Sermon at Parish Mass Lent 5 2013

Isaiah 43:16-21

Philippians 3:8-14

John 8:1-11

On Monday I went to the Courtauld Gallery to see the Picasso 1901 exhibition. Monday is cheap entry day at the Courtauld, there were lots of people there, and I could only get a timed ticket. So while I was waiting I went to look at the other collections. Among the canvases by Rubens, Cezanne and Monet there was a tiny panel painting by Brueghel the Elder in grisaille, which is a technique of painting in oils in monochrome. It depicted the scene from today’s gospel, the woman caught in adultery and brought before Jesus.

Brueghel’s painting shows the moment when Jesus bends down and writes with his finger on the ground. And although the accused woman is standing in the centre of the scene, the bystanders and her accusers are not looking at her, but at what Jesus is writing. And they are reacting with amazement, even astonishment. 

According to Brueghel’s version what Jesus is writing is, in Dutch, the words, “let the one who is without sin cast the first stone”. Now the gospel story doesn’t actually tell us what Jesus wrote, so Brueghel is guessing, and perhaps he just wanted to make sure that the scene was unambiguously identified. 

There have been other suggestions about what it was that Jesus wrote. Perhaps he was writing down the names of the woman’s accusers, or their secret sins, even the names of the people with whom they had committed adultery. But I think we need to attend to the text. This gospel passage thinks it is important to tell us that Jesus wrote with his finger on the ground, twice, but does not think it important to tell us what Jesus wrote. So perhaps it is the  simple fact of his writing that is significant.

This particular gospel passage hasn’t always been where it is now at the beginning of chapter 8 of John’s gospel. In some early manuscripts it is in other places in John, or even in Luke. It seems to have been a free floating story which moved around because people didn’t know quite where it fitted in the sequence of events in Jesus’ life. But it is surely an authentic reminiscence of Jesus, the merciful and forgiving Lord, the friend of sinners, who was always being opposed and tested by the Pharisees. 

And in the canon of scripture recognised by the Church it has ended up in John’s gospel. John, as we know, makes great use of symbolic detail, and places an emphasis on the Divinity of Jesus, on Jesus being God’s word in person in the world. And I think these help us to understanding this story. 

There may be a reference, for example, to the Prophet Jeremiah, who wrote 

O hope of Israel! O Lord!
   All who forsake you shall be put to shame;
those who turn away from you shall be recorded in the earth,
   for they have forsaken the fountain of living water, the Lord. 

That fountain of living water is something that Jesus has just referred to in the scene before today’s gospel, so perhaps here we are meant to see, in the woman’s accusers, those who have turned away from that water. Jesus writing on the earth may have reminded them of that text of Jeremiah.

But we are told quite specifically that Jesus writes with his finger on the ground twice. And in the Old Testament there are two scenes in which the finger of God writes.

The first scene is the giving of the ten commandments. In Exodus chapter 31 God is said to have inscribed with his finger the stone tablets of the covenant given to Moses. And one of those ten commandments of course is, “Thou shalt not commit adultery”. But in the gospels we see that Jesus himself is the lawgiver, indeed he is the Law in Person. And in Jesus we see that the finger of God has not stopped writing, and that the old law needs to be completed with the new law of forgiveness and love. 

In the Bible the Law is not seen as a kind of arbitrary code imposed on the world from outside. It is rather something that is written into the fabric of creation. The flourishing of human beings in community and in communion with God is something intrinsic to creation, it is at the heart of the way things are. To live according to the law is to live in tune with creation. 

And Jesus shows us that part of that law is forgiveness. The work of God as creator goes on. God is continually at work to restore, to reconcile, to forgive, to put right what goes wrong. And if we are to live according to the law, in tune with God’s creation, then we need to be forgiving. God’s will in creation is not condemnation but forgiveness, not accusation but grace, acknowledging our own need and God’s free gift meeting our need.

If we resist that law of forgiveness then we are resisting our own good. We will not be able to live in tune with the world, to flourish as God wants us to in community and in communion.

Which brings us to the second Old Testament scene where the finger of God writes: Belshazzar’s feast, that rather louche entertainment where the guests got drunk from the sacred vessels looted from the Temple in Jerusalem. And a ghostly finger appeared and wrote: mene, mene, tekel, parsin. Which the prophet Daniel interpreted as meaning: your days are numbered, you are weighed in the balance and found wanting, and your kingdom is overthrown. 

In today’s gospel reading there is a kingdom that is found wanting and overthrown: the kingdom of the accuser, that is to say, the kingdom of Satan, because that name means “the accuser”. The kingdom of Satan is the world ordered according to accusation and condemnation, the world in which scapegoats and victims are identified and cast out. And Jesus is saying, this is not the way the world should be, this is not God’s purpose in creation, this is not the Law.

And the accusers, one by one, give up and leave. Their kingdom is overthrown. And the woman finds herself now alone with Jesus, spoken to, and able to speak for herself at last. She is not condemned. In Jesus she has found grace and forgiveness. She has been saved from the kingdom of the accuser and has entered the Kingdom of God. 

And so Jesus tells her to remain in this state of grace, “go on your way and do not sin again”. She has been restored to harmony with creation and to communion with God. The law of forgiveness and love has found her and saved her, and now she is to live according to that law too.

Our whole life as Christians is the experience of being saved, of being restored to God’s purpose in creation. It is that experience of liberation, the joyful surprise of being snatched from the kingdom of the accuser and brought into the Kingdom of God, entirely through God’s gracious action in Jesus Christ.

But that does bring to us a challenge. Go on your way, and do not sin any more. It is for us to align our wills with the will of God, to choose to live according to God’s law, which is the pattern of life in all its fulness written into the fabric of creation. We are called to live in a way which respects and enables us and all our brothers and sisters to flourish. The path of Christ is a wholly new way of being in the world.

This is the meaning of the ten commandments. But it is also the meaning of the new law of forgiveness and love. It is to turn away from everything that destroys, from accusation and condemnation and self-righteousness. It is to love and forgive others as God has loved and forgiven us. To live according to God’s will is to attain our true freedom. Only so can we receive the fulness that God wills to share with us, which is nothing less than himself, his life and his Spirit shared with us and transforming us into the image of his Son.