The story of the woman caught in adultery is a favorite among those who want to find in Jesus a rulebreaker and rebel, who want to take the message of mercy and strip it bare of any connection with justice or morality.
To find these things requires a certain deliberate misreading of the story. We’d have to ignore that final line “Go and sin no more” and replace it with something generic and affirming: Hey, you do you. We’d also have to act as if Jesus in fact fell right into the trap set for him by the Pharisees. You see, they want him to downplay the sin or relativize it so that they can catch him violating the law of Moses. Either that, or they want him to condemn the woman to death and thereby condemn himself by disobedience to Roman authority, which alone could authorize such punishment. He does neither of those things. He knows the game they’re playing, and he wants none of it.
We read through this part, and it tends to come across as happening faster than it probably did. It’s hard to insert an awkward pause and silence into scriptural narrative, but John tries to make it pretty clear with this odd detail of Jesus bending down and writing in the dirt. The Pharisees come out in front of the crowd—everyone’s eyes on them, and on Jesus. They demand a response. Everyone is on edge, wondering what he’ll say, whether it will enrage them or stir up the crowd or get him arrested by the soldiers no doubt watching. And he just . . . ignores them. It’s really remarkable. That’s something to remember the next time we’re baited by the algorithms that feed on our constant sense of outrage.
It is only after some time, when no doubt the silence became deafening, when Jesus has deftly shown his mastery over the situation, that they press him again, and he says, almost casually: “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.” Again, it’s not “Stop this nonsense about sin and let’s all get along!” or “Destroy the sinner.” It is a calm nod to both justice and mercy. After all, some commentators think the whole thing may be staged: Whether the woman actually committed adultery or not, the setup is a bit too convenient. The implication is that the authorities don’t really care anything about this woman or her sins; they’re only interested in trapping Jesus. The finger of judgment is pointed at him more than at her. St. Bede says that by turning to the ground, the Lord suggests that before making judgments we should look to our own faults so as to avoid being unjust or unmerciful. Alcuin also suggests that the ground is a sign of the human heart, and that when faced with our neighbors’ faults, we should “not immediately and rashly to condemn them, but after searching our own hearts to begin with, examine them attentively with the finger of discretion.”
Another small but significant detail in John is that the elders among the scribes leave first—the wiser men, in other words, realize that their trap has failed. Certainly it is possible that they are convicted by the Lord’s words and realize that they are not completely without sin. More likely, though, is a calculated choice to risk losing the moral high ground with the crowd rather than risk being arrested.
There’s more to this than Jesus just being clever. Someone else could have, in principle, made the same diffusive argument. But John wants to show us in his Gospel over and over that this man is himself the key to everything. Especially in the backdrop of the Temple, we should imagine the signs and symbols of that great structure: the large candelabras, the altar, the great doors, the secret interior sanctuary. But Jesus says, “I am the light of the world. I am the door. I am the bread that came down from heaven. Likely this scene takes place around the time of the feast of tabernacles, when the altar would be ceremoniously washed with large quantities of water, suggesting the spring flowing from the Temple in the end of the Book of Ezekiel. And here is Jesus, the true living water. Whereas the dust of the ground is a sign of our condemnation, our falling back into the earth, he is the cleansing water that transforms us with the life of heaven.
As the prophet says, “Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?” (Isa. 43:19). In Christ we are no longer trapped between condemnation and rebellion. The law was just, but, on its own, it insufficiently manifested the divine mercy. The solution here isn’t to reject the law, or to dig in with greater scrupulosity, but rather to accept that all law is superseded in the presence of the lawgiver. He wrote the law. He is the law, for he is the eternal Word of the Father. He is both justice and mercy, full of both righteous hatred of evil and unbounded loving kindness to the penitent.
Whatever the circumstances of the woman in John 8, Jesus offers her something new. “Go and sin no more.” This is a moment of conversion, turning away from the past toward the future gained for us by the Lord’s mercy. Today’s readings provide stark language about this newness. In Isaiah: “Remember not the former things, nor consider the things of old” (43:18). In Philippians: “I count all things to be but loss for the excellent knowledge of Jesus Christ my Lord; for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them but as dung, that I may gain Christ” (3:8). I intentionally use a more literal old translation, because where Douay and King James use “dung,” most of our modern translations use polite terms like “rubbish” and “refuse.” But the Greek word is maybe even more accurately translated as a word for excrement not appropriate for a Sunday-morning pulpit!
This should suggest that St. Paul really means business. Just as Isaiah instructs us to “remember not the former things,” the apostle insists that he is “forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead (3:13). Surely there is a kind of exaggerated rhetoric here amid the Bible’s otherwise routine instruction to remember things. And indeed I think it would be a mistake to read these verses as if they instructed us literally to forget everything about the past—if the Church believed that, we wouldn’t have kept these words of Scripture. Yet conversion must really mean a new start, and the forgiveness of sins must really be the forgiveness of sins.
To make sense of this, we should consider the paradox of the Lord’s eternal memory alongside his promise to “remember not” our sins. Going to confession is an act of remembering in order to forget. Being baptized is an act of forgetting ourselves so that we can be remembered by God. Likewise, all the sacraments are acts of remembering and forgetting.
I suppose that is a clever way of thinking about things, but maybe not terribly helpful in itself. What I think we ought to remember about the story in John 8 is this: that when we are thrown down into the dust by the false dilemmas of this world, whether we’re “caught in the act” of some immorality, or whether we’re caught in the snares of those who want to use us in their political games, or whether we are stuck in the business of rounding up people to condemn . . . Jesus is there in the dust with us, offering us the cleansing water—that is, himself—that empowers us to get up and walk away toward a better life. At the end of our lives—and I think this is what St. Paul means—the final and most important thing is whether we remember Jesus. Because we know that he will never forget us.