People were shouting, stirred up by the Pharisees. A woman was standing in the middle of the crowd, looking miserable and trying to hide her face. Jesus was also there, but he was not standing. Instead, he was hunched over writing some letters in the dirt with his finger.
As Saint John tells us in the Gospel, the Pharisees persisted (8:4): “Master, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery. And in the Law, Moses has ordered us to stone women of this kind. What have you got to say?”
What letters was Jesus tracing in the dirt? Personally, I like to think he was writing the same words of warning that Prophet Daniel had to interpret for King Baltazar when God was preparing to destroy the Babylonian kingdom (5:25): “mene, mene, teqel, parsin”.
This is one of the paradoxes of the Gospel. Jesus insisted that God would punish sin severely with eternal fire in hell and yet he also insisted that God would forgive all the sins of any sinner who was ready to repent. So the “Good News” is good, but only for those who turn to God and tell him: “I have sinned against you. I beg you to forgive me.”
If you have not done that yet, you really ought to do it as soon as possible. Otherwise those words—the famous “writing on the wall” from the times of Daniel—will be for you. If you do repent, you will hear what Jesus told the woman caught in adultery: “Neither do I condemn you. Go in peace and sin no more.”
