Jesus returned to the Mount of Olives, but early the next morning he was back again at the Temple. A crowd soon gathered, and he sat down and taught them. As he was speaking, the teachers of religious law and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in the act of adultery. They put her in front of the crowd.

“Teacher,” they said to Jesus, “this woman was caught in the act of adultery. The law of Moses says to stone her. What do you say?”

They were trying to trap him into saying something they could use against him, but Jesus stooped down and wrote in the dust with his finger.

They kept demanding an answer, so he stood up again and said, “All right, but let the one who has never sinned throw the first stone!” Then he stooped down again and wrote in the dust.

When the accusers heard this, they slipped away one by one, beginning with the oldest, until only Jesus was left in the middle of the crowd with the woman. Then Jesus stood up again and said to the woman, “Where are your accusers? Didn’t even one of them condemn you?”

“No, Lord,” she said.And Jesus said,

“Neither do I. Go and sin no more.”
John 8:1-11

Dear God, when the thought occurred to me a year or two ago that this woman’s fate of potentially being stoned could have been Jesus’s mother’s fate with him had Joseph not acted the way he did, it gave me a whole new perspective on Jesus’s emotions in this story. Now, this woman was apparently guilty of things Mary wasn’t, but still. His mom could have been disgraced and stoned falsely. The Old Testament reading today was from the parts of Daniel that are in the Catholic Bible but not in the Protestant one. Susanna was falsely accused and almost killed until Daniel intervened. Mary could have been falsely accused, but Joseph took responsibility in the world’s eyes. But this woman. This woman actually needed the forgiveness and mercy Jesus gave her that day.

I wonder why Jesus did it. Would he have intervened if he just heard about them stoning her and they hadn’t brought her to him to test him? How lucky is she that they wanted to test Jesus with her? Did Jesus forgive her because he was proving a point to the Pharisees, or was she pitiful, looking for mercy, and he gave it to her?

Father, first, I need your mercy. I have sinned. In my thoughts and in my words. In what I have done, and what I have failed to do. Through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault. There for I ask you to forgive me. I ask for all the angels and the saints to pray for me. And help me to be the forgiveness of Jesus to others.

I pray this in Jesus and with your Holy Spirit,

Amen