Ash Wednesday: The Woman Caught in Adultery

This is the Gospel of Christ, but it’s not the Gospel of John. 

No commentator defends it as original to John, no matter which century you turn to. 

The language is not Johanine, we hear of the Mount of Olives, and Jesus disputes with ‘the scribes and the pharisees’, unmentioned in John but common in the other Gospels.

It awkwardly interrupts the flow of the rest of the chapter, which seamlessly flows around it, and it’s missing from almost all the earliest manuscripts.

So, sorry to those who claim Biblical inerrancy, but this Gospel is in the wrong place.

So should we discard it as a cuckoo text –

erroneously or wickedly introduced to fool the unthinking Christian?

Well, no.

There are actually even better reasons for paying careful attention to it. 

Stylistically it feels like it belongs in Luke’s Gospel and in some manuscripts it’s placed as Luke’s twenty-first chapter. 

As an episodes of Jesus confronting religious authorities it’s among the most credible material of Jesus’ life, and the attention to detail suggests it may be from an eye-witness account. 

But what stands most in its favour is just how surprising it is. 

The radical claim that Christ’s mercy cuts through such an obvious case of caught-red-handed,

of its overturning of human justice,

is a threat to all authority. 

Backing a woman, at this time little more than property (with no legal voice), makes it even odder.

This story liberates the woman. 

It’s a dangerous text. 

In the emerging church, with its many disciplinary issues, regularly brought up in Paul’s letters, it’s a text that goes too far.

How will it be read? 

How will we maintain the reputation of our new faith if the hoi polloi get wind that the mercy of Christ exceeds all law, the teaching and authority of men?

So we have to thank the scribe who sneaks it in here, because in it we have a record of one of the most striking, comforting and challenging teachings of Jesus.

But what is going on here? 

And what have you assumed?

We’re told this woman is caught actually ‘in the act of adultery’ —

in flagrante delicto.

Presumably we can imagine then she is somewhat immodestly dressed (as in the art), caught off guard, and her public humiliation is only a foretaste of the hoped for violence.

I deliberately chose the story of Susanna three days ago for Safeguarding Sunday –

(Somehow her story translates seamlessly into a modern context –

Two established men bullying a woman into either sex or disgrace.)

Because here she is again a few centuries later, dragged before Jesus.

And when you heard this familiar story, did you assume she was guilty? 

Did the marvellous moral that Christ acquits even the most disgusting sin, obscure the fact that no evidence is given, that this is a lynching?

Did you also - without thought – pass judgement on the humiliated woman? 

Are you one of them?

Like in the plot against Susanna, with no offending man in sight, it's quite probably a set-up.

made even more evident as their actual goal is to trap Jesus:

Either he condones circumventing Roman law, and punishes her according to Jewish Law, in contrast to the mercy and healing with which he’s associated;

or in the very temple itself he denies what the Jewish Law demands.

How far will you go Jesus?

Does he care about this woman?

Jesus looks away, writing in the dust.

Is this an ironic parodying of man’s justice.

Is he mocking the Roman court in which the accusation would have been written impartially in the leger; 

We’re told he does this with his finger twice, perhaps suggesting the Law of Moses, written on the two tablets of the Ten Commandments.

Is he positioning himself as the new law giver?

Is he suggesting that human law is dust? 

Vanity blowing on the wind?

Is it simply time wasting, or an eyewitness report on one of Jesus’ tics?

Is he overcome with emotion, unable to look upon either the murdering crowd or the exposed humiliation of the woman?

We have in his riddling response — that the guiltless should throw the first stone — perhaps a suggestion of an answer,

for he immediately begins his writing in the sand again. 

He doesn’t look up. 

He doesn’t attempt confrontation. 

There’s something impartial in the action, which faces human judgement and says, yes, yes, but who are you, any of you, to demand punishment?

In the heat of conflict he holds up a mirror to the conscience of the would-be-murderers.

See this person who you are.

The episode is a criticism of all so-called human justice —

of every time we’ve been involved, personally, as a community, as a nation, where violence is committed in the name of justice. 

This isn’t to dismiss human justice, but it shows that it’s ugly, that everyone’s diminished by it, and that we must bear its sad weight every time it’s deployed.

At the end the woman and Jesus are left alone, the oldest — the wisest or the most burdened — having left first. 

Jesus and the woman. 

As St Augustine says ‘relicti sunt duo miseria et misericordia’—

Left, there are, the two — misery and mercy: 

“Woman, where are they? 

Has no one condemned you?”

This story has always moved me —  it’s an involving story. 

The question to ask though is — who are you identifying with here?

As you heard it, were you thinking of modern day parallels;

atrocities that happen to women today,

still, all the time. 

You may have seen in the angry mob an angry mob in Yemen or India. Perhaps you’re thinking of parliament, or the armed forces or the BBC.

You probably identified first of all then with the woman. 

Your own regrets may have come to mind, the residue of a secret shame.

But one of my most profound spiritual experiences occurred when I realised that although I did empathize with the woman I also strongly identified with the crowd of men. 

Because we all enjoy a bit of rough justice.

There’s a part of us not unhappy to see another suffer, lose, fall behind; the whisper of “justice” in your head as someone you don’t like trips up, the thrill of schadenfreude as an MP makes a fool of themself.

Executions have long been a mainstay of popular entertainment, and little has changed in the bullying morality of the press and social media.

But this was not my spiritual experience. 

What I noticed was that the rage of the crowd with which I identified was mostly directed at myself.

Because all of us are angry with ourselves — rock in hand angry with ourselves.

Many of us judge ourselves and find what we see wanting. 

Failed ambitions, disappointing relationships, not what we expected when we expected, not as good, clever, successful, pretty as a close friend;

“every time a friend of mine succeeds a little piece of me dies.”

Part pride, part vanity and envy; part frustration, part guilt, part unreasonable expectations. 

Hurl your rock on this disappointment of a man.

Jesus does not claim the woman hasn’t sinned. 

He tells her not to sin again. 

She isn’t left happy or even relieved. 

She's left in a state of repentance;

thankful for mercy.

Like the crowd, like us, not necessarily adultery, but she has sinned.

Like the men who excised this story from some of the early manuscripts because it was too threatening, too permissive, and in doing so continued the violence of the crowd to this woman. 

Like them, like the woman, we live in glass houses. 

But our aim for Lent is to be like her, to find ourselves alongside Jesus, and to one by one let the jeering crowd of clamouring anger depart from us, one by one, frustration, disappointment, guilt, vanity, pride.

Lent is a time for giving things up.

So this year perhaps you could:

Give up self-righteousness.

Give up self-judgement.

Give up self-hatred.

Give up anger.

Give up resentment.

Give up bitterness.

Watch them walk away, starting with the eldest. 

‘Relicti sunt duo miseria et misericordia:’

‘There were left, the two, misery and mercy’

Left with Jesus you will find no one left to condemn you.

‘Go, and do not sin again.’ 

Amen.