Sermons from St Faith's
From Wronged to Wrong
Fr Simon Tibbs, Lent 5, 2013
Lent 5: John 8:2-11
The scene described in today’s Gospel is one of high
tension and high emotion. The scribes and Pharisees
have apprehended a woman in the act of adultery,
something for which the Hebrew Bible allowed the death
penalty, where there were witnesses to the crime. For
the death penalty to be applied seems to have been
unusual, perhaps because in the ordinary course of
events, there would not usually be any such witnesses.
In this instance, we can assume that other people had
actually seen the couple in the act of love, or Jesus
would have had straight-forward grounds for getting
the woman off.
It’s a bit hard to reconstruct the events leading up
to the scene described. The fact that the woman has
been brought to the Temple early in the morning as a
test for Jesus may suggest a degree of contrivance and
forward-planning on the part of Jesus’s opponents, or
perhaps they have come there straight from the scene
of the crime. Either way, a crowd seems to have
gathered, perhaps including, but not limited to, those
who actually saw the act of adultery. Perhaps the
witnesses have alerted the scribes and Pharisees, the
legal experts, and they have got the case together,
with others simply tagging along.
I imagine an angry mob, as it were, baying for blood,
their adrenalin flowing as they seek the punishment
for a crime whose horror all right-thinking people can
agree upon.
It’s quite hard for us to think our way into the minds
of the mob on this occasion. Our own society, after
all, has a more flexible, case-by-case approach to
matters of sex. Perhaps, we might think to ourselves,
the woman was unhappily married and had found
fulfilment with a new partner. Perhaps she had grounds
for what she did in her husband’s long absence, or
perhaps he was violent towards her and any children in
the family. Any number of factors might soften our
judgement of the woman’s conduct.
We need to remember that the mob in the story is
acting according to the most basic norms of that
society, norms that are in effect beyond debate. It’s
helpful to think of possible parallels for us in our
very different society, with its very different
instincts about matters of morality. What crimes can
we think of that are so hideous that we would feel
some sympathy if a group of vigilantes were to
set about administering their own rough justice. A
terrorist, perhaps, caught in the act of trying to
plant a bomb on a bus? A drug dealer who derives his
livelihood from preying on the desperation of
society’s most miserable? A human trafficker? A
paedophile? In connection with the latter, the ugly
scenes on the Paulsgrove Estate in Portsmouth just
over a decade ago spring to mind, when people got
together to hound out of their community convicted
sex-offenders whose names had been publicised as a
result of Sarah’s Law. Some innocents were caught up
in the violence that erupted, but the emotions that
spurred on the group that called themselves ‘Residents
Against Paedophiles’ were ones that many people up and
down the country could understand.
We haven’t really done our work of interpreting the
story for our own lives if we stop short of feeling
some sympathy for the crowd. For many of us, adultery
doesn’t really make our blood boil the way it would
have done for the scribes. So what really gets us
worked up? These are perhaps the crimes we should hold
in mind as we attempt to put ourselves into the
situation.
A common feature of Jesus’s clashes with his opponents
is his refusal to answer a straight question. Rather,
his responses when challenged by hostile enquirers
tends to expose the inner disposition that lies behind
the question.
Today’s story is not exception. Pressed for a judgment
on adultery, Jesus plays for time. Rather than rushing
to pronounce on the case in hand, he writes in the
dust, an act that must have given the impression of
strange self-absorption and disregard of others’
feelings. When he does speak, he offers a judgement,
not on adultery, but on judgement itself.
Jesus’s message in this story is a subtle one. A man
of his time, there is no reason to think he was
radically soft on sexual offenders.
The point of the story is more to do with what we owe
each other as human beings when we come to judge
another person.
Before accusing another, or rehearsing the wrongs we
have suffered at their hands to a third party, we need
our moment of withdrawal, a moment in which we take a
few deep breaths, and read the writing in the dust.
What we read there is the accusation against us. It
could be anything - the name of a person we have
harmed, a habit, a character trait, a certain period
in our lives – something that shows us the truth about
ourselves.
God in Christ has met us where we are. What he writes
in the dust he writes for our comfort in the moment of
our anger. That writing reflects deep knowledge. Deep
knowledge, and deep love. As we say in the beautiful
old prayer, he is the one before whom no hearts are
closed before him, and no secrets hidden. No desire of
ours is unknown to him. Nothing is shocking, nothing
shameful, nothing unsayable. To the degree he knows
the worst of us, to that same degree he loves us.
He asks only that, as he has looked with pity on us,
so we have pity on others, and particularly on those
to whom we are inclined to feel superior. That is the
contract between us. We come to his altar naked, and
we bring to our judgement of others a sense of our own
weakness.
Jesus was someone who knew about angry mobs. He
suffered at their hands on various occasions, and an
angry mob was responsible for his death. In our Holy
Week liturgy, we take the part of the mob in
recognition that the impulse to denigrate others and
make them a scape-goat is one that we all share. For
most of us, the mob-instinct comes out in our
conversation, rather than in actual violence. The
violence is there, make no mistake, we’re just too
polite to clock anyone over the head.
Into the sorry mess of human anger and resentment, in
which self-righteous mobs form all too easily, and can
be hard to break up, Christ has brought in a new note
of generosity. The knowledge of our own sinfulness is
actually good news, Gospel, to use the technical term,
if it helps us put a more generous construction on
other people’s behaviour, and practice self-control
when it comes to rehearsing their misdeeds to
others.
Many of us cling for dear life to the sense of being
wronged. Christ’s word to us, the word he writes
before us in the dust of our lives, moves us on from
resentment and anger to a more advanced sense of
fellow-feeling, even with the worst of sinners. It’s
the movement from wronged to wrong, and strangely,
often comes as quite a relief. Righteous anger,
however high we may get when we are expressing it, is
ultimately draining.
Jesus humiliated the mob by confronting them with
their own sinfulness. I expect they left the scene
with their tails between their legs. But I hope they
were feeling happier – lighter - by the time they got
home, having started to make the transition,
fundamental to the spiritual life, from wronged to
wrong.
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