Brief synopsis of the readings: In our first reading from Isaiah we find the Lord reminding the people of their escape from Egypt (“who opens a way in the sea and a path in the mighty waters, who leads out chariots and horsemen, a powerful army, till they lie prostate together, never to rise, snuffed out and quenched like a wick.”). Now the Lord announces this: “Wild beasts honor me, jackals and ostriches, for I put water in the desert and rivers in the wasteland.” John’s Gospel tells the story of the “woman caught in adultery.” Jesus came upon a mob who intended to stone a woman to death for the crime of adultery (interesting point: no mention is made of the man caught in adultery). According to the law she was guilty of a capital offense, and the crowd asked Jesus what he thought they should do. After bending down and writing something on the ground he told them: “Let the one among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” One by one they dropped their stones and left. This left Jesus alone with the woman. He asked her if there was anyone left to condemn her and she responded that there was not. Jesus then told her that he did not condemn her either. He told her to go but not to sin anymore.

Again, like last week, the connection between the first reading and the Gospel is not obvious. Isaiah speaks of the Lord reminding the people (who are returning from exile in Babylon) that they were not abandoned, as they feared. Instead God explicitly reminded them that far from being abandoned, were saved from slavery. And not only were they allowed to escape but when it seemed they were trapped by a body of water, God parted the sea. This allowed them to walk on dry land, but the water would then drown their pursuers.

Ironically we see that water contains the power of both life and death. We see in the “parting of the sea” that too much water can drown us. For the Egyptian army water was lethal. But once the escaped slaves crossed the seabed, their next danger was the lack of water. They spent the next forty years wandering in the desert where the search for water made the difference between life and death but only because they needed water.

But God, who parted the waters to save them, then provided water to sustain them. God ensured that no matter what, they would survive because God protected them.

So what does this have to do with the Gospel reading? Good question.

Today’s Gospel is often called “the woman caught in adultery.” I have to confess that I read this from the perspective of a joke I heard from one of my seminary professors:

Jesus is confronted by the Pharisees who present a woman who was accused of adultery. He tells the crowd: “Let the one among who is without sin cast the first stone.” Suddenly the crowd parts and a short, middle aged woman picks up a rock and nails the adulteress. Jesus then slumps his shoulders and says: “Cut it out mom, I’m trying to make a point.”

The joke is funny but it makes a good point: when Jesus asked the crowd his question about who has the right to throw the first stone, Jesus did have the right to throw it (and for Catholics, Mary did also since we believe that Mary was conceived without sin).

But he didn’t. The belief that Jesus was “like us in all things but sin” informs this reading. Instead of throwing a stone, he picked up a stick and wrote something in the sand. It was the only thing we know Jesus wrote, but we don’t know what it was. But it made the difference in how the Gospel scene played out. Those who held the stones in their hands were the scribes and Pharisees, the best educated men in Jewish society. We can only imagine the zeal they felt in the righteousness of stoning this woman to death, but their zeal compounded when they stumbled upon Jesus and believed they found a way to trap Jesus.

The Pharisees and scribes, from the very beginning, found Jesus an annoyance. He kept messing up their authority by challenging their belief that they owned the understanding of God’s Law. No one argued their understanding but they confused understanding with love.

They thought they had him: they challenged him to choose between what they knew (the law of Moses) with what Jesus taught (love). You see, Both Leviticus 20:10 and Deuteronomy 22:22 demand that both parties in adultery be stoned to death. Nobody denies that adultery is a bad thing, and those who choose to step outside their marriage create havoc for their selves, their spouses, and their families.

But Jesus recognized that this woman, like the rest of us, is not defined by her worst mistake. Jesus recognized that we are not condemned to live our lives in payment for the worst decision we’ve ever made.

We don’t know anything about this woman (or the man caught in the adultery) but we do know that adultery was a much larger sin than we see it today. We live in the the second decade of the twenty first century where sexual relations among consenting adults are seen as mutual. We view any sexual relationship between consentual adults as a “victimless crime.”

But this parable takes place in a different place. The marriage between a man and a woman clearly favored the man. If a married woman entered into a sexual relationship with another man, she is considered “damaged goods.” We should see this as progress in our understanding of the mutuality between men and women, but this understanding comes to us only with the gift of time.

This parable, difficult as it is to understand, is not about the mutuality of marriage, or the stability of the family, but of mercy. Nobody, including even Jesus, looked on this scene and concluded this woman’s choice was good. Instead Jesus looked on this woman with justice imbued with love. He didn’t make excuses what she did, but instead recognized that this choice did not inform all, or even the biggest part, of her life.

Perhaps she was coerced, perhaps she was lonely, or perhaps she was depressed with her current marriage. In any case her poor choice was not outside God’s mercy. We can only image the terror she felt when she believed that her poor choice brought her to the last few minutes of her life. We can only imagine how she felt when she viewed the crowd with rocks in their hands and anger in their eyes. And we can only imagine how she felt as she knew that the murder in their eyes looked to Moses and God for their justification.

And enter Jesus. Was he going to be on the side of Moses and the law or the side of this sinful woman? That was how the Pharisees and the scribes set it up. But, as many times, they were no match for Jesus. He didn’t take sides. He didn’t turn this event into winners and losers. He chose a form of mercy that included justice, and a form of justice that included mercy.

We don’t know what he wrote in the sand (and here we find the only occasion where Jesus actually wrote something). But whatever he wrote caused the crowd to drop the stones in their hands.

And while we don’t know what Jesus wrote, many of us suggest that he wrote down a list of sins. He wrote down “cheat” and the cheaters dropped their stones. He wrote down “liar” and the liars dropped their stones. He wrote down “gossip” and the gossipers dropped their stones. He wrote down “thief” and the thieves dropped their stones. And ironically, he wrote down “adulterer” and the adulterers dropped their stones

Many things unite us as people but sin is one of them. On some level we attempt to rank sins so that ours are at the bottom and others are at the top. This gives us the false belief that we are better because the sins of others are greater than ours.

And let’s face it: for much of our history we’ve pointed to sexual sins as the gravest. On some level it makes some sense: the ability to create life may well be the closest we get to the God’s power as the source of life.

When God gave us the ability to create life through sexual contact, God gave us our best gift. If a sacrament crashes the divine and the human into a relationship, nothing comes closer to that than the conception of a new human.

The woman (and her partner) caught in adultery misused love. Like water, we depend on love for life. We create life with people we love. But love, like water, can give us life or take it away. As adults we can look back on our life and see that our best and our worst moments came from our need for love.

The day we married our spouses, the day we first held our children, were the days when we loved at our best. But those days when we tried to use another’s love for us to manipulate behavior, those days when we threatened to withhold love from someone to get something we wanted, those were the days we misused love.

Our desire to love and be loved is as essential as our need for water. Again and again God teaches us higher needs by explaining basic needs.

God gives us the power to use water for good, and also to use love for good. But more importantly, God allows us to have a path back to wholeness when we misuse love. Unlike the Egyptians who were drowned, we have a path back when our use of love is mistaken.

Let us use love only in the best way we can, but understand that our failure is not the end of the road.