READINGS

John 8:1-11
Deuteronomy 22:20-22
Leviticus 20:10
Jeremiah 17:13 (written on earth, literally)
God's fingers: Exodus 31:18
Moses' fingers: Exodus 34:27-28
Moses' hissy-fit: Exodus 32:19-20

HOMILY

Jesus went to the Mount of Olives.

Early in the morning, he comes again to the Temple.

So this incident which we're about to hear in today's Gospel happens in the Temple.

All the people came to him and he sat down and began to teach them.

The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery, and making her stand before all of them, in the midst of them, they said to him: Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery.

Note that all the physical expressions are absolutely vital.

He's sitting down and he's teaching the people in the Temple.

They bring a woman who'd been caught in the act of adultery and they make her stand before all of them.

It's really weird: if this woman had been caught in an act of adultery and they wanted to stone her, the last place they ought to have brought her was the Temple.

It's clear that their particular interest was not in what the women had done, but in how Jesus was going to react to it.

And so they make her stand before all of them, making this poor woman to be suddenly the center of attention.

The crowd not only say that she committed acts, but they say she was caught in the very act of committing adultery, which is baffling, because it takes two to tango.

How is it that there are not two people standing before the Lord at this point? We are not told.

One interpretation might be that she had recently been discovered to have been being pregnant while not married.

But that would not be "being caught in the act" of committing adultery, that would be some time later, some months later, probably, before she became visible.

So this is a very odd exercise that's going on here.

In the Law, Moses commands to stone such women, and indeed both in Deuteronomy 22 and in the relevant passage of Leviticus, Moses does command them to stone women.

Now, what do you say? They said this to test him so that they might have some charge to bring against him.

And here we have the physicality of the thing once again: Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground.

One wonders how dusty would have been in the Temple?

One wonders what that would have been for him to make significant figures?

But he writes with his finger on the ground.

And this was a point which Rene Girard brought up: here is a woman who has been put into a place of terrible shame.

She has been caught doing something shameful and now she is being made to be full of shame.

This is a tremendously embarrassing situation.

And the first thing that Jesus does is not look at her, so that he doesn't augment her shame.

Instead, he bends down and writes in the dust or in whatever was on the floor of the Temple.

This very act will have distracted the attention of the scribes and the Pharisees who've brought the woman there, because rather than being focused on her, as they had been up to now, he was now doing something with his fingers, and they'll all be bending to see what was going on.

You'll have actually managed to distract, break the spell, if you like, which the shamed tension had brought about, distract their attention so they could try to work out what's he writing.

And of course, that's one of the million-dollar questions that people have been trying to answer to this day: what was he writing?

Well, the guess that I've heard is this: he was writing with his fingers on the ground which is where Moses's first tablets had ended up.

In the Book of Exodus, Moses goes up to the mountain and receives the word of the Lord which the Lord writes with his own fingers.

So Moses is given the tablets and then he goes down the hill and he finds the people of Israel basically have given up waiting for him and they're having a huge party with the golden calf and generally idolatrizing left right and center.

So Moses has a great hissy fit and he throws the tablets to the ground. They break up. And then he smashes the golden calf and grinds it to the dust, so the whole thing is dust, a mixture of the broken tablets and the golden calf - a mixture of the word of God and idolatry is now on the floor.

Moses then recovers from his easy fit, goes back up to the mountain, and receives two new commandments, two new tablets.

But these commandments he writes with his own hand. This is the second Law.

The first Law, the law that was written by the finger of the Lord, is no more, it's not to be seen.

Only the second Law, the deuteros nomos, from which we get the Book of Deuteronomy.

So Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground.

I suggest too that he's recalling to them the first Law, that he's enacting the first Law of the Law Giver, this is the Lord himself writing.

What he's writing we don't know because the first Law we don't have the text of, we only have the second Law.

When they kept on questioning him - presumably they were saying: what are you writing? - he doesn't say.

He straightened up and said to them: let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.

And with this, the elders become aware that they can't do this.

When there is a lynch mob everyone is eager to be the first, but no one wants to be the person to have been remembered to have started it.

It's the most difficult thing to do is to start a lynch, but to be involved in it, it's very easy.

So Jesus is basically saying: okay, go on, go on witness then. And would you be witnessing against yourself?

So each person now has their participation made voluntary, in a way that that wouldn't have been before.

If you're part of a lynch mob, it's not voluntary or you've been sucked up into a contagion, you're acting under the influence of wild mimetic contagion.

But Jesus has broken that by his distraction.

He's broken the mimetic contagion, and he's challenged them to decide for themselves if they are able to do this.

And starting with the eldest, they aren't.

The eldest presumably, because they're aware that they are sinful men.

Then it says once again, he bent down and wrote on the ground. So he's carried on writing. And again, what is he doing?

Another suggestion which my friend Margaret Barker makes: she takes this to be the passage from Jeremiah 17, where those who turn away from you shall be written on the earth, for they have forsaken the fountain of living water - the Lord.

So the suggestion that they have come to the place of judgment, the Lord is acting as judge, and He's writing on the earth the names of all of them, because they have forsaken the fountain of living water, the Lord, the One who is to take away shame.

It's a different approach to the same magisterial poise of our Lord in either enacting the giving of the first Law or in writing the names of those who on the earth, those who are forsaking the fount of living water.

So Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him. Jesus straightened up. So once again, the physical elements are recorded.

And said to her: woman, where are they, has no one condemned you?

She says: no one, sir. Jesus says: neither do I condemn you. Go your way and from now on do not sin again, - with the suggestion that the first Law is the law against lynching.

It's the law against deriving your goodness over against another, and that what He was creating by His writing in the sand was genuinely the first Law: undoing the whole mechanism by which we lynch, the mechanism into which He was Himself to step, not long thereafter, which they had wanted to put Him into by testing.

But before doing it, He showed with his finger that that whole mechanism was undone.

He stood as judge and showed that the judgment was: no lynching.