Whenever I hear Jesus’ encounter with the woman caught in adultery, my first question inevitably is, where is her partner? After all, you can’t commit adultery by yourself. He would be just as guilty and, depending on circumstances, if the episode of Susanna is any guide, maybe even more so.
I think our Psalm this evening, the beautiful and well-known Psalm twenty-three, provides us with a key to our readings for today. This is one of those Psalms that is often slightly off in many English translations. In the revised edition of the New American Bible, which is our American Catholic Bible, the first verse is translated quite accurately: “The LORD is my shepherd, there is nothing I lack.”1
The first part of the last verse of Psalm 23, also needs a corrective translation. Often it is translated as “Only goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life.” A better translation is in the revised New American Bible: “Indeed, goodness and mercy will pursue me all the days of my life” (italics mine).2
The better translation is important because it gives us a more accurate insight into God’s very nature. God, who is Goodness and who is Mercy, doesn’t just passively follow you. God actively pursues you! This is what a good shepherd does: seek out the lost sheep.
Tonight, we hear about two women. One, Susanna, is innocent, the unwitting victim of wicked men, while the other, who remains nameless, is by all indications guilty, caught in the very act of adultery.
The good news we can take away from this is that God not only vindicates the innocent. Through Jesus Christ, even the guilty can be vindicated. God pursues you with no less gentleness, kindness, and mercy than he pursued the woman caught in adultery, arriving on the scene just in time.
While apostolic credentials of the pericope of Jesus' encounter with the woman taken in adultery is not in question, it was not clear to the Church for some time in which Gospel it belonged. It fits well in John’s Gospel because, like the three Gospels we proclaim for the Scrutiny of the Elect, you can put yourself in the place of the Samaritan woman whom Jesus knew everything about and desired to save all the more, of the blind to whom the Lord gave sight, and Lazarus, who he raised from the dead, it is easy to be the woman caught in adultery.
Of course, this is not to accuse everyone of adultery. It is merely to point out that we’re all sinners in need of God’s forgiveness. As we read in 1 John: “If we say, ‘We are without sin,’ we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.”3 Through Jesus Christ, by the Holy Spirit’s power, God is eager to forgive you. This is what the woman’s adulterous partner ran away from.
What is amazing is that is precisely through our lack that Christ gives us everything. He makes our fall the source of redemption. This may be his greatest miracle of all!
So badly does God want to forgive you that the first gift the Risen Lord gave to his Church after his resurrection was the Sacrament of Penance.4 It is through this sacrament you are reconciled to God and to the Church. It is through this sacrament that Christ says, “Neither do I condemn you. Go, and from now on do not sin any more.”5
Jesus is always eager to meet you wherever you are. But he is not content to leave you where he found you. The Good Shepherd pursues you through the dark valley, accompanies you through (if you let him), sets a table before you, anoints your head with oil, and fills your cup to overflowing. Jesus+nothing=everything.
1 Psalm 23:1.↩
2 Psalm 23:6.↩
3 1 John 1:8.↩
4 John 8:11.↩
5 John 20:19-23.↩
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