Since both parties were to be stoned according to the law, we have in today's story of the adulterous woman but a part of the  total picture. One gathers that they were not stoned together in the custom of the times. Some say also that the parties were stripped. Whether that be so in today's piece is not said. However, assuming that the prosecuting men were a group, they could more or less encircle the woman out of some sense of decency. But when they came upon Christ by accident, or Design, on their way out of the city, they let the woman be seen, "making her stand in front in full view of everybody." Whether she was nude or not, Christ felt compassion for her humiliation and quietly found something to do on the ground. He also may have been very angry at the group for using her as a ploy against Him as much as for their arrogance.

Christ deftly parries their ploy and ignores the issue of the law and applies it with a new proviso: "Let him be without sin himself who stones another for sin." They were both stung and stunned. He was a master-mind, a shrewd lawyer and an astute judge.

They threw the clothes at her and, "beginning with the eldest," as the text say, "they withdrew." Actors to the end, looking good.

These people loved God, upheld His course, but did so blindly, motivated by a desire to come off well. "Self-righteous" is the proper word. A disease the pious are prone to.

How does one at the same time be pious and not self-righteous? Jesus has your answer today.

By mercy.

The three-tiered mercy: to God, to neighbor, to self.

Forgive God, to begin with. Surely, you have something against God — life being what it is. Have you forgiven Him?

Praise God, has your neighbor done nothing against you? Not likely. Have you forgiven him? Sometimes monks do not forgive, but carries a grudge, a resentment, a justified umbrage for what someone has done to him: superior, inferior, equal. What a nonsense!

And you, my brother, have you forgiven yourself? Alas, this is the last. Here it starts, here it ends, for forgiveness is meaningless when it does not start at home, in your own heart.

Forgive what you have done, or should have done, or could have done and did not.
In the silence of the cloister the voice of the past can haunt you, can point fingers at you, can snicker.

Unless mercy is continued here it is not going to amount to much in terms of others.
Charity starts at home. As the man said: "My own heart let me more have pity on."

You're not up to it? That's likely. Well, then you pray for the grace to be a man of mercy: for yourself, for others, and toward God.

It's not a matter of liking everybody. That's impossible. But to love everyone? —that is possible. And it is what we are called to.

Love means you don't distinguish your children: you love the gifted one, the happy one, the one less gifted, the awkward one, the troubled one — you love them all. Else
what kind of  father or mother are you? What sort of monk?

You don't know much as a parent or as a monk, if you don't know Christ as a Man of mercy.

Why not join the ranks of love? Why are you standing there? Why linger on the fringe, stand in the back, hesitate and be fearful?  Come on in, the water's fine!

For if you enter the realms of mercy, your world changes. From that milieu, from that climate, your attitude is one of Jesus. You don't throw stones. You show compassion:

  "Woman, has no one condemned you?"
   "No one, Lord."
   "Neither will I."

Forgive God. It's important.
Forgive your neighbor. It's the law.
Forgive yourself. It's Christ-like.