Is the woman caught in adultery in John 8 an allegory (a type or figure) of Israel and the Lord? The thought had never occurred to me before hearing it retold in a sermon recently.

Israel is brought by her accusers before the Lord, having been caught in the act—that is, of betraying her love for the Lord through worshiping idols and failing to be faithful to the terms of the covenant. Her accusers (false shepherds? the gentile nations?) are not wrong that she has transgressed the Law; nor have they misjudged the jealousy of this Lawgiver’s love for Israel, the bride of his youth.

But the accusers are themselves accused by the terms of the covenant. The Law indicts all. No one, not one, is righteous before the Lord. When Israel is left alone before her Lord, then, whom alone she has sinned against, she stands condemned by her actions—but not by her accusers, all of whom have dropped their stones and walked away. He looks at her and says, “Neither do I condemn you; go, and sin no more.”

Saint Paul’s famous declaration, “There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus,” is but a gloss on this narrative allegory. Christ’s command to the woman—to Israel, his beloved bride—is not one more imperative she is bound to fail to keep. It is a liberating announcement of her freedom from sin. The word is effective by his sovereign power and will keep her, henceforth, from the sin that once led her astray.

As Christ says just two chapters later, “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me; and I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish, and no one shall snatch them out of my hand.” The woman caught in adultery replies in the words of the Song: “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine.” And as Jesus says in Mark 10, “What God has joined together no man can put asunder.” And as Paul puts it at the end of his peroration in Romans, nothing can “separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”