A sermon by the Rev. Dr. Cynthia Briggs Kittredge, Associate Professor of New Testament, given on February 19, 2008, in Christ Chapel

John 8:1-11

In the gospel tradition, this story is an orphan. It’s a story with no home, no place to lay its head. It’s not really from the gospel of John, nor from the gospel of Luke, says the manuscript evidence. It’s a roving radical one that cannot be pinned down to one literary location.

Episcopalians never hear it on Sundays. In the Church of England they read it every Ash Wednesday, and today we do on this Tuesday in Lent in Austin. It’s a difficult story to make perfectly pious, though people have certainly tried – the suppliant doesn’t confess, repent, even ask for help, and Jesus doesn’t even explicitly forgive her – he just says the Greek equivalent of “Git, go on your way, and don’t sin again.” The facts it lacks and the details it has make it unnerving... and it troubled the scribal tradition – I think because of its revelation of raw human depravity and of God’s mysterious and inexplicable response.

The pent up tension in this moment of crisis is intense. Those at the temple and we who read it so many generations later anticipate the explosion of rage, the execution of justice, and the satisfying resolution of punishment. The prisoner will be killed, a crime avenged. When these scribes and Pharisees are lined up in formation against this woman, and the stones are in piles – it is the gallows, the shock box. About to ignite and blaze is the hatred, envy and hostility of the scribes and Pharisees against Jesus and the resentment, rage, fury against a woman who has dishonored her husband, and by extension all husbands, by giving to another man what belongs to him. The text says that she stands for all – “in the law Moses commanded us to stone such women....”

And all this violence is about to be unleashed upon her.

She has been caught and will pay with her life. It’s going to hurt and be horrible, and before she dies, she’ll be shamed, made to stand before all of them – in their midst – en meso – Like Hester Prynne and like the woman on death row in Pakistan and like the prisoners at Abu Ghraib – First she is humiliated.

There is only one scene that rivals this one in the gospels – which is as horrifying and repulsive:

“– Hail, King of the Jews, Crucify him, Crucify him.”

This woman, remembered in the subtitles as the “Woman Taken in Adultery,” is for the Pharisees a means to an end. She is used by them as a trap for Jesus.

“Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery. Now in the law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?”

They said this to test him, so that they might have some charge to bring against him.”

For the Pharisees, she is an example. For the Church Fathers she is a symbol of human sin. Augustine calls her Miser, the Miserable One who meets Jesus, Misericordia, Mercy. Could it be that she is an object to Jesus, too, a means for him to demonstrate his outwitting the Pharisees? Is she the personal version of the coin used to pay taxes that he asks the Pharisees to produce which has Caesar’s image upon it?

It may be.... let us see.

So what does Jesus do? This situation is really not all that unusual – it resembles so many with which we are familiar. Sometimes the laws themselves are wrong – Sometimes the law enshrines, lots of the time, the law enshrines sexist, imperialist values, and religious laws are no exception, but rather are all the more powerful if they are religious.

Law and violence are sometimes identical – execution a legitimate and legal spectacle of revenge and violence. Sometimes people with evil intentions use the law to trap and to trick, and sometimes they use the law to intimidate and shame, and to control. All this we call sin.

So what does Jesus do? When he is confronted with the convicted stranger? What does God do when confronted with overwhelming hate and lust for blood?

Well, I’m not sure I can describe it in discursive words. The scripture doesn’t either.

He gets low down, bends close to the ground. Below the mob’s accusations and the relentless questioning, he does something mysterious – he draws, writes, makes some markings, with a single human finger, daktulo, not a pen, or a stylus, a sword, a cursor, with his finger.

Amazingly frail. Faint marks in the dust, the earth, signs that will blow away, wash away, erode, not in the stone but in the dust of the earth, the dirt of the ground, ground zero.

The law is written too, but maybe this is a different kind of writing, an improvised writing, to see what happens, what meaning appears, what picture emerges. Maybe he’s stalling for time, diffusing anxiety, maybe he’s making the distracting gesture of the magician while he makes the illusion –

Maybe it’s the silence, like his going to a lonely place apart –

and then he straightens up.

“Let he who is without sin among you cast the first stone.”

And then he bends again, down low, and again he writes. In his unseen script all their projections multiply, and the adreneline eases and fades, and the self-righteous outrage turns to sheepishness, and the wanting to shame turns to wishing to disappear. And they leave the killing field, one by one, beginning with the elders.

If Jesus and the woman without a name were set apart from each other by the crowd and by the interrogation, if she were an example only, when the elders go off, and she and he are left alone, if she had ever been an only an object, a test, a challenge for him, this is no longer the case. Jesus sees her, and the two of them have a chat – it’s a short one, but in the conversation she becomes a Thou and he a Thou to her. Not an Object, but a person, a subject.

“Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”

“No one, sir.”

Like she and Jesus, when we are seen by Christ, we become subjects to God, to Jesus, to ourselves. Like her, we are not objects of of sexual possession or industrial production or scapegoats for others, but like her, we are people made from earth, nephesh hayyim, living beings, good, not be condemned and destroyed.

“Neither do I condemn you. Go your way, and from now on do not sin again.”

Here are Jesus’ words of absolution: Git.

She’s free now. Whatever outwitting has happened, whatever lesson is illustrated, she’s free; she gets her life back. There is no satisfaction of lust for violence and no carriage of justice.

The relief is as vivid as the crisis was acute This is the shocking conclusion. The free ride, the lucky break. Clemency. Pardon.

– I picture her running off like a wild deer into the woods.

Jesus has de-clawed the violence of the scribes and Pharisees – His mercy diffuses our violence too – when sin, pride, greed take us over, wreck us, trample our selves, make us into raging things – trying to take vengeance on others and to destroy ourselves.

In Lent through practice and prayer we turn over the soil, discover new life and growth, through reflection, self-knowledge, repentance. We plow up the ground, knowing ourselves as created from the earth, subjects to God and to ourselves. Now the green blade riseth from the buried grain - warm soil for planting.

We have a lucky break, a second chance, a million second chances. Jesus has disarmed our enemies, and disarmed us. With gentleness.

And we don’t even know what he wrote.

Go! Git! And don’t sin again.