“FIRST IMPRESSIONS”
FIFTH SUNDAY OF LENT -C-
APRIL 6, 2025
Isaiah 43: 16-21; Psalm 126; Philippians 3: 8-14; John 8: 1-11
By: Jude Siciliano, OP

Dear Preachers:

There aren’t many more dramatic stories in the bible than today’s gospel. The story starts well. John tells us Jesus comes to the temple in the morning. The mood is set: a new day’s light enters the holy place. Jesus takes a seat, the traditional posture of a teacher. To make the point clearer John even spells it out for us, Jesus “taught them.” At first glance the teaching seems interrupted. We wonder if we will ever get to hear what he had to teach them. But of course, the teaching is the unfolding story and we who hear it anew today are anxious to learn what teaching Jesus has for us.

The scribes and Pharisees considered themselves the official religious teachers. We meet the Pharisees frequently in these stories; they are the scrupulous practitioners of the religious observance, and the scribes are the legal experts. Men from these two groups bring the woman to Jesus and present him with a dilemma. If he went along with the religious law (e.g. Lev. 20:10, Deut. 22: 13-24) he would lose his reputation for mercy and as one who had welcomed sinners. He would also anger the Romans, since the Jewish people could not impose the death penalty. On the other hand, if Jesus pardoned the woman, he would be accused of breaking the Mosaic law; and more, he might have been seen as one who condones adultery.

The modern reader detects other factors in the story. At a recent scripture reflection with a group of parishioners, we read this story and no sooner had the reading, and a minute of silent reflection ended than a woman spoke up, “Where’s the guy? It takes two to tango. I bet those men let him go!” (Another reason, when possible, for the preacher to get varied input on a passage: a chance to hear the scriptures from another perspective.) We noted that the woman isn’t even named. For the accusers, the woman is just a shameless “case in point” to be used as an instrument to trap Jesus. But God wants no person used, treated as a thing. Remember that in Genesis, humans were created by God and in God’s image and likeness, animated by God’s breath/Spirit. The learned religious leaders failed to see God’s image and breath in the one they called “this woman.”

For the charge of adultery to stick, two men and only men, would have had to be witnesses. What a humiliating situation for the woman; made to stand in public before a crowd of accusers and, I am sure, curious spectators. The cards are stacked against her. I think of some people on death row I know who were too poor to afford good lawyers, have spent years on the row hoping to get someone to review their case, pay for DNA tests, move their appeals process along, etc. The woman was guilty, all that was left was for her execution to be carried out. The woman’s fate is sealed, yet I am struck by the opening lines of the Isaiah reading: God “opens a way in the sea, and a pathway in the mighty waters....” The allusion, of course, is to the exodus from Egypt. God’s people were in vise-like grip, trapped with no future. But God “opened a way” for them. The prophet reminds his contemporaries caught in a new slavery, this time in Babylon, that their God can do again what God did for them once before—free them from bondage, get them out of an impossible bind.

Isaiah tells the people they should look back to what God once did for them and see it, not as something that just happened long ago, but to trust that God can do it again. In fact, their looking to their past will not have to be with a nostalgia to events that are only a distant memory. God will act again on their behalf. “Remember not the events of the past, the things of long ago consider not; see I am doing something new! Now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?” The woman is in the bind Israel was in and she too needs to be let out of a trap. God needs to do “something new” for her.

So often people will say, as they reflect on a past crisis or difficult time, “I would never have gotten through that had God not helped me and given me strength!” We look back at what seemed impossibly difficult and only later, after we passed through the period of trial, see the hand of God helping us. Psalm 23, everyone’s favorite, I bet, describes that strong guiding presence as “your rod and staff.” Well, Isaiah also invites us to remember how God stood with us and to trust that in whatever bind we currently are in or will get into at a future time, that God’s help will “spring forth.” In fact, look closer, Isaiah invites, God is already doing something for you—even in the “wasteland.”

Wasn’t this true for the woman caught in adultery? She was in the wasteland of guilt and surrounded by Isaiah’s “jackals” who wanted her end. Even more, she was just being used to trap Jesus. She must have felt terribly alone; but we believers can see what she did not--- in her wasteland God was “doing something new.” Jesus was with her. The scriptures don’t tell us what Jesus was writing on the ground. Throughout history there have been guesses by biblical scholars and the pious. Whatever he wrote is not the point. But from his silent moment came a word that, like the creative word God spoke in the beginning of Genesis, shattered the darkness with God’s light and creative power.

John’s gospel has strong ties to Genesis. The first book starts with the creation account. John’s gospel opens in a similar way, “In the beginning....” John is showing that Jesus is the Word and wisdom of God, recreating a broken and sinful humanity. Isaiah reminds us that throughout the history of God’s people, God was always at work in the process of recreation. God is always ready to forgive us the sin that defaces the Creator’s image in us and make of us a new creation, free from sin’s destructive control. This forgiveness and new life is what the woman experienced at Jesus’ word.

Maybe we have been successful in our chosen Lenten observance—or not. Taking our cue from today’s readings, we are stirred to a Lenten prayer of thanksgiving at this Eucharist. The psalm response to the first reading sets the tone for our prayer today. Even as we remember the great deeds God has done for us, we take Isaiah’s advice and move our gaze from the past to the present—and then to the future. As we look back and see the hand of God at moments of need and reflect on the saving work God did for us in Jesus’ life, we can say, with the psalmist, “The Lord has done great things for us; we are filled with joy.” We are thankful that God was there for us when we were “captives,” when we sowed “in tears” and when we reaped a harvest of “rejoicing” (Psalm 126). And in our prayer of thanksgiving, we also express the firm hope that God will lead us out of any barren place we now or in the future will experience.

How could Isaiah have known that the “something new” God had planned for us was Jesus? Today’s gospel shows how he was the oasis for the woman in her wasteland. Jesus makes a new way of living God’s law possible, not by relying on external rules and observances, but on the Spirit’s new life given us at baptism—our “rivers in the wasteland.” Jesus set the woman free from the trap of her accusers as well as from her sin, “Neither do I condemn you, from now on do not sin anymore.” As with the woman, so with us, Jesus frees us from our past sin, reanimates God’s image in us and sets us free and now able to overcome sin. The woman was as good as dead but was given new life through his freeing word. So, it is with us this Lent, we stand aware of our sins before God and Jesus’ word frees us to live a new life—Isaiah was right, God has done “a new thing” for us.

Click here for a link to this Sunday’s readings:
https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/040625-YearC.cfm