Went Home With Head Held High

We can take many lessons from the Woman Caught in Adultery story from today’s Gospel.  The first is obvious, forgiveness.  However there are more lessons, such as “the angry and righteous mob,” “feelings of humiliation,” “feelings of defeat,” and most of all – feelings of relief and happiness.

The angry mob who wanted to stone this woman to death had become the self righteous and angry mob.  They wanted to make sure that they rooted out all that of which was immoral from their sight with no second thought to anything, this is what usually happens in the mob mentality, it is a mentality we see today often in our political world where everyone makes their own candidate the Messiah and the other guy a demon and these feelings are disguised and bathed in one’s own self righteousness which then makes it easy to go from point a to point b, i.e. catching the woman in the act and then dragging her through the streets and getting ready to kill her.

The feelings the woman had would have been of fear but also humiliation as now she is exposed publicly.  However, those same feelings got turned around on the angry mob as Jesus challenged them in looking for the person who had no sin to cast the first stone; it was they who now felt humiliation.  The question for those persons would have been, did they finally understand mercy or did they walk away bitter?

The woman finally would feel relief in that she was not going to die that day or in that fashion and she also felt great happiness as the sin of adultery, which in fact is a very grave sin had been lifted from her.  She already paid the price and penance for those sins, being dragged through the street and almost stoned death would have been enough much more than just saying two rosaries.   I like to picture in my own mind, Jesus picking her up by the hand and looking at her face to face.  I am sure when her eyes met His, her knowledge of Jesus went beyond Him just being a nice guy but someone who could take away her sins.

Two groups of people came out that day, on the trip out the mob held their heads high in self righteousness and the woman held her head low in humiliation but on their journey back to their homes the mob went home with heads held low and the woman now made clean went home with head held high, Amen!