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The God Who Does Not Condemn You Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis May 17, 2009, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Deuteronomy 22:22-27 John 7:53-8:11
“In the insubstantial dust,” writes Miguel de Unamuno, “let us read the lesson of conscience/traced by your finger as you bent over/the earth, your open book/alive and sacred….” Even though the story of the woman caught in adultery is a later addition to John’s gospel—an addition that has all the marks of Luke’s pen—many scholars agree that the story comes to us from a time not that far removed from Jesus’ earthly life. They know this because sometime in the second century the punishment for adultery changed from stoning to strangulation. Specifically the means and method of second century capital punishment, as laid out in the Sanhedrin, read: “The man is to be enclosed in dung up to his knees and a soft towel set within a rough towel is to be placed around his neck (in order that no mark be made, for the punishment is God’s punishment). Then one man draws in one direction and another in the other direction until he (or she) be dead.” Furthermore, no matter the century or the method of execution, the law stipulated that the witnesses themselves were to carry out the death sentence…were to administer the lethal injection, throw the switch on the chair, pull the floor out from underneath the figure in the noose, release the blade in the guillotine, aim the gun at the hooded head, cast the first stone…in God’s name and on God’s behalf! For the most part this did not cause the self-appointed righteous of John’s time (who are like unto our own) any loss of sleep. They believed themselves to be “the agents of the punishment of God.” How do the blessed feel when they think of the damned? the old theologians would ask sometime later. “The thought does not trouble them,” comes the answer. “On the contrary, when they look at the damned they rejoice that God's honor is so great." One scholar even speculates that this story was not in John’s original manuscript because “The ease with which Jesus forgave the adulteress was hard to reconcile with the stern penitential discipline in vogue in the early Church. It was only when a more liberal practice [of atonement] was firmly established that this story received widespread acceptance.” Today the story is most often invoked by Christians who are fond of loving the sinner but hating the sin. The distinction works only if the sin in question involves something one willingly does that one can willingly stop doing rather than something one unwittingly is that one cannot cease being. The distinction also only works if one is a Pelagian—a believer in the moral perfectibility of human beings which was ruled a heresy back in Augustine’s time. But these are points for another sermon! Back to this one in which an unspecified number of agents of the punishment of God had brought a woman who had been caught in adultery to Jesus; but (says the narrator) they had come with no intention of seeking Jesus’ moral advice in the matter. Rather they entered the temple and interrupted Jesus’ teaching in order to catch him in the act of blasphemy. The dilemma facing Jesus in their minds was this: the law of Moses required two witnesses to accuse a person of adultery. That she had been caught in the act presumably met the test of evidence. Therefore the law was unequivocal: she was to be stoned. The absence of the man is glaring but of no consequence if the point is to catch Jesus in the act of blasphemy. One adulteress will do the trick. Jesus either had to concur with the law of Moses that ordered the woman’s death by stoning or set himself against God’s law and be liable himself to death by stoning. According to Leviticus, by the way, the entire congregation along with the witnesses shall stone anyone found guilty of blasphemy. So the real question raised by this little story as well as all of the material that surrounds it in John is simply this: Who is to judge? Who is able to stand in the place of judgment over another? In the middle of John’s seventh chapter and parallel to the story before us this morning, Jesus enters the temple and begins to teach in such a way that people ask where he could have learned these things. Claiming his teaching to be from God, Jesus begins to press the crowd for the basis of their knowledge of God by which they have judged him. “Did not Moses give you the law? Yet none of you keeps the law.” Specifically he juxtaposes a willingness to circumcise on the sabbath in order that the law of Moses not be broken with a judgment against him because he healed a man’s whole body on the sabbath. Judging Jesus according to the flesh, says Edwin Hoskyns, they “perceive only a violation of the sabbath punishable by death” while God’s true judgment has been revealed in Jesus’ healing of the whole person--a sign given to let us glimpse the consequences of God’s judgment against sin and death. “Do not judge by appearances,” commands Jesus just before the religious authorities attempt to have him arrested, “but judge with right judgment.” We, of course, cannot judge rightly unless we know him and see the other not through the law of Moses but through the grace and truth he reveals. Then as if to illustrate his point, the story of the woman caught in adultery appears. “On the very basic level” wrote Pam Belluck in the New York Times following the YouTube phenomena featuring a dowdy Scottish spinster with the voice of an angel, “judging people by appearance means putting them quickly into impersonal categories, much like deciding whether an animal is a cat or a dog….Eons ago, this capability was of life-and-death importance” she goes on, “and humans developed the ability to gauge other people within seconds.” That the Deuteronomist believed the stoning of an adulterer to be a matter of life and death in the community is underscored by the repeated acknowledgment that in the stoning, evil is thereby purged from the community. No doubt many in this country have come to believe the same of people who appear to be from the Middle East, though categorical judgments of human beings based on appearances involve not only ethnic origin but class, race, gender, age. Evil is purged from the community when these types are banished or subdued or silenced or slain. Scientists have now found that judgments based on appearances “are not simply stored and retrieved by the brain, but ‘are associated with general regions of the brain involved in memory and [hope]” whose underside is fear. David Amodio, assistant professor of psychology at New York University, suggests that “people recruit stereotypes to…help them plan a world that’s consistent with the goal they might have.” Or to put the matter theologically, people judge people according to their eschatology, according to the persons they determine to be desirable inhabitants of the hereafter they believe God has promised them, a kingdom that often bears an uncanny resemblance to a civically or economically or socially or theologically segregated moral universe. Though here is an even more curious scientific finding. Susan Fiske, professor of psychology and neuroscience at Princeton, has discovered that those judged to be of a low social status register differently in the brain. “‘The part of the brain that normally activates when you are thinking about people is surprisingly silent when you’re looking at homeless people,’ she said [though homeless is a blank to fill in]. ‘It’s kind of a neural dehumanization. Maybe we can’t bear the horrible situation they are in [to give us the benefit of the doubt], or we don’t want to get involved, or we’re afraid we might get contaminated.’” [Purge the evil from the community!] And even when an exception to the rule appears, the discrepancy “‘creates a sort of autonomic arousal’ in our central nervous system,” notes John Dovidio of Yale, “that is going to motivate us to do something in that situation,” especially if we perceive the situation is dangerous. Stoning, say…or lynching. “But,” she said, “the neural response is restored when people are asked to focus on what soup the homeless person might like to eat, something that makes one think about the person as someone with wants or goals.” Consider the testimony of those in this community who have returned from Haiti or Pearlington or St. Paul’s makeshift home for the homeless with reports that the people who once were categories now have become human beings for whom they pray daily. Incarnation, it seems, activates a part of our brain that makes of think of the other as human! However when Jesus straightened up and spoke to the men who had brought the woman caught in adultery to him, the men whose brains did not register her humanity, his words activated a part of their brains that made them think of themselves as human. “Let the one without sin cast the first stone.” Theologically translated, I think his words mean, “Let the one at one with the will of God mete out God’s judgment.” “There is no more to be said,” says Hoskyns. All “stand under the judgment of God; no single one of them is without sin, and no single one of them is capable of pronouncing the judgment of God.” Nevertheless, the most remarkable moment in the story is the moment when, in response to Jesus’ words, the oldest turns to walk away and, one by one, the rest follow. Never on the floor of Presbytery have I seen the fact of a person’s own broken relationship with God abate that person’s zeal to be God’s instrument of judgment against another deemed to be more of a sinner in God’s sight. As sin is the damage we do by the distance we keep from God and the neighbor, then the sinners in this story are those who—one by one—increased the distance between themselves and Jesus until, at the end of the story, only Jesus and the woman remain. He is without sin; she a sinner. Translated that means he is at one with God and able to judge the distance we have run from God rightly. Therefore he does not condemn the woman but rather commands her to live the rest of her life in relation to him. That is the meaning of sinning no more. She cannot of her own do this; no one can. But as Christ accompanies her, as he dwells with her, as his light shines on her darkness, he takes away her sin. He does the same for you and me. The next words out of Jesus’ mouth in John’s gospel say as much: “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life.” With his light shining not only on the path before us but on those whom we shall meet along the way, may our brains be activated by God’s Spirit and our hearts enlarged to judge not by appearances; for as in him we have been made one with the God who does not condemn, so will he accompany even us all the days of our life, that we may sin no more. Thanks be to God. |