A New Way of Seeing
Michiel Peeters - Let us try to imagine the scene, for example, through the eyes of the caught woman, or of a bystander who is not blinded by fanaticism but looks and feels in a human way. The woman has been caught red-handed in adultery and is now experiencing a jumble of feelings: shame, fear of the mob, trepidation at the painful death that awaits her....
The scribes and Pharisees bring her to Jesus — that strange and disturbing rabbi of whom they have now decided that he must be put out of the way, to catch him—either for incongruity with Moses or for a harshness that would undo his reputation of goodness and love of man. But Jesus does not answer. He writes with his finger in the sand, as if to say: your fuss is like words written in the sand, without meaning, without consistency.
When they urge him, he stands up and says: only they who have never sinned themselves may carry out the punishment on this woman. “And in response, they went away one by one, beginning with the elders.” The woman is left alone with the Lord. Did no one condemn you? Did they all run away? No one, Lord, they all ran away. I, too, do not condemn you. Go and sin no more.
Never again will that woman be able to erase those eyes and that voice from her sight and heart, no matter how many mistakes she still makes after that day! That rabbi, who defended her, even against herself (for she had already condemned herself too). That rabbi who understood that her sin was a symptom, a symptom of her desire for happiness, however unluckily lived.
“See, I am doing something new! Now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?” the prophet Isaiah had foretold. That “something new” is that gaze, which that woman could no longer tear from her eyes, which we can no longer tear from our lives, when we have seen it. “Do you not perceive it?” The difference is between those who have seen, observed, experienced that new gaze, that newness, and those who have not.
We are together to help one another perceive, not to overlook, that newness, that newness that finally corresponds to the heart.
The repetition of the perception of this newness—“See, I am doing something new! Now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?”—of the realization of this newness, the continued, repeated experience of this newness is what generates a Christian personality, of the caliber of Saint Paul, which can become the caliber of each of us, if we help each other perceiving the newness that He is making in front of our eyes: “Brothers and sisters: I consider everything as a loss [compared to] the supreme good of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. [Because of Him] I have accepted the loss of all things and I consider them so much rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in him….
It is not that I have already taken hold of it or have already attained perfect maturity, but I continue my pursuit in hope that I may possess it, since I have indeed been taken possession of [I have been grasped] by Christ Jesus…. Forgetting what lies behind…, straining forward to what lies ahead, I continue my pursuit toward the goal, the prize of God’s upward calling, in Christ Jesus,” I strive to obtain the reward that consists in knowing (in the Biblical sense), in being entirely grasped by Jesus Christ, by that gaze.
20250406 5th Sunday of Lent C (Isa 43:16–21; Phil 3:8–14; John 8:1–11)
(Homily by Fr Michiel Peeters, Tilburg University Chaplaincy)
