The Old Testament law that refers to this case of adultery in the gospel is found in Leviticus chapter 20; if a man commits adultery with his neighbor’s wife both the adulterer and the adulteress shall be put to death. The stoning of adulterers was a way of maintaining order in ancient society. In a tightly knit tribal society, a case of adultery could explode into violence between families, one seeking revenge against another. So, the strict death penalty was a way of preventing the spread of violence. Violence is controlled by violence.

Jesus himself would eventually become a victim of this same practice. The political and religious leaders would accuse him as causing unrest and determined that his assassination would be the fastest and most effective way to unite the people behind their power and to prevent social chaos and restore order, because that is what we do with evil, get rid of it at any cause, even if that means through violence. Jesus has come to transform this reality of human power working through violence.

That is the movement we see in all the scriptures. If you read the bible chronologically, you see that slowly God is moving us away from violence. God first begins this movement in the words of the prophets. The voice of victims of power begins to be heard in the Old Testament prophets, but the full means of transformation of power are not fully known until the appearance of Jesus. Transformation can be a long process that people who are not mature in their faith don’t understand or accept. They look at books like Deuteronomy where God seems to be dictating very violent actions and use that to put down religion, you have to read the bible as a whole to understand how God is actually moving us humans away from violence, but slowly… it takes time to mature.

But as human beings, we would not be able to reach full maturity on our own, so Jesus challenges us to engage in the way of transformation that he sets before us rather than the ones we as a collective human society tend to set for ourselves. Jesus has not come to teach us how to purge evil from our midst as Leviticus says; by identifying evil people and eliminating them. Jesus teaches us how to transform evil into good.

The law on adultery is developed further in the book of Deuteronomy chapter 22. If a man is discovered having relations with a woman who is married to another, both the man and the woman he has had relations with shall die. Thus, you shall purge evil from your midst. If within a city a man comes upon a maiden who is betrothed and has relations with her, you shall bring them both out to the gate of the city and there stoned them to death. The girl because she did not cry out for help, and the man because he violated his neighbor’s wife. Thus, shall you purge evil from your midst. Think about what the means… if the woman does not scream, then her consent is assumed and she is considered guilty, even if the man lied to her and she did not know he was married, even when she were in fact not guilty.

Take that context now into the scene in the gospel: it is very possible that the woman who Jesus encounters either doesn’t know or is an unwilling participant in adultery. Women had little choice about anything in the time of Jesus, the man is not even mentioned so it could be that the Pharisees put him up to this just to set up the situation because adultery is not really the issue here. The woman is being sacrificed as a pawn and the Pharisees plan to try to trap Jesus into violating the law. When that plan didn’t work the only option left was to sacrifice Jesus himself.

A lot has been said about what it means that Jesus is writing on the ground with his finger. It is sometimes understood as a reference to Jeremiah 17:13. In some scrolls this verse says; those who turn away from the Lord shall be written on the earth for they have forsaken the Lord. Sometimes it has been understood to as Jesus making his own calculations of judgment, writing the sins of the those around him on the ground, but Jesus is uninterested in the standards of judgement of the scribes and Pharisees, he is not about shaming people, Jesus comes to transform our understanding of what justice is.

For God, justice is not about punishment it is about the opportunity for every person created in the image of God to flourish. The mission of Jesus is to initiate the process of transforming evil into good in which every person created in the image of God can come to know their essential goodness and be able to express it. The temple leaders have to learn mercy in the form of compassion, so Jesus says to them; let the one who is without sin cast the first stone. In other words, let the one who has never exploited a woman for his own purposes cast the first stone at this woman. Of course, every one of them has, they’re doing it at the very moment and many of them may have been adulterers themselves.

The temple leaders are examples of people in power who must be honest with themselves about how they use their power. Is power used to promote the flourishing of others, or is power an end in itself? There are also a lot of people there when all this happens. We are told this happened in the morning, Jesus arrived in the temple area and all the people started coming to him, and then the scribes and Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery and made her stand in the middle of the crowd.

The Greek text makes it very clear that she was literally dragged out of bed so you can imagine what condition she was in and the extreme humiliation that she was being subjected to. Everyone could see it, and did anyone do anything? The crowd is complicit in the religious power of the temple leaders. They assume that the woman must be guilty because the temple leaders say she. The gospel is challenging all of us here with the question how would we respond if we were present at the stoning of this woman? Would we stand up for justice?

Jesus is challenging us to look more critically at ways that injustice is built into the ways that we live and to be advocates for justice for all. Jesus is also about the transformation of this woman as an individual person. He wants her to realize her dignity as a person created in the image of God. Unlike men in positions of power that she has known, Jesus addresses her personally. He shows her his respect.

Jesus accepts the woman openly and lovingly as an adult and as a person. He can handle the situation and the relationship with her because he has nothing to be afraid of in himself. He is completely integrated in his own sexuality. Only a man who is can properly relate to women. So, Jesus says to her; I do not condemn you go and sin no more.

The woman must also learn mercy and she must learn mercy in the form of forgiveness. If she goes away feeling angry about her mistreatment that anger is going to eat away at her and maybe lead her to seek revenge or drive her into depression. If she goes away feeling ashamed that she was somehow to blame for what happened that shame is going to stop her from growing. If she goes away feeling fearful of men, that’s going to enter interfere with her future relationships.

Jesus conveys to her a new way of looking at herself. She is a daughter of God, not the property of men. She can rise above the injustices of her life, and she can claim her freedom. Jesus is challenging all of us here to look at ourselves and ask if we really show respect to others in our personal relationships. Are we secure enough in ourselves to seek the flourishing of others without being threatened by their struggles or by their success?

In order to relate to others with respect we must have nothing to fear in ourselves, and so we come to the conclusion of lent; we can all ask ourselves if there are things we tend to hide about ourselves that we fear that others might find out. To the extent that we’re hiding something then we cannot have authentic relationships with other people, and we might even tend to use them to continue our deception.

How do you get rid of evil? Not be eradicating it at all cost, but by entering the process Jesus has left us to transform evil into good through mercy.

At a personal level we must receive God’s mercy toward ourselves, and we must learn to forgive others. At a social level we must learn to exercise our power in the form of compassion and generosity that frees us to look beyond ourselves and to seek the common good; the flourishing of every man and woman created in the image of God. The spiritual maturity of any individual person is measured by their capacity to forgive. The health of any society is measured by its capacity to care for those who are at the lowest level of the society.

On this final Sunday of lent we asked the Lord to teach us mercy. We asked the Lord to give us the courage to stand up for justice, and we ask the Lord to strengthen our resolve to do our part in his great work of transforming evil into good.