Has no one condemned you? - A Lent reflection by Warren Hartley
Stained glass window detail depicting Christ forgives the woman caught in adultery, Sacred Heart Church, Columbus, Ohio. PHOTO: Nheyob
ON ASH WEDNESDAY, one of the Bible readings recommended for the day is the story of Jesus forgiving the woman ‘caught in adultery’ [John 8:1-11].
Our Open Table Liverpool community co-hosted their parish’s Ash Wednesday service, and their LGBTQIA+ Ministry Facilitator, Warren Hartley, shared this reflection on the story after sharing Glitter Ash, a practice intending to capture the relationship between Ash Wednesday and Easter, between death and new life.
Does this story disturb you?
Actually I hope it does! After all, it is a story filled with fear, mob violence, injustice, bullying and misogyny. The elements of this story are all too familiar to us even today. Just open up Twitter on your phone, for example, and within a short period it will leap out at you. Alternatively, watch a news broadcast to see a sneering autocrat waging war.
The late great Jesuit priest Gerard W Hughes, wrote in his book Oh God Why? that:
‘the feasts of the church are celebrated not primarily to remind us of past events but to help us celebrate our current existence’.
So what can this story from our cultural and spiritual history help us celebrate in our current existence? It happened so long ago now, and scholars argue did it even ‘happen’ or what is ‘just a story’? Either way, how we tell and hear stories shapes the way we think of ourselves and the wider world.
The first thing I notice about this story is that it is only the woman who is ‘caught in adultery’. Where was the other party? As the old saying goes, ‘it takes two to tango’!. We know nothing about the woman, no name, no background, no idea of the situation from which she arises. Was the sex even consensual? In Jewish law, similar to Roman and Greek law of the time, a man’s infidelity did not constitute adultery, only the woman’s. Was she set up just to create this trap? An object to be used?
The question presented to Jesus was certainly a ‘gotcha’ moment , impossible to answer. You see, the teachers were simply carrying out the law of the land. This woman had clearly broken the law, having been caught ‘red handed’. However the legal system of the day rarely gave the death penalty, therefore what we are dealing with here is vigilante justice to play to a crowd.
There was no need for jury nor judge, as the law of Moses stated she should be killed by stoning, and her ‘crime’ would have been enough to incense the mob sufficiently to dispense with the need for legal process. We hear of similar incidents today in places with strong blasphemy laws. It takes little to whip up a crowd to violence.
The conundrum Jesus faced was that if he told them to stone her, he would be inciting violence outside the law, and yet to protect the woman would have been to break the law and potentially forfeit his own life to the anger of the mob.
Stoning is a particularly brutal way of killing someone. The victim would be partially buried in a pit, and then stones hurled at them by a mob. It could take hours to die. However no-one knew who threw the fatal stone. Classic mob violence… everyone was guilty and no one person could be blamed.
Where does the injustice or the sin lie in this situation? Is it with the woman who perhaps made a questionable choice, or is it in the reaction of the mob?
Dr Gary Jenkins, murdered in homophobic attack by two men and a teenage girl in a park in Cardiff in July 2021.
Let’s translate this into a modern British story. I think about Gary Jenkins, a doctor, who was murdered in Cardiff’s Bute Park in July last year. Dr Jenkins was a gay man who had gone looking for a sexual encounter in a public park. He was attacked by three people who set themselves up as judge, jury and executioner. He was beaten and tortured to death. These three people also assaulted another man who attempted to intervene.
The parallels to our scriptural story stand out. Some may argue Dr Jenkins made a questionable choice, but does that justify mob violence? It reminds me of that disgusting question asked of rape victims: ‘what were you wearing?’, as if somehow they brought it on themselves! Then the man who intervened was assaulted for his troubles, a fate Jesus could have shared in this story. The three people who attacked Dr Jenkins all pleaded not guilty at trial - who among them dealt the fatal punch or kick? - though they were all convicted.
Stories like our scripture reading, and the attack on Dr Jenkins, force us to ask big questions about what is it within our culture that gives permission inflict violence in all its forms - physical, economic, environmental - to those deemed not to fit. Is it Dr Jenkins or the woman caught in adultery who were in the wrong? Or the three murderers, or the mob who no doubt would have gladly killed the woman if not for the intervention of Jesus? Or worse, is it something within all of us collectively in our culture and society where we are all implicated?
It seems clear to me that it is systemic injustice at play here, in both of these stories, which plas out daily in every culture in different ways. It is systemic injustice which is the log in our own collective eye, and an individual error a mere speck. The systems we rail against are the very systems in which we are complicit. Sin is always corporate. Not sinning isn’t about keeping our noses clean - ‘aren’t I good?’ - it is about the dust we collect along our walk through collective life.
We can easily say to ourselves that we wouldn’t act like that. Maya Angelou, when interviewed on television, quoted the Roman slave Terence who said: ‘I am a human being, nothing human can be alien to me’. Maya continued:
‘If you can internalise the least portion of that, you will never be able to say of a criminal act “I couldn’t do that” no matter how heinous the crime. If a human being did it we have to say “I have in me all the components that are in her or in him. I intend to use my energies constructively as opposed to destructively”.
If you can do that about the negative, just think what you can do about the positive. If a human being dreams a great dream, dares to love somebody, If a human being dares to be Martin Luther King, Mahatma Ghandi, Mother Theresa or Malcom X, if a human being dares to be bigger than the condition into which she or he was born, it means so can you, and so you can try to stretch yourself. I am a human being, nothing human can be alien to me.’
There are three protagonists in this story. The woman, the crowd and Jesus. We have as individuals and as a society occupied all three places. We have been the victim or wrong-doer, and the crowd, and we are called to be like the third, neither creating nor condemning victims but calling with words of peace a third way, a queer way beyond the binary.
We begin then to see what this feast is trying to help us celebrate about our current existence. It isn’t just about individual wrong-doing, it is our participation in systems that oppress and destroy, and carting the shame of walking against the flow, the pain of sticking out and being misunderstood. To have our ashes and lives smeared and yet to find the glitter in the ash and pain. Not to deny the pain but to look beyond it.
Ash Wednesday is a collective act of committal to the queer kingdom where all the rules are tipped over; the first are last, the adulteress more moral than the upright, the rich go away empty and the poor are fed.
Jesus took a third way between the stark binary choices that he was given: to comply with the crowd, or side with the woman? He stooped and scribbled in the dust, the dust from which we are made. We do not know what he wrote, but I wonder if this was a way of buying some time and controlling his own fear. He was a human being, God in a finite and limited form. He showed the source of the sin in the mob and not the individual. He spoke no words of condemnation, neither for the crowd nor the woman, but took the space and time to see the heart of what was actually going on. Jesus queers the dynamic, the one to be sacrificed goes free, and self-righteous anger dissipates like writing in the dust.
As the American activist Maggie Kuhn exhorts us to do:
‘Stand before the people you fear and speak your mind - even if your voice shakes.’
My voice shakes incessantly, if I can even get it to speak - my complicity is often my cowardice in not speaking up or speaking out.
So what does this mean in practice? What do we do with this insight? The burden can feel overwhelming! How can I change the world?
Well, YOU can't! Jesus didn't in his lifetime, he might have saved one woman from stoning, but on the same day in the next village up, another may well have been killed.
Collectively WE might though. Communities like the one we are a part of can shift our thinking. Your individual efforts can make a difference, but only when added together. It is said that only 25% of a population needs to take hold of an idea for it to cascade across a culture.
May we individually and corporately stretch ourselves and use our energies constructively, and maybe, just maybe, we are good enough and that gritty, glittery scandalous hope we wear on our forehead tonight is a foretaste of what can be ?
Can I, can you hear Jesus say ‘Has no one condemned you? Then neither do I condemn you.’
