Ash Wednesday Service. 5-3-2014.
The Woman Caught in Adultery.
May I be helped to speak in the name of the Living God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.
Yet again, the Pharisees try to draw Jesus into a trap. This time the bait is a woman caught in adultery. It’s tempting to focus on the conflict, the debate – but not this evening. Instead, concentrate on the woman, her thoughts, her feelings. What is happening to her while this contest between Jesus and the Pharisees is played out?
She has been caught in the very act of adultery; surrounded by lawyers and priests that cannot be comfortable. It’s embarrassing, humiliating.
She has been deserted. It takes two to tango, but the woman faces her accusers without her dance partner, her lover. Did you realise that under Jewish law, when a married man has sex with an unmarried woman, she is guilty of adultery whilst he is not? She faces her fate, the wrath of her righteous accusers, alone.
And there is really no doubt. According to the law she is guilty of adultery; according to the law the punishment is death by stoning. The Romans might intervene – if they got there in time. Meanwhile the woman cowers before the threat of a lynch mob. She must be terrified.
The woman is thrust into the centre of a crowd. They’ve gathered at the temple to hear Jesus preach. And she is exposed to their gaze in her shame, perhaps in her nakedness. As a player in a courtroom scene she is guilty. But as a human being she is alone, deserted, frightened, humiliated, exposed.
And what happens? She is pretty much ignored by the Pharisees. Maybe there are a couple of accusing fingers pointing her way, a few hands filled with missiles ready to launch her way. But the truth is she’s not important – to the Pharisees she’s not a human being, just a piece of bait.
The Pharisees are intent on trapping Jesus. She is just a means to an end. She has been caught in her sin. The law says she should be stoned, what does Jesus have to say about it?
What is more disturbing, the woman is largely ignored by Jesus as well. Jesus deliberately fails to be drawn into the quarrel. Faced with this accused woman he just bends down and starts doodling.
Has this woman heard the stories about him? About how Jesus loves to be amongst people, helping them – the sick, prostitutes, tax collectors, all the poor souls who float in and out of the gospel stories. Imagine how she feels now. He is the last hope to which she clings. Yet he seems to ignore her. Imagine her sense of hopelessness, of despair.
Even when her accusers are gone, and Jesus finally addresses her, there’s not a whole lot of interaction, not much sympathy for what she has just endured – is still enduring in her mind. Just a curt instruction to go and sin no more.
For now, that’s where I want to stop. Feeling all those feelings, those thoughts that this woman is experiencing: alone, deserted, frightened, humiliated, exposed, ignored, hopeless, despairing.
We all know what that’s like. We’ve all felt buffeted about by others, by forces we have no control over. We’ve all felt in those times as though we as individuals don’t matter – even God can seem to ignore us, to leave us to our fate.
To feel abandoned or ignored by God – for the person who feels like that, it is more than just feeling, it is reality. To deny that, is to devalue their pain.
I have a friend who, many years ago now, spent some time working at a centre providing support for people affected by HIV/AIDS. This was back in the days when an AIDS diagnosis was effectively a death sentence. Many of the people she worked with felt like the woman in this evening’s gospel story.
Their intimate sexual activities were exposed to public view; they were often deserted by their partners or families; they were condemned and held up as examples of moral turpitude, of depravity; they were used or ignored, as appropriate, by politicians, even church leaders. And when they were at this, their lowest, they are apparently abandoned by God.
Watching friends suffer and die in circumstances like this, those who love and care for these people constantly, ask ‘Where is God in all this?’
Some lose faith. Some develop a unique ministry. At its heart is facing the reality of the situation: the inevitability of death, the apparent indifference of God. And so they do not deny it, or offer easy assurances. They live with their helplessness in the face of suffering. They stay with the pain of being rejected by those they long to help.
They are simply with those who suffer, sharing the reality of their pain and their powerlessness. It’s as though someone from the crowd in the temple had quietly got up and walked over to stand alongside the cowering woman – just gone and stood next to her waiting for the first stone to fly.
The model for this form of ministry is Jesus himself. What the woman caught in adultery does not know, though we do, is that this Jesus who, in the temple courtyard appears to ignore her, will one day share her experience.
On the cross he will be betrayed, deserted by his friends, humiliated and taunted by passers-by. He will suffer the agony of an excruciating form of execution. He will be treated not as a human being, but as an object. For Rome he is a sop to keep Jerusalem quiet. For the Jewish elders he is an example of what happens to the leaders of sects who challenge them.
A pawn in the contests between conquered and conqueror, politics and religion, the man Jesus will share the deepest agony of all. He will taste the very depths of despair as in his moment of greatest need God, in whose presence he has lived his life, ignores him. ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’
Bizarrely, it is this very thing which brings us hope. Jesus has shared with us the reality of that feeling of utter abandonment, utter despair. He has shared with us the pain and powerlessness that is so much of human life.
We may feel that God is not with us – we may feel the absence of the kind, compassionate healer to whom we cling in faith. But in our darkest moments, when there appears to be no comfort, not even from the presence of God, he is actually there alongside us: helpless and rejected, but present in the pain of abandonment.
Rev’d John Routh.
Rector of Holy Trinity.