Recently, a friend gifted me a copy of Pope Francis’s book, The Name of God is Mercy. In the opening pages, which are really a series of questions and answers from an interview he gave last year, Francis makes the case for going to confession. To sit, stand, or kneel before a confessor is essential not just to our religious practices, but to our humanity, he says. Having done some wrong, or having failed to do some good, it is not enough to repent and ask for forgiveness on one’s own. “To sort things out with God alone isn’t going to cut it.”
It’s a bold assertion. In a time when we have grown increasingly proud of our individualism, of our ability to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps, a call to openly admit our pathetic failings isn’t likely to win any actual converts. While the majority of church-goers in North America today don’t tend to go alone, once there we tend to act like we’re alone. We sit in our individual pew, we sing from our individuals hymnals, we drink from our individual communion cup, and sit and go home with our individual thoughts. And if padded chairs, multi-media screens, less passing of bread and wine, and a more interactive preacher seem more your style, God bless you, says the Pope, put it all all together and it’s still not going to cut it.
“If you are not capable of talking to your brother about your mistakes, you can be sure that you can’t talk about them with God, either, and therefore you end up confessing to yourself, in the mirror” (p. 21).
To make his point Francis draws upon a story about an adulteress and Jesus from the gospel according to John. Once again the setting is the temple. Jesus has been here before, many times before. As a baby the temple is where he first heard the words, “Blessed are You, Adonai our God, King of the Universe, and blessed is this child who comes in the name of the Lord,” as his parents handed him over to a priest and gave him over to God to be circumcised. For Jesus, the temple was like Gram and Gramp’s place, the place he traveled long and far to get to a couple times a year. On major holidays he met his cousins at the temple. In the temple he saw and remembered that he was part of something bigger than himself. The temple is the place to which beggars came looking for bread, and where they always found it. In the temple every preacher’s refrain is,
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor,
to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
On this particular day in the temple, however, the sermon refrain is being hushed a bit by a dissonant choir of Scribes and Pharisees who have found themselves at an impasse with so many things.
“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?”
By all appearances, their question isn’t up for debate. They know what the woman has done, they kno
w what the law says to do to women who have done what she has done, they love God, they respect the law as being God’s own, they’ve never not followed through with punishment before. So why the question? Why now?
The storyteller makes clear what they are not willing to make clear themselves. “They said this to trap Jesus, to try and make him say something they could use to accuse him.” They figured, if Jesus says, “She shouldn’t be stoned,” they could label him a lawbreaker, and if a lawbreaker, a public menace. If he said, “She should be forgiven and let go,” they could condemn him as a heretic for trying to do what only God can do.
In a word, the whole discourse is a sham on the part of the Scribes and Pharisees. A sham not because they don’t really care about the law (they do), but because they don’t really care about the woman or even what she has done. To them she is just a pawn. They try to use her against Jesus, but Jesus will have none of it.
“Whoever among you is without sin, you throw the first stone.”
At this we’re told Jesus bent down to write something on the ground. What did he write? The sins of inquisition? A four letter word for back down? A doodle? I’m not sure it matters. I believe his point was more to bend over and touch the earth, to
show us once again where we all came from and to where we all are returning. We go from dust to dust. In between we are each God’s beautiful creation.
In her memoir, Leaving Church, Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor says, “I’ve noticed that whenever people try to solve their conflicts with one another by turning to the Bible, defending the dried ink marks on the page becomes more vital than defending the neighbor. As a general rule, I would say that human beings never behave more badly toward one another than when they believe they are protecting God…I know that the Bible is a special kind of book, but I find it as seductive as any other…If I am not careful, I can decide that I am really much happier reading my Bible than I am entering into what God is doing in my own time and place, since shutting the book to go outside will involve the very great risk of taking part in stories that are still taking shape…The whole purpose of the Bible, it seems to me, is to convince people to set the written word down in order to become living words in the world for God’s sake. For me, this willing conversion of ink back to blood is the full substance of faith” (p. 106-7).
“But we’re people of the Book,” the Scribes and Pharisees tell Jesus. “That’s good and well,” Jesus tells them, “but we’re all people of the book around here. So that’s just not going to cut it. What else you got?”
Jesus won’t condemn them. He won’t play their game and do to them what they are doing to the woman. Neither will he leave them alone. They can do better, and if they are willing to put their rocks down, they can have as much second chance as anyone, including the woman.
“Woman, where are they? Does no one condemn you?” Jesus asks once the mob has been left empty handed.
“No one,” she reports with grateful awe.
“Neither do I. Go your way and do not sin again.”
If there is anything Jesus has to teach us here and now it is that we are failing one another, but we can fix it. The fulness of our failures are rarely what we think they are. In the end, we might not follow or enforce the law in the same way, or at all. Our disagreements over how to interpret a particular verse may lead to cruel and undue accusations. Our infidelities toward marriages and commitments that others hold dear may cause us to want to pick up rocks and hurl them. We might, and already are, standing up on platforms and behind podiums, barking orders, and being barked at, about how and where best to build borders, to keep each person in line. But these are not our ultimate failings, and they ought not to be our downfall.
As is always the case, our ultimate failing lies in what we do with what comes next. When the Scribes and Pharisees dropped their stones, did they walk away feeling defeated, like they had lost the last great campaign of their careers? Did the woman blow them a gloating kiss?
Everybody who was anybody in the temple that day wanted to know: should the woman be stoned or not? Jesus wanted to know: who here should get to throw first? I want to know: did the woman ever sin again? Jesus must have known that she would. When he told her, “Go and sin no more,” he must have known that no one can keep a perfect streak going forever, that while we may never do the same wrong twice, we will do wrong more than twice, and that when the woman does sin again, the Scribes and Pharisees will likely be right there again, holding her captive. Except maybe Jesus also knows that, next time around, they won’t confront her with rocks. Next time around, it will be a tender loving embrace. And in that moment all the dust will look beautiful.
PleaseGrace 