This coming Sunday is the 5th Sunday in Lent and our gospel is the “women caught in adultery.” Today we consider  the challenge presented to Jesus by the Jewish leaders. It is a challenge which also includes a callus and demeaning treatment of the women. If she had committed adultery the previous evening , then have these opponents been holding her during the night and waiting for Jesus to show up in order to use her to test him? Has been apprehended in the early hours of the morning? In either case her fear would have been palpable.  Putting her in the midst of the crowd would have added public humiliation. 

The scene is a mixture of zealous righteousness that seeks to enact the law without pardon or quarter, the leadership who want to trap Jesus between mercy and the Law, and a woman caught in sin, fearing for her life.  The Law commands a stoning to death as punishment for her transgressions. More precisely the law speaks of the death of both the man and the woman involved (Lev 20:10; Deut 22:22-24). The law makes it clear that stoning could only take place after a careful trial, which included the chance for the condemned to confess his or her wrong (m. Sanhedrin 6:1-4). 

True righteousness would have some measure of concern for her soul. True righteousness would be free from deceitfulness, not hiding behind loyalty to Moses for other intentions. Since the law says both the man and the woman who commit adultery are to be killed, we are left wondering why the man was not brought in as well. It may be that he had escaped, but the fact that only the woman is brought raises suspicions and does not speak well of the  true object of their zeal.

This situation is apparently just an attempt to entrap Jesus (v. 6). If he is lax toward the law, then he is condemned. But if he holds a strict line, then he has allowed them to prevail in their merciless treatment of this woman and has opened himself up to trouble from the Romans, for he will be held responsible if the stoning proceeds. The leaders of Israel are putting God to the test in the person of his Son, repeating the Israelites’ historical pattern on more than one occasion in the wilderness at Meribah and Massah (Ex 17:2; Num 20:13; cf. Deut 6:16; Ps 95:8-9; 106:14).

“Most interpreters accept the view that Jesus faced a charge under either Roman law or the law of Moses. If he said ‘Stone her,’ he would lay himself open to the charge of counseling action contrary to Roman law, which did not provide for a death penalty in such cases. If he said ‘Do not stone her,’ he could be charged with offending against the law of God. The question was a loaded one. Either answer would involve Jesus in difficulties. This may indeed be the dilemma his opponents had in mind” (Morris, 782)

They wanted a legal basis on which to accuse him. Jesus’ reaction was to ignore them.

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Image Credit: Detail of “Christ and the Adulteress” Rembrandt, 1644 | National Gallery London | PD-US