behind … straining forward to what lies ahead.” Because we, doubtlessly even more so than St. Paul, “have [not] already attained perfect maturity,” there will be times when we come face to face with Christ like the woman in Gospel, caught in our own sins. As He says to her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” the realization of her guilt and shame – the realization of Whom she has really sinned against – doubtlessly flooded her mind. Her simple response – “No one, sir.” – conveys far more than her accusers walking away. “No one.” No one is left to condemn her. This is the moment where she can stop trying to take hold and is finally taken a hold of, where she can forget what lies behind, and allow the Lord to pull her towards what lies ahead, because no one is there but Him.

          It is a thousand times better to be in her shoes than those of the Pharisees – to be the recipients of boundless mercy rather than those motivated by a false perception of their own goodness. Her story invites us to grow in humility, to recognize that God is the source of holiness, and that in the person of His Son, Jesus Christ, He is in pursuit of us even more than we are of Him. As we begin Passiontide today, as we turn from working on our sinfulness to the deeper contemplation of His Passion and Cross, we see the Cross for what it really is: Christ directly confronting you. Just as the weapons of the soldiers were really His weapons – the arma Christi – He has not been caught in the trap of His executioners, but is catching you in His trap of mercy and love! From the Cross, He asks you, “Does anyone condemn you? Behold, I am doing something new. I, the only truly innocent One, the only One who deserves no punishment at all, I have taken the punishment due to your sin. There is no one left to condemn you, because the price of your condemnation has already been paid – and I have done it all to win your love.”

          If you are willing to shed the parts of you that only know how to be a slave, and to be caught in His trap of mercy and conversion, what you have gained up until now will indeed be so much rubbish, and there will be no one left to condemn you either.

The Rev. Royce V. Gregerson

I Sunday of the Lord’s Passion

6 April, A.D. MMXXV