We
heard an unusual message from the prophet Isaiah. God is the
speaker, he is addressing the Jewish Exiles in Babylon, he references Israel’s
foundational events – Moses, Exodus, etc., and then he says the
unthinkable: Remember NOT the events of the past, the things of long
ago. In effect, Forget it, forget the past, forget
all of it. Then God goes on to say, SEE, now I am doing
something new. Can you perceive it? In context, they could
not believe that the Persian King Cyrus – a non-Jew, someone who was said not
to have known God – would be God’s instrument to deliver them from their exile,
to bring them home, to re-build of temple, Jerusalem &
community. Many refused to return because they could not believe God
was in it, could not accept a new revelation, a new experience of God’s care
for them as authentic. The “new” was the stumbling block. They
refused to believe that God would do anything that was new, unconventional, radical.
The
four gospels tell a parallel story. Primarily the Jewish leadership
– scribes, Pharisees, Sanhedrin, high priest - could not believe that God was
doing something new with them and for them in Jesus. Jesus looks like a man,
walks like a man, talks like a man, he’s a man. But he does some
things that only God can do – is he really sent from God? Is he really God’s
son as he says? Many devout Jews took him and his deeds at face
value and believed he was God’s son, that he was authentic, that this man
renders God more present, accessible to all than does Temple, Torah, and
leadership. But he also does things we think God would never approve
of – healing on a sabbath, eating with sinners, speaking with more authority
than Torah, Moses, and us? Conflicts about Jesus escalate into a life and death
struggle with Jesus. Gloria Steinman sums up the dynamic, quoting
Jesus: the truth really will set you free, but before it does so the
truth will leave you completely P.O.’d. The core issue, the core
grievance with Jesus is that his identity, his person gives a new, heretofore
unimagined, open inclusive access to God, to holiness, to salvation, to the
fullness of life. He threatens the status quo. In fact,
with this newness of God’s presence to his creation and everyone, made actual
by the incarnation of his Son Jesus, comes a disruption for the Jewish
community of a magnitude that would be hard to overestimate. The
intensity of the life and death struggle noted in the gospels is proportionate
to the newness of God’s presence in our world, in his creation.
We
are placed in the midst of all this by John’s gospel story this
morning. The poor woman is used to set up a “gotcha moment”, the
so-called testing of Jesus, to trip him up in word or deed or both, so as to
discredit him permanently or even have grounds to kill him. The
scene is the temple, the people come to him, and his body language is
illuminating. He is seated – a public posture associated with
authority usually reserved for the teacher or judge. As he teaches a
disruptive, intrusive group led by Scribes and Pharisees crash the teaching
moment by demanding that he judge this woman’s case now. Jesus’
first response is non-verbal, he surrenders the judgment seat and stoops down
to the ground in a non-contentious posture, doodling in the sand. In
his culture, this was a recognizable form of messaging, signaling woman’s
accusers, I am not going there to meet you. I am not going
to fight you. I am not playing the ‘gotcha’ game. They
press on, he holds his ground and when he senses the power to shape the
conversation shifts to him, he literally “un-stoops” himself. He changes his
posture to that of the just man, the man who stands upright in the presence of
God and the community, and eye to eye. Matter of factly he says, Let
the one who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her. Immediately
he drops again to the ground again assuming a humble posture, one of
indifferent vulnerability, fingering the sand, allowing time for the real
conversations to begin. It’s the conversation that originates in a
listening deeper than hearing words with ears, it’s an attending to one’s past,
one’s failures, one’s sins, the things one would have liked not to have done,
the words one wishes were never said at all, a recognition of an inner truth
whispered softly by the voice of conscience and the Holy Spirit.
It
was a conversation of repentance that Jesus initiated. He declined
to engage in the fight mode, disengaged from the power mode, and the judgment
mode, by taking a posture of vulnerability, i.e., a posture of faith that his
Father would impart to him in this moment of need truth, a truth to set each
one free to think and feel and act like the icon of God each one deeply
is. The mysterious spiritual power of Jesus disclosed here we might
call “elective vulnerability”, he leads with it all the way to the cross and
beyond. He invites us to follow him, to imitate him in this way of
kindly truth, emanating from who he is and his relationship to the Father, ever
guiding us toward who we are and are becoming in him.
When
silence without matches the silence within, he again assumes the upright
posture of the just man, and he addresses the accused respectfully, Woman,
as he addresses his mother in the Synoptics. Like his Father
(Genesis 3), he does not accuse but rather he questions. Where
are they? Has no one condemned you? No one,
Lord. Pretty remarkable when you think of the quasi-mob
mentality where we started from. Neither do I condemn you. Jesus
absolves her shame and welcomes her back into community. Jesus is the only
sinless one and he acquits her, even as he acquitted the others and
us. In the freedom his acquittal imparts, he opens up for her a
doorway into the future, a new path into a changed life – go and sin
not again. Likewise, for all those who walked away stepping back
from condemning the woman, they too were given the possibility of a new future,
a less fearful one, a more human one, hopefully, one open to a new revelation
and encounter with God.
To
close, we note that Jesus challenged the caretakers of a religious system and
horizon so embedded in its story, its rule, its practices, and its past that
they were no longer able even to imagine God could and would do something new –
for them. That temptation is not restricted to 1 c. Jewish people
and their leadership. This story again reveals that God, God’s
world, God’s presence, God’s reality vastly exceeds the boundaries of our lives
and institutions, our minds and communities, our hearts and stories, our souls,
and our very selves. The experience of de-construction is a gift of
grace waiting to be received.
Jesus
is renewing this grace in this and every Eucharist.
Father Isaac's homily for the Fifth Sunday of Lent, Year C.
