Additional Homily for the Fifth Sunday of Lent

Homily delivered by Fr Nicholas King SJ

Scripture Readings: Isaiah 43:16-21; Philippians 3:8-14; John 8:1-11

This Sunday sees us plunge deeper into the darker part of Lent. In the old days, this was Passion Sunday, when crucifixes and statues were veiled in purple (and in this church they still are!). But the tone of our readings is, for all that, quite cheerful: “fear not, for I have redeemed you”, says God in our first reading, from Isaiah, “I have grasped you by the hand; I set you as a light for the nations”. Not only that, but the prophet reminds the Israelites whom he is trying to persuade to go home across the desert to Jerusalem, of the time when God took them on that other journey, across the Red Sea; this is going to be a New Exodus, and an even better one: “do not remember the events of the past; do not consider the things of old... I am doing something new”. This is a very cheerful prospect. 

 The psalm is equally cheerful, one of the great “songs of ascent” that pilgrims used to sing as they went up to Jerusalem on pilgrimage. Here they are remembering what it was like to come back from that Exodus: “we thought we were dreaming; our mouths filled with laughter, our tongues sang for joy”. That return was painful and difficult, so the sadness is not far away, but the cheerful mood comes from knowing what God has done. 

 You get the same cheerfulness in the second reading, where Paul is writing from a Roman prison (from which he would not ordinarily expect to emerge alive). He lists all those things in his CV that might be said to give him confidence, and rejects them all as “garbage”. He uses a metaphor from athletics to indicate his determination to look ahead: “forgetting what happened in the first half and looking ahead to the second: I'm going for goal, to the Prize that lies at the end, as God in Jesus Christ calls me upwards”.  And above all, note his emphasis on “the power of the resurrection”, which for Saint Paul is the heart of Christianity. We are currently preparing to celebrate the great feast of the resurrection; that is what Lent is all about, and the source of our cheerfulness. 

 Today's gospel is an extraordinary piece of work; it does not come from the hand of the 4th evangelist, which is where it finds itself in most of our bibles; but it carries the unmistakable accents of Jesus himself, and we must be grateful to whoever it was that put it here back in the first or second century. Jesus is in the Temple, as often in Luke’s gospel, and talking to the people; then the people just disappear, and their place is taken by “scribes and Pharisees”. We know this means trouble; and so it proves. First, they “are bringing a woman who has been caught in adultery”; now it takes two to commit adultery, as you may have noticed, but there is no reference here to the lady’s partner. Significantly, “they placed her in the middle”, so she is the obvious centre of attention. And we know they're out to get her. Then we hear her crime, repeated, and made more explicit: “this Woman has been taken in the Act of Committing Adultery”. They want to know if Jesus will go along with Moses, who had “commanded that women of this sort be stoned”, and ask him, “What is your view?”. Then we don't really need to be told that “they were testing him to get some grounds for an accusation against him”, but it is included in the story so that we may be aware how serious the problem is. 

 Jesus will not play their game but “bent down and started writing on the ground”. They insist however, and he brings the murderous project to an end by a single line: “let the sinless one among you be the first to throw a stone”. Then, decisively, “he once more bent down and started writing on the ground”. He doesn't trouble to watch what they're going to do; but we watch as they “started to go out one by one beginning from the elders”. 

 Then for the first time the woman appears as a character in her own right, alone with Jesus, face to face. And for the first time someone actually speaks to her: “Jesus bent up and said to her, ‘Woman where are they? Did no one condemn you?’.”  

 Now at last she speaks; and it is quite a statement: “Nobody, Lord”, which is exactly how we should address Jesus in the New Testament. Just one last word in this beautiful story: “Neither do I condemn you. Off you go, and from now on, no more sinning.” 

 It is an extraordinary tale, this, and at the end we and the woman go off rejoicing.