“We look at the sky, there are many, many stars; but when the sun rises in the morning, the light is such that we can’t see the stars. God’s mercy is like that: a great light of love and tenderness.’ So when Jesus acts as confessor to the woman he does not humiliate her, he does not say: ‘What have you done? When did you do it? How did you do it? With whom did you do it?’ No! He says: ‘Go and do not sin again!’ God’s mercy is great, Jesus’s mercy is great.
We find the warm and open heart of Jesus hard to take. It seems too good to be true that God is so forgiving. One way to understand God’s mercy is to allow ourselves to be forgiven and show mercy. It is the sort of mercy a parent shows when they still believe in their child who has done great wrong. Trainee teachers were sometimes told – ‘when a child really drives you mad, remember he has a mother who loves him’! A help to show mercy is to see the mercy in the eye of God for someone with whom we have a big difference.
Mercy when we receive it helps us show mercy ourselves. When we are hard on others, it’s sometimes because we are hard on ourselves and cannot really believe we are loved. The light of God’s mercy is bright enough that you can no longer see the stars that are our sins and faults and failings. Maybe Jesus means something like this when he says that he is the light of the world.