Dear Parishioner,

Today’s gospel, in this final stretch of Lent,  is such a powerful testimony to the mercy and justice of God and it is right that we are reminded of that. The question for each of us I suppose is whether we are deserving of God’s mercy?  

There is a story of a young French soldier who deserted Napoleon’s army only to be recaptured within days.  Like the woman in John, the young man was facing an automatic death sentence.  Whereupon the young soldier’s mother went to Napoleon and pleaded for mercy.  Napoleon’s reply was that the crime of desertion was so serious that he clearly did not deserve mercy. “I know he doesn’t deserve mercy,” the mother replied “but it wouldn’t be mercy is he deserved it.”

Jesus is really testing the patience of his audience, the scribes and Pharisees.  After all they are simply doing what the law requires. But Jesus does not criticise the law, rather he turns his attention to the lawyers, the accusers. He doesn’t say to them that the woman is innocent but neither is he persuaded by the innocence of her accusers. So we are invited to check our own track record on sin.  To the accusers’ credit they back off. 

The challenge for us is whether we can see ourselves not as the woman caught in adultery but as the person who is caught up in forgiveness.  The story itself is missing from the earliest manuscripts of John’s gospel perhaps suggesting that the early Church had some difficulty with Jesus and in the way that many people today have with God: really believing in what Graham Green has called “the awful strangeness of God’s mercy.”   But isn’t that the whole point of mercy, that no-one actually deserves it?  We might call for justice, and so we should because that is what being human demands of us. Mercy, on the other hand, is sheer gift.

Deacon Alex