Homily for the 5th Sunday of Lent, Mar. 21, 2010
Intro: Today’s gospel story had a tough time making it into the canon of Sacred
Scripture. It is missing from the earliest papyrus copies of John, missing from
the most important early Greek manuscripts of John, and was not commented on
by any Greek Father of the Church before the 12th century. Since the style and
the vocabulary of this passage are not John’s style, some copyists placed it in
Luke’s Gospel. In spite of all this, textual critics today think the passage has all
the earmarks of the real Jesus, and so it is universally included here in the gospel
of John. Why was it such an orphan?
Jesus: In our modern world, adultery is no longer the shameful crime it always
was. Hollywood and TV have made it seem as common as dirt, and the
callousness of this view has seeped into much of our society. But in the world of
Jesus, it was a monstrous crime. Adultery undermined the integrity of the family
as the basic building block of society; it destabilized and destroyed community
relationships; it undermined the whole idea of inherited nationhood. While one’s
identity as a Jews depended on being born of a Jewish mother, it was the father’s
line which determined one’s place in society. Finally, adultery violated the
fidelity most fundamental in Jewish society, the one that Yahweh made symbolic
of his own covenanted relationship with Israel. It was so mortal a sin that, along
with murder, it merited capital punishment for both partners in the adulterous act.
And so the scribes and Pharisees wanting to stone this woman are defending not
just some form of ritual or even moral purity, but their whole identity as a
religious people. This is the problem that Jesus faces when the Pharisees and
scribes bring this woman caught in adultery to Jesus.
At first, you might say, “What’s the problem? She did it; she was caught in the
act. It’s the law: Stone her.” But here’s the catch: the Pharisees and scribes
don’t expect Jesus to give that automatic answer. They suspect he’ll do
something else, and then they’ll have him: he can’t be a teacher in Israel if he
doesn’t subscribe to the law. And so they test him: “What do you say?”
What does Jesus say? He says nothing. He bends over and writes in the dust
with his finger. Some say he was writing the sins of the woman’s various
accusers. Possibly, but, in fact, we don’t know what he wrote. And maybe those
at the scene didn’t, either. What Jesus does is create silence. Silence is the
womb in which questions emerge and the truth comes to birth. “What is he
writing?” becomes “What’s going on? Who is this woman? Why is she here
alone; where is the man caught with her? Why are we here? Really, how do I
get to be judge?”
But the Pharisees don’t want the silence in which these questions emerge. They
start badgering Jesus for his answer. And so he finally straightens up and says,
“Let the one among you without sin be the first to throw a stone.” He goes back
to his silent writing. And the crowd, including the self-righteous Pharisees and
scribes, begin to melt away one by one. None of them is without sin, and so
none of them can cast the stone.
Finally, Jesus is left with the woman. He is without sin; he can cast the stone.
Instead, he says, “Woman…has no one condemned you?” She speaks for the
first time, “No one, sir.” Jesus, with the compassion of an all-forgiving God,
says, “Neither do I condemn you.” But he does not condone the monstrous sin:
“Go, and don’t commit this sin again.”
The Early Church had great difficulty with this text. It identified murder,
adultery, and apostasy from the Church as unforgivable sins. And so this gospel
did not conform with Church practice for well over a century. But the message
of Jesus’ forgiveness of the adulteress would not go away. It floated about in the
oral traditions of the church, until finally it converted the Church to the fact that
adultery is not an unforgivable sin. (Only the wholesale rejection of the Holy
Spirit is unforgivable sin.) Having done its work, the story found its home here
in the gospel of John and became part of the canonical inspired Word of God.
Interesting, huh? But what does it say to us today?
1. It shows us a courageous, yet loving Jesus. A woman who heard this passage
said, “I like this Jesus!” This Jesus, who images the compassion and mercy of
God, is the one who is Lord of our hearts. This is the one for whom Paul can
say, “I consider everything as loss because of the supreme good of knowing
Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake…I consider everything so much garbage, that
I may gain Christ and be possessed by him.”
2. Jesus rejects capital punishment for adultery, even though he considers it a
heinous sin. That message is still countercultural in savage parts of today’s
world---in Islam, where women can still be killed for adultery or in Texas, where
as recently as 1970 a woman could be killed for adultery. We need this
compassionate Jesus to remind us that no sin is punishable by death. And we
need this Jesus to tell us that there is no probable reason for any capital
punishment, as Pope John Paul II pointed out.
3. This passage condemns the harsh judgment that sinners make on other sinners.
We don’t know why this woman committed adultery, but we must presume that
powerful pressures were at work on her. The same is true of most sinners: we
do not know what factors have reduced their guilt far below that of ourselves,
who have had so many graces of Christ in our lives. We don’t know what
childhood experiences deformed them, and, in any case, we, with our own
incapacity to love, are in no position to be their judge. We leave them to Jesus,
whose judgment comes totally out of his infinite love for them. To judge them
makes us adulterers, unfaithful to Jesus, who commands us not to judge.
4. This year, however, I am struck by the silence Jesus creates. In our world we
seem so afraid of silence: We must have muzak in our buildings, ipods in our
ears, texts under our fingers---anything but that womb of silence in which we
come to ourselves, and, even more, in which God speaks to us. And so we, and
our society, become daily more and more superficial. God and Jesus are talking
to us at all times, but there is so much noise that we cannot hear them. I
encourage all of you, during these last two weeks of Lent, to give yourself some
silence. Jesus is going to death for our sins and yet praying from the cross
“Father forgive them; they know not what they do.” Let his actions and his
words echo in the silence of your minds and hearts..
Silence lets Jesus bring us his good news.