I recall years ago how the pastor at my parish opened his homily by telling us “We are here in the scripture story…this story is about us…”As we move into the last full week of Lent, the Scriptures truly are speaking directly into the experience of our lives in a way that can be unsettling, challenging, but most importantly – Excitingly hopeful.
In John’s Gospel (JN 8 : 1-11), we have the story of the woman caught in adultery who is brought publicly before Jesus by her accusers, who are both ready to stone her and catch Jesus up at the same time. Although many biblical scholars doubt whether this story is actually written by John, or that it was part of the original manuscripts, the story is certainly appropriate for any consideration of the Gospel of Jesus’ life and our experience of it.
So, after dragging the woman into – mind you – the temple area, the Gospel tells us that they placed her “in the middle” – between Jesus and them – remind Jesus that the penalty by law of adultery is stoning, and then ask Him what should be done. In response, Jesus, in a seemingly casual manner, rather than looking at the woman or her accusers, directs his attention to the ground and starts drawing on the ground. There has been much speculation about what it was that Jesus drew on the earth, but I tend to sense that the drawing on the ground was a diversion of Jesus’ eyes from the accusatory situation towards something else. It wasn’t a question of what he was scratching in the earth, but that he was drawing the onlookers away from their judgment and toward compassion. This interpretation of the story is in line with what comes next in the story.
Jesus straightens up, we are told, and rather than responding to their questions, actually invites the accusers to carry out their intentions, but with a caveat…
“Let the one among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.”
Having provided this ranking order for the accusers to carry out the lawful consequence against this woman, Jesus in a very deliberate and compassionate posture looks away and continues to draw or write on the ground. His eyes will not accuse anyone! It’s as if the woman, thrown “in the middle” between Jesus and the accusers, symbolizes sin itself. Sin that is not exclusively hers, not exclusively theirs (the accusers), but all of ours – every one’s! This is remix of “remove the plank from your own eye…” But what type of adultery is this shared sin? Perhaps it is an adultery of the heart, where we try to give ourselves to something to which we don’t belong.
We always tend to bounce blame off of each other. We start doing this quite naturally as children. Can you remember a time when you were doing something you weren’t supposed to be doing as a child, but someone else (a brother/sister or companion) was blamed instead? You may or may not have spoken up to take – or at least – share the blame. Or, maybe you were caught doing something and immediately said that someone else did it or made you do it (wasn’t there a creation story about that?) I can truly appreciate now how my parents would punish/ground every one of us when we did something wrong, instead of trying to figure out who was to blame. A type of mandatory solidarity!
We always want a scapegoat to cleanse us of from our blame and responsibility. Self-justification is always a destructive ploy – both to ourselves and to those around us. We play this out in our adult lives too I believe. Take for example, how we look at career and getting ahead, or how we single out a certain class of “others,” who we hold responsible for what we deem as the problems in our society. Look no further than our political and social climate, not to mention some conspiracy theories circulating about the origin of COVID 19.
Jesus offers the challenge, and then “draws on the ground.” He is drawing our attention away from scapegoating and judgment in order to give us the space to look in the mirror and decide if we are going to throw the stone, hold the stone, or just DROP it! It’s not a disregard for the law so much as it is a reverencing awareness of WHO the law is made for – people…human beings…you and me, in all our fallibility! It’s a question of belonging – To whom do we belong? And that is where the exiting HOPE comes in to play.
Jesus is drawing us into a center where we can find that we all belong! Put another way, He is drawing us in to be found. To be found is to realize that we belong to Christ, and this of itself relativizes those other things that we preoccupy ourselves with, like pointing out everyone else’s issues and problems. It’s the healing confrontation of those things to which we adulterously try to give ourselves, even though we truly do not belong to them. We may be held prisoner by these preoccupations, addictions, attachements, etc., but they cannot truthfully speak to Who we really are – the ground of our lives and beings!
I wonder if our present pandemic environment could not be seen through this lense. Even as we may be distancing ourselves physically, could we not be also be drawing closer to our communal ground?
Jesus draws on the ground of our lives and in doing so draws us toward Him, which means toward one another, loosening our grips on the stones we clasp, and letting them drop away. Free from trying to infect our relationships through the deaths of accusation and condemnation, we can begin to live directly within the Resurrection, the New Life that we may not be able to clearly describe or envision, but that to which we are ultimately drawn.
Peace,
Thomas
(Originally published March 14, 2016)