Homily for 5th Sunday of Lent 2010

It is good to see Tiger Woods back on the fairway. And it is good that Michael Clarke is back playing cricket! I couldn't help but think of these two when reading the account of the woman caught in adultery. We do take delight in the humiliation of people who are caught out doing something wrong. It is a bit ironic, though. The media promotes all kinds of sexual exploits as the norm and glamorous. Yet is quick to condemn when some public figure is caught out. It is not just the media, however, it is all of us. Such celebrities become scapegoats for all of us. We are quite capable of destroying lives just as much as the people who seem prepared to stone the woman in the Gospel.

One can hardly imagine what an humiliating experience it must have been for this woman, caught in the very act, we are told. Who caught her out? Her husband, or an inquisitive neighbour? Where was her partner in the act? She alone was dragged out into the public Temple precincts to be shamed and degraded by onlookers. We can do as much on TV and internet.

The scribes and Pharisees are using her to test Jesus. In Jesus' day stoning was not a commonplace event. Since the Roman occupation of Palestine only the Roman governor could deal out capital punishment. Yet the penalty was still in the Mosaic Law observed by Jews. For Jesus' enemies that law provided a way of seeing how far Jesus would go in observing the Mosaic Law. If he agrees to stoning he will be at odds with the Romans. If not then he breaks the Law of Moses. It seems Jesus reputation for compassion and his very presence was a challenge to them. His words and actions were testing them and their religion. It is interesting to not that in some early manuscripts of John's Gospel this passage is missing. Some commentators speculate that some early Christians thought Jesus let the woman off too lightly. So this episode must be wrong! So they omitted it. Yet it is there still and challenges us too.

There is much more to this episode than Jesus just forgiving a sinner. The first reading gives us a clue. Isaiah recalls the exodus from Egypt. The Lord made a way through the sea for the Hebrew slaves to escape to the promised land. He promises that God will do even greater things for his people. So forget the past. Look to what God is doing now and in the future. So these readings are once again like those in the whole of Lent: they are a baptismal catechesis. This encounter of the woman with Jesus is her exodus, her passover, her baptism of fire. She had to die to her old self to find life. Jesus is looking for a conversion of heat and mind.

Remember, however, that God only established a covenant with the Hebrew people after he had freed them from Egypt and slavery. Only then did he invite them to enter into a close and committed relationship with him asking them to keep the Ten Commandments. While they were slaves they were not free to make that choice. God had to set them free first. This is what Jesus does for this woman. He sets her free. She is not just a slave to her own sin. She is a slave also to the powers that be who are using her for their own ends. They cannot offer life. All they can offer is disgrace and death.

So Jesus, without any kind of miraculous intervention, sets her free to choose what she wants to become. He does this simply by meeting her and respecting her where she is. At the same time he puts the scribes and Pharisees in a position where they also have to choose what they want to become. For all concerned Jesus is not out to condemn. He is offering a new beginning, a new life, that can only be received in freedom. He offers it to everyone.

We all know people, I am sure, who are in situations where their ability to choose a better way of life is beyond them for all kinds of reasons that enslave them. That freedom is a grace. Pharisees or a terrorists only have power to destroy not give life. What do we give?

Jesus, by his actions and words, sees in her not a sinner to be condemned but a human being, a child of God to be loved. I have known many parents who do just that as well. A child who seems to have gone astray and got involved in self destructive behaviour can bring them to the brink of despair. There may be plenty of advice to disown the child, condemn the child. But they see their own flesh and blood in that lost life and it is impossible for them to do that. God finds it impossible as well. In the parable of the two sons and generous father in the Gospel last week we are not told what choice the elder son made. Did he accept his fathers invitation or did he reject it? We do not hear how this woman responded either. The question is left an open one because it is addressed to us as well.

With Paul, when we know the freedom that our Baptism celebrates, can say, "I am no longer trying for perfection by my own efforts, the perfection that comes from the Law, but I want only the perfection that comes through faith in Christ, and is from God and based on faith. All I want is to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and to share in his sufferings by reproducing the pattern of his death" (Philippians 3:9,10).

Fr Graham