Woman caught in adultery: Transition from Old to New

Woman caught in adultery: Transition from Old to New

Negative Old Testament Laws

Firstly, and unfortunately, God had to instantiate many negative Old Testament laws that were physically not His ultimate desire but that were necessary to meet a child humanity where they were at. More specifically, just as a child must first learn through illustration before graduating to abstract written words without images, so God needed to give His first People physical pictures that were mere images of what would really matter later: spiritual realities. In other words, the mere physical laws, when they pointed to negative spiritual realities, were themselves also negative and, in fact, things that God would not ultimately want in His eventual Plan in fullness.

Some examples of these were the death penalty for serious sin, the taking of the Holy Land by bloody and universal slaughter, down even to the infants, and the ostracizing of the lepers from the regular community. Each of these points to a negative spiritual reality, as follows:

The Death Penalty

The ultimate end of serious sin is eternal death in hell. But the early People are not ready for this, so God must give them a picture as the next worse thing, which is clearly physical death: hence, the death penalty is instituted for various, severe sins.

The Bloody Take-over of the Holy Land

The taking of the Holy Land by blood-curdling force is not what liberals say it is: a mere human fashioning that the Jewish people thought God wanted. That is based upon Enlightenment heresy, which sees religion as man trying to find God instead of as God coming down to meet man. Rather, this difficult passage most likely means that when the Church, the New People, are about to conquer a land for Christ, spiritually, once it is converted, every last jot and title of its cultural and religious errors which cannot be transformed into something reconcilable to the Gospel must be spiritually slaughtered, massacred by the New Adam and Eve, by the flaming sword of the supreme Archangel, that the blood of these diabolical errors might flow down into eternal fire, consumed by God’s wrath and destroyed, In other words, that the People there cannot be corrupted by them. For, does not the Church massacre even the smallest of heresies since her inception, knowing that the tiniest cancer may in the end destroy the whole person.

The greatest example of this in the history of the Church is when Our Lady of Guadalupe annihilated the diabolical religion of volcano worship and human sacrifice of the Aztecs to convert them into Catholicism.

The Unclean Community

As for the ostracizing of the physically unclean from the clean community, this was obviously psychologically cruel to the suffering ones and does not express the true compassion that Christ would show the lepers in his public ministry in the New Dispensation. However, at the time it was unfortunately objectively necessary in the first instance for the separation to avoid the entire flock of the Israelites to die off from the infection. But even more to the point there is this purpose clearly: in order that the clean community may not be infected by the unclean in the literal physical sense, how much more should those heretics or sinners who are publicly and spiritually unclean in the New covenant be cast out from the true and clean community, lest they infect the faithful sheep with errors and sin, that is, excommunication from the Church.

St Mary Magdalene at the Stoning: Transition from Old to New

Consequently, St. Mary Magdalene at her stoning is revealing the transition to the New Law: Jesus is unveiling, as we all know, that even though the death penalty shows, in a beginning sense. the ultimate consequences of serous sin [from physical death to eternal death in hell], nevertheless God’s ultimate desire is for Him to show the sinner loving mercy, to help the person be healed of the wrongdoing and move on to live in the love of God, so that, hopefully, in natural death, they pass into eternal life. This is clearly one of the greatest lessons of Old to New Law in the Gospel.

Also, as one more point, we recall once again that St Mary Magdalene is the only female creature present at the cross, sparing the Ever Virgin herself, who is mainly distinguished from Magdalene only by her ultimate purity, her sinlessness. This, again, was where the Old Dispensation crossed into the New, which places Magdalene at an epic juncture to Christ.

In the next segment, we shall consider how St Mary Magdalene’s inability to recognize the risen Christ at first at the tomb can be a wonderful type of the progressive conversion of the Jewish people to the Gospel, shewing forth that only at the final time of Church history are their eyes opened to the Messiah who has stood before them for the whole of these ages of the New covenant, even as St Mary Magdalen’s eyes are not fully opened until the Christ utters unto her “Mary!”, and she exclaims “Rabonni!” which means, “Teacher!”