A joke associated with today’s Gospel has Jesus turning around, as a boulder comes towards the woman caught in adultery. Jesus then says, “Ah, Mom, c’mon.”

I heard that joke over 20 years ago, while in high school. I was surprised to check the internet and there is a whole dialogue on it with different versions of the joke and people arguing about whether the joke is funny or not, whether the writers accept the Catholic belief in the sinlessness of Mary, whether this is just an example of mothers showing up their children, whether God the Father could have dropped a rock from Heaven to kill the woman, etc.

But joke analysis aside, if the sinless Blessed Mother had been present in this situation, would she have been justified in throwing a stone at the adulteress?

Well, first let’s look at Moses’ command that adulterous women be executed. The Old Testament books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy both have this commandment, with Leviticus having it as a direct command from God to Moses, while Deuteronomy has it as a command Moses gave the Israelites right before he died. However, in both Old Testament books it says that both the man and the woman are to be executed. In the scene from today’s Gospel it seems that the man gets away unpunished, while the woman is about to be killed.

In the book of Deuteronomy Moses also says that the witnesses, and there must be 2 for an execution, are to cast the first stones. Here Jesus gives a new commandment – that those who are without sin are to cast the first stones.

So, why is Jesus contradicting the Old Testament? Don’t we believe that both the Old and New Testaments are God’s word, inspired by the Holy Spirit? We do believe this, but here is one of those situations where our Catholic approach of reading the Bible not as fundamentalists, thinking that every word is literally true, according to their meanings in 2007 English, helps us to get at what it is that God is trying to tell us.

For one thing, we need to remember that Jesus Christ is the fullness of God’s revelation of Himself to the world. That’s why John’s Gospel begins by calling Jesus “The Word.” Jesus is THE Word which says it all about God. Until Jesus came, the Jewish people were the people who knew God the best, but they still did not know everything there was to know about God. Moses was guided by the Holy Spirit, but was a fallible human being. 

Reading the Old Testament through the prism of Jesus, we can understand that adultery is a very serious sin – Jesus Himself tells the woman, “Go, and from now on do not sin any more.” But Jesus did not come into the world to put sinners to death, but instead to offer them (us) life.

The people who are being condemned in a way in today’s Gospel are the people who are in a rush to judgment. When Jesus starts writing in the sand, He evokes the prophet Jeremiah, who wrote, "Those who turn away from thee shall be written in the earth, for they have forsaken the fountain of living water."

 Jesus is the source of this living water, and yet instead of wanting to drink up all that Jesus could share with them, the people in the Gospel today wanted to trap Him and have Him put to death.

We can all be tempted to be like those people. Most of us have individuals or groups that we judge to be unworthy of our forgiveness, people we’d like to see punished.

St. Paul used to be like us in that regard – he approved of the stoning to death of St. Stephen, whom he considered to be a heretic. And yet in today’s 2^nd reading Paul says, “I consider everything as a loss, because of the supreme good of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.”

Because of this relationship of love with Jesus, and because of his consciousness of being forgiven by Jesus, Paul was able to give up the desire to see other people punished.

Mary did not have to be grateful for being forgiven of sin, since she is sinless, but like Paul she knew that the relationship of love she shares with Jesus is worth much more than getting even seemingly justifiable revenge against sinners.

We ask Our Lord to help us turn away from our own desires in this regard, so that our names won’t be written in the dust for having turned away from the source of living water.