There was a man who was trying to take a “selfie” with his smart phone at the edge of the Grand Canyon.  As he stepped back to get just the right shot, he slipped and went tumbling over the edge. About 20 feet down he saved himself from a fall of 1, 00 feet and certain death by grabbing a tiny tree growing out of the cliff face.

          When he gathered his wits, he began yelling: “Help, help—is there anyone up there who can help me?”
          A voice answered back from the top: “Yes, I’m here.”
          The man holding on to the tree said: “Who are you?”
          The voice answered: “I’m God.”
          The man said: “God? What are you doing here?”
          The voice replied: “I’m God.  I’m everywhere.”
          The man said: “God, I’ll do anything—pray, go to church, reform my life.  Just save me from falling.”
          God replied: “We’ll worry about the promises later—let’s just get you off the cliff.  First, let go of the tree.”
          The man said: “I can’t do that—I’ll fall thousands of feet.”
          God said: “Trust me. I’m God.  It will be ok.  Just let go of the tree.”
          There was a long pause, and finally the man yelled up toward the top: “Is there anyone else up there?”

          In the Gospel today we see another person in a terrible situation – the woman caught in adultery—and who is saved by Jesus from an awful death.

          We’re familiar with the story.  Jesus is in the temple area and the scribes and Pharisees bring him a woman who has been caught in the very act of committing adultery, and ask Jesus what they should do to her.

          The Gospel says this was done to test Jesus, and this may have been a trap like the trap that the scribes and Pharisees tried to set regarding the payment of Roman taxes. You’ll remember there was a tax paid to Rome, and Jesus was asked if he paid it.  If He didn’t, Jesus could be gotten into trouble with the Romans.  If He did, that would anger the Jews.

          Jesus solves that problem by reminding everyone whose face is on the coin and saying that the things of Caesar should be rendered to Caesar.

          This is a similar trap because, as we read later in John’s Gospel, the Romans had forbidden the Jewish people from carrying out capital punishment, even under Jewish law.  So if Jesus said the woman should be stoned—which is what Jewish law clearly required—he would be in trouble with the Romans.

          But if He said she shouldn’t be stoned, He would be teaching in a way contrary to clear and long-standing Jewish law.

          Again Jesus’ solution is brilliant.  He writes something on the ground with His finger—we don’t know what, but people of the early Church  speculated Jesus was quoting from the prophet Jeremiah, who said that “those who turn from me will be written on the earth”—and, after making the crowd wait and wait for an answer, Jesus says: “Let the one among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.”

          The crowd slowly melts away, and Jesus also does not condemn the woman, telling her only to go and not sin any more.

          I think we can take away a couple of important things from this story, things about God and things about ourselves.

          When it comes to God, this story is a beautiful illustration of the fundamental characteristic of God that Pope Francis emphasizes—God is mercy. God is a god who loves us, and whose fundamental orientation towards us is one of mercy, not judgment, not law, not punishment.

          God is a god we can trust. We can let go of the tree that we’re so dearly clinging to, and trust in God.

          For many of us, that means letting go of an image of God that we carry—of God as the big bookkeeper in heaven, keeping track of all our sins, testing us to see if we’ll mess up, giving us rules that are hard to follow so he can decide if we’re worthy of heaven.

          None of that describes the God of Jesus, the God who, through Jesus, ignores the strict prescription of the Law of Moses that the woman be stoned to death, and lets her walk away without punishment.

          The God who doesn’t say: “Love the sinner, hate the sin”—but who says: “Love the sinner, forgive and forget the sin.”

          The God who has our back, if only we’ll let Him do so—if only we’ll let go of the skinny tree of our own selves.

          Today’s Gospel story also reminds us of a couple of specific aspects of our selves we might need to let go of.  The first is our tendency to minimize our own shortcomings, and maximize those of others.

          That’s why Jesus was writing on the ground about the sins of the Pharisees—they were so horrified by the behavior of the woman, but they couldn’t see their own sins, the plank in their own eyes, how they had turned away from the Lord.

          The absence of the man in the relationship from the story is telling, isn’t it? No one seems to want to do anything to him—maybe because the men who are all excited can sympathize with the man’s role, and minimize it, but view the woman as the real problem.

          Think about gossip, for example.  When we’re so happy to spread around something someone else has done, aren’t we being very much like the scribes and Pharisees today, making someone else in their shame the center of attention, and pretending we’ve never done anything sinful  ourselves?

          And we have to see on display as well that human tendency to use others for our own purposes, with no regard for the other person’s good. The Pharisees and scribes are doing that—using this poor woman to try to trap Jesus because trapping Jesus is what they really care about. The woman is just a pawn in that bigger game.

          We also may need to let go of our tendency to look at other people as just pawns on our own chess board.

          We see today the triumph of mercy over judgment and of God’s love over human deviousness.
          It is the triumph we celebrate at Easter.
          May it be the triumph we also keep at the center of our prayers so that we can come to truly trust in God.