MONDAY IN PASSION WEEK
The scribes and Pharisees brought a woman along who had been caught committing adultery; and making her stand there in the middle they said to Jesus, “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?” They asked him this as a test, looking for an accusation to use against him. But Jesus bent down and started writing on the ground with his finger. As they persisted with their question, he straightened up and said, “Let the one among you who is guiltless be the first to throw a stone at her.”
—John 8:3—7
God is a compassionate God. This means, first of all, that he is a God who has chosen to be God-with-us….
As soon as we call God, “God-with-us,” we enter into a new relationship of intimacy with him. By calling him Immanuel, we recognize that he has committed himself to live in solidarity with us, to share our joys and pains, to defend and protect us, and to suffer all of life with us. The God-with-us is a close God, a God whom we call our refuge, our stronghold, our wisdom, and even, more intimately, our helper, our shepherd, our love. We will never really know God as a compassionate God if we do not understand with our heart and mind that “he lived among us” (John 1:14).
How do we know that God is our God and not a stranger, an outsider, a passerby?
We know this because in Jesus God’s compassion became visible to us. Jesus not only said, “Be compassionate as your Father is compassionate,” but he also was the concrete embodiment of this divine compassion in our world. Jesus’ response to the ignorant, the hungry, the blind, the lepers, the widows, and all those who came to him with their suffering, flowed from the divine compassion which led God to become one of us. We need to pay close attention to Jesus’ words and actions if we are to gain insight into the mystery of this divine compassion. We would misunderstand the many miraculous stories in the Gospels if we were to be impressed simply by the fact that sick and tormented people were suddenly liberated from their pains. If this were indeed the central event of these stories, a cynic might rightly remark that most people during Jesus’ day were not cured and that those who were cured only made it worse for those who were not. What is important here is not the cure of the sick, but the deep compassion that moved Jesus to these cures.
Our Prayer
Lord, you have not come to judge the world,
but to save the world:
anyone who rejects you and refuses your words
has his judge already:
the word itself that you have spoken
will be his judge on the last day.
—After John 12:47-48