Homily

With this fifth Sunday, Lent approaches its end and begins down the path towards the great and holy week of the passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus. On more than one occasion during this season, we have been urged to convert our hearts, and yet each one of us finds him or herself much the same as he or she was before. Perhaps we have listened to the word of God too little, and it has not taken root in our hearts or in the realities of our lives. Overall, it has transformed us too little. We are not saying this because of some obsession with evaluating or to re-propose a fruitless sense of pessimism. Rather, I believe that we are all well aware of how difficult it is for the Lord’s time to find its place in the convulsive running of our daily lives and how many obstacles God’s feelings and invitations find in the wild forest of our feelings and the many invitations that we receive every day. Often have we suffocated the favourable time of Lent with our commitments, with our worries, and, why not, with the banalities that overtake and subjugate us. And so we have all stayed the same. This Sunday comes to us once again, and, in a certain sense, it is dragging us in front of Jesus one more time. And in front of Jesus, it is impossible to feel like that Pharisee who praised himself because Jesus is the Lord of mercy and not an exacting creditor.
It is the dawn of a new day and Jesus, John’s Gospel notes, is again teaching in the temple. A throng of people surrounds him. Suddenly, the circle of listeners is broken by a group of scribes and Pharisees who push forward a woman caught in adultery. They draw her, throwing her into the middle of the circle, right in front of Jesus, and ask him if the law of Moses should be applied or not. This law, they say, prescribes "stoning women such as this" (the scribes and Pharisees refer to the prescriptions contained in Leviticus 20:10, and in Deuteronomy 22:22-24, which provide for death for adulterers). In truth they are not motivated by zeal for the law and even less are they interested in this woman’s drama. They want to throw a trap at the young prophet from Nazareth in order to discredit him before the people who, in ever increasing numbers, run to hear him.
They think that if Jesus condemns the woman, he goes against his so-greatly-acclaimed mercy; if he forgives her, he goes against the law. In either case, he comes out the loser. But Jesus "bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground." His behaviour is strange; Jesus is silent, as he will be during the passion in front of people like Pilate and Herod. The Lord of the Word, the man who had made preaching his life and service to the point of dying, now remains silent. He bends down and writes in the dust. We do not know what Jesus is writing or thinking at this moment. We can, however, imagine how annoyed the Pharisees felt, and we can guess what lies in the heart of that woman, whose only hope of survival is tied to a man who has not spoken a word or made any sign. After the Pharisees insist that he say something, Jesus raises his head and speaks words that shed a little light on his thoughts: "Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her." And he bends down again to write on the ground. His answer disarms them all. Struck by these words, "they went away, one by one, beginning with the elders," the evangelist remarks wryly. Only Jesus remains with the woman. They come face-to-face with one another: misery and mercy.
At this point Jesus begins to speak again, as he usually does, with his tone of voice, his passion, his tenderness, and his firmness. He lifts his head and asks the woman: "Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?" And she responds: "No one, sir." Jesus’ words become profound, not at all indifferent, but rather full of mercy. His words are the good words that only the Lord knows how to say: "Neither do I condemn you. Go your way, and from now on do not sin again." Jesus was the only one who could have lifted his hand and thrown stones to kill the woman; he was the only just one. But instead he takes her by the hand and lifts her from the ground; in truth, he was lifting her up from her miserable situation and setting her back on her feet. Jesus did not come to condemn, much less to hand a woman over to death by stoning; he came to speak and to raise the poor and sinners back to life. He turned to the woman and said: "Go your way," as if to say, go back to life, continue on your journey. And he adds: "Do not sin again," that is, walk on the path that I have set for you, the path of mercy and forgiveness. This is the path on which, from Sunday to Sunday, the Lord sets for those who come to him.