“This passage is about sin, but I want to ask about whose sin, right,” asks Amirah Orozco, a doctoral student in systematic theology at the University of Notre Dame. Raised on the U.S.-Mexico border between El Paso, Texas, and Juarez, Chihuahua, Amirah reflects on the woman caught in adultery(Jn 8:1-11), whom Jesus stops from being stoned to death by a group of men who want to punish her, and test Jesus. “The woman is concerned about her sin,” Amirah reflects. “What if we made it also about the sin of the men who want to kill her?”
On this episode of “Preach” for the Fifth Sunday of Lent, Year C, Amirah joins host Ricardo da Silva, S.J., to offer a woman’s perspective on the adulterous woman that draws insight from liberation theologies. “Although personal sin is real, it is clear to us now that structures are set up in such a way that social sin becomes possible for us to talk about.” Amirah says. “The God of great mercy reminds us that if social sin is possible, so too is social mercy and forgiveness.”
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Scripture Readings for the Fifth Sunday of Lent, Year C
First Reading: Is 43:16-21
Responsorial Psalm: Ps 126:1-2, 2-3, 4-5, 6
Second Reading: Phil 3:8-14
Gospel: Jn 8:1-11
You can find the full text of the readings here.
A Homily for the Fifth Sunday of Lent, Year C, by Amirah Orozco
Violence against women is one of the ills in the world least visible to the public eye. It often happens in the privacy of homes and goes unreported for a variety of reasons. The exceptions to this are when high profile women speak out often against high profile men. It feels now like a lifetime ago that Dr. Christine Blasey Ford testified in front of a Senate Judiciary Committee in 2018 in rather gruesome detail about an assault she remembered having happened when she was only 15 years old. Many thought that the media response to her and even the questions the senators asked her compared far better to Anita Hill’s testimony in 1991. In a podcast in March of last year. Dr. Ford though tells a very different experience of testifying. She described it as re-traumatizing and explained how she and her family had to move hotels multiple times due to safety concerns and were kicked out of their California home. She had predicted that her credibility would be questioned, but she did not predict how much backlash she would receive from the broader public and how much it would affect the life of her family in particular.
The adulterous woman in the Gospel for today is brought to Jesus by a group of men who want, the text says, to test Jesus. The Gospel writer tells us that this scene took place while Jesus was teaching the temple and it follows the passage that explains the unbelief of the religious leadership. The woman says few words, and her demeanor is not revealed to us through the text, but we can imagine that she was forcefully dragged here and stood fearful for what this great teacher might tell these men to do. Jesus was also Jewish, also knew the laws of Moses that they cited at him, and the woman would have known that they were correct—the punishment for this was death by stoning. What we see in this moment then is a woman who believes herself to be between life and death.
Scholars almost all agree that this passage was added at a later date and was not included as a part of the original Greek text. The natural question for an inquiring mind is: What does this passage reveal that is unique in the Gospel of John? Given that it was added later, we might ask this question in a way that seeks only to get inside the mind of a historical person. The more theological question, though, is what does how Jesus acts in the gospel say to us, listeners of podcasts, readers of Catholic magazines, those of us who want to follow Jesus in 2025? What does this passage say about the Jesus of Nazareth who we proclaim as Christ?
This passage is overwhelmingly interpreted throughout history as a passage about mercy. The way it is positioned in the lectionary for the Roman Catholic Church seems to highlight that aspect of it as well. It is from this passage that we get the words we hear often, “go and sin no more.” It is about a forgiving God who is merciful, kind and seeks conversion in people around him, in us today, to turn away from sin so as to turn towards God.
Feminist and liberation theologians have expanded our vocabulary on sin by pointing to the fact that now more than ever before in history, we know root causes of poverty, oppression and violence. Although personal sin is real, it is clear to us now that structures are set up in such a way that social sin becomes possible for us to talk about. The God of great mercy reminds us that if social sin is possible, so too is social mercy and forgiveness.
As we journey through Lent, this passage comes towards the end of our time dedicated to preparing ourselves for the Easter experience. It is a reminder that Lent is not only about sins, but also about striving for forgiveness. Forgiveness, though, has never meant that it is given without an expected change. This is true sacramentally, biblically and socially. Forgiveness requires that there be a change in the status of relationship with God, or between oppressed and oppressor. While we will continually be offered forgiveness from a patient, God, it is also true that each time we sin in the same way, we reject that grace of forgiveness. Social sin is no different than this. God calls us to seek forgiveness by making social change, by creating a world anew according to the renewing grace of God’s forgiving love. As Pope Francis explains in Fratelli Tutti, to forgive in this way, to forgive by making change, is to humanize. To humanize is necessarily to draw someone away from sin towards their own humanity. To truly forgive oppressors, then structures must be adjusted to inhibit them from sinning again in the same way.
One of what I find to be one of the coolest parts of today’s Gospel is that it is the only time where we see Jesus write. While we see Jesus perform miracles of healing with his hands, the word epigraphan here, which can also mean draw, is a creative power of Jesus using his hands that we do not see elsewhere. He leans down and writes with his fingers in the sand. It is first when they come to ask him what they should do. He leans down, they keep asking. He stands up and says, “Let you who has not sinned throw the first stone,” and then the text tells us he bends down again to keep writing. We can picture the scene, a woman surrounded by men ready to pick up stones, or perhaps with stones already in their hands, angrily arguing over her life, and Jesus, the man who potentially has the power to stop it, sitting by writing in the sand. I would be terrified to be an observer; I can’t even imagine being the woman! Jesus had been teaching and he was interrupted by the sound of men screaming angrily calling on this woman to be violently and cruelly murdered before everyone’s eyes.
And yet, when Jesus speaks these words, one by one they walk away beginning with the elders in the realization that they too have sinned. While some read those words as meaning that the men were sinners in the general sense, that reading seems contrary to human behavior. These men before coming here knew that they were sinners in the general sense, surely they were self-aware enough as scholars of the law to understand themselves, to be imperfect beings, and yet they brought her here anyways. Jesus’ words convinced them of something they seemed not to realize before this. What sin of theirs did Jesus reveal to them in a way that made them more human, allowed them to walk away from further sin?
We can glean one answer from a careful reading of the text. The woman is said to be caught “in the act.” The word autophoro here leaves no room for interpretation that she was really exposed. The thing about adultery, though, is that it’s not a sin one can commit by herself. There had to be another person involved. That person might have been a man. The Greek word is also not fornication, porneia here, but adultery. The law that they’re presumably citing is Leviticus 20:10 in which both the man and the woman involved in the affair are to be stoned to death. Where, then, is this man in John's Gospel for today?
I think that when Jesus is leaning down, he’s not writing anything important, but rather he’s buying time. The “miracle” sort of speak that his hands are performing is the self-realization of the men. He is allowing them time to think about what they’re doing, allowing them to self-reflect on the scene that comes before them. Beginning with the elders, the wisest in the group, they realized what they have done. They have called for the death of this woman. They have violently dragged her here. They were not concerned with justice. They wanted to stone this woman, using her as a pawn to test Jesus so that he too might be charged and murdered.
When Jesus is left alone with the woman, a victim becomes the subject of her own life once more. Her guilt, or lack thereof, was not important to Jesus, it was protecting her by making those around her realize their violence against her. When she stands before him alone to be judged, she asserts her agency and we hear her speak for the first and only time. Jesus asks, “Has no one condemned you?” And she replies, “No one, sir.” The battered woman stands before the Lord of Love as an agent of her own destiny.
Violence against women is real, and it is a social sin, which is at the root of much evil in the world. Statistics show us that in the United States alone about 1300 deaths a year are caused by intimate partner violence. And the overwhelming majority of those are women. We have a severe problem that we must admit. Dr. Blasey Ford’s case is one of many in which women who accuse men are berated endlessly. In a moment of extreme vulnerability, the public received her testimony with hostility in many cases. She received death threats, and to this day, has the need for security guards in public places. I was in college when the testimony was being shown live on televisions across the country. I remember being shocked and dismayed, not only by the media, but by the way others talked the way others around me talked about her and the incident with such dismissal. This case alone does not necessarily prove any pervasive problem of violence against women, but it is her case together with so many that show that we are in need of social forgiveness, that we need a renewed culture in which violence against women is taken seriously.
The good news we hear today is that forgiveness is offered to us, even in the case of sins that are most difficult for human beings to get past. The ones that keep us in a deadlock and keep us away from one another. It is an offer to us that the grace of God permeates who we are as communities so deeply that even the sins that are entrenched in who we are as a society, even those sins, are offered forgiveness by God. This Lenten season, as we reflect on our own sins in preparation for the Easter victory of God over injustice, I pray that we might take seriously the social sins of sexism, racism and nationalism. I pray that our church might take seriously its own role in promoting social sin through its own structures. And I pray that we can begin to seek the forgiveness that Jesus offers us as a country and as one human family.
