Forgiveness is the most divine of all Christian virtues: it forgets the past, transforms the present, and looks to the future. This triple consideration becomes vivid in our minds after reading in today's Gospel the report of the meeting of Our Lord with the adulteress. Unlike the parable of the Prodigal Son narrated in last Sunday's Gospel, we do not have here a story with a moral, but the report of something which has actually happened.

The Scribes and Pharisees were Our Lord's declared enemies from the beginning. What they always had in mind was to trap him publicly. And they had hoped to be able to do so not in some secluded place, but in the Temple, of all places.

One day, while Jesus was teaching there, they brought to him a woman who had been caught in adultery, a crime then punishable by death. "Master", they said to him, "this woman has been caught in adultery and should therefore be stoned to death". As usual, Jesus knew what they had in mind, he knew that what they really wanted was not showing obedience to the law of Moses, but trapping him into a statement which would contradict his continued teaching about love and forgiveness.

Jesus however was here more astute than they were pretending to be. The reply he gave them at that moment was not one of condemnation, but of love and forgiveness. It was not by words, but by deeds. "He bent down and began writing on the floor with his fingers", we read. Soon after, when he saw there was no further accusation coming from them, he looked up and said to them: "Whichever of you is free from sin, let him cast the first stone at her". After this, as John the Evangelist remarked not without a fine sense of humour, "they began to disappear one by one, beginning with the eldest."

Then Jesus said to the woman standing there in humiliation before him: "Woman, has no one condemned you? Go, and do not sin again".

If sin is an offence against God, the law of love is supreme. And love does not seek punishment, but forgiveness. That is how God deals with us, and that is the way we Christians should behave between ourselves: condemning the sin, but loving the sinner and forgiving whoever is in need of forgiveness.

At this point one cannot refrain from recalling certain attitudes of the Church's authorities in past centuries. They have been accused, especially in the not so distant past, of being too juridically minded and too harsh in the way disobedience to Church laws was being punished.

The idea of Christ as loving and full of mercy for all, including public sinners, was being blurred by certain juridical exigencies proper to those times. Christ's image as loving and full of mercy was therefore being distorted and not sufficiently reflected on the whole juridical apparatus of the Church, the Mystical Body of Christ.

As we all know, there has been a Second Vatican Council, initiated by the saintly Pope John XXIII. The main emphasis of the Council's teachings was no longer that of the Church as a society, but as a community. This concept of community does not refer only to the universal Church, but qualifies all the units existing within it. Each of its many dioceses is a community on its own merits, and so is every parish and every unit within the parish.

Hence the Church of Christ as a whole is a communion, or a community of communities, held together more by the bonds of love than by condemnations, or by attitudes which are more proper to a juridical society than to a community of salvation. Jesus' attitude manifested in today's Gospel tells us much about the primacy of the law of love over the love of the law.