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April 7, 2022In the first reading, God describes the covenant He has made with Abram: he will have a long line of children and land that is their own. The reading ends with a somewhat ominous expectation that God expects the newly renamed Abraham and his descendants to be faithful to this covenant.
We all know the tragedies that follow: the children of Abraham repeatedly fail to uphold their covenant with God: they engage in false worship and give their bodies over to greed, lust, and violence. As a result, they lost their personal, social, and political autonomy. The shekinah, the glory of God that rested in the Temple, departed. This is where the drama of today’s Gospel begins: a crucial detail is noted at the beginning of this eighth chapter in John’s Gospel: Jesus comes to the Temple area from the Mount of Olives. This was from the east, the same direction that God’s shekinah had departed centuries before. Jesus, truly God and man, is returning to the kabod YHWH, the mercy seat that rested atop the Ark of the Covenant. He is revealing to us the depths of His mercy, the extremes to which he will go to maintain the covenant made with Abraham. After forgiving the woman caught in adultery, Jesus converses with the Pharisees and then the Jews who believed in Him, using the title ego eimi - the phrase in Greek that God spoke to Moses on Mount Sinai - to describe Himself.
Each of us are like the woman caught in adultery: we have all given our soul, our mind, heart, and body over to false gods. We have experienced the love of God, the blessings that accompany our communion with Him, and we still exchange the truth for lies. The joy to be found in Lent is how God does not remain far off but approaches us in the depths of our sin and persistently extends His hand of mercy.
