NewCreation

Homily for the Fifth Sunday in Lent, Year C

Welcome, my sisters and brothers, to this the homily for the fifth Sunday in Lent. And yes, this is a sling. I tripped over and fell while in Washington DC last week. A stupid accident. Luckily, the arm is broken but it's not badly broken and things should be better, back to normal, soon. So, to the Gospel. Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. Early in the morning he comes again to the Temple. So this incident, the 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, said to him, "Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery." Now, please notice first of all that here 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. Now it's really weird. If this woman had been brought in an act of adultery and they wanted to stone her, the last place they ought to have brought her was the Temple. But it's clear that their particular interest was not in what the woman had done but in how Jesus was going to react to it. And so they make her stand before all of them. This poor woman is made suddenly to be the center of attention. And they then 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 pregnant while not married, but that would not be being caught in the act of committing adultery. That would be — as you know — some time later, some months later, probably before she became visible. So this is a very odd exercise that's going on here. "Now in the law Moses commanded us 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 it would have been in the Temple. One wonders what there would have been for him to make significant figures. But he writes with his finger on the ground. And this was a point which René Girard brought up. Here is a woman who has been put into a place of terrible shame. She has been caught perhaps 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. And that very act will have distracted the attention of the scribes and elders who brought him — the Pharisees and the scribes and the Pharisees who 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. He'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 — because of course it is only a possible guess, but it seems to be a very, very fine guess — is this: he was writing with his fingers on the ground, which is where Moses's first tablets had ended up. You may remember that 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 idolising 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 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 this, 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 went 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, the lawgiver of the first law. 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, to start a lynch. But to be involved in it is very easy. So Jesus is basically saying, "Okay, go on, witness then. And will you be witnessing against yourself?" So each person now has their participation made voluntary in a way that it wouldn't have been before. If you're part of a village it's not voluntary; 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 oldest, they aren't — the eldest presumably because they're aware that they are sinful men. And 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, is she takes this to be a passage from Jeremiah 17, where "those who turn away from you shall be written on the earth," it says, "for they have forsaken the fountain of living water, the Lord." So the suggestion is 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, if you like, 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. In the name of the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit. Amen.