Sermons

Ash Wednesday
Wednesday 21 February at 7.30pm

Simon Cowling
Readings: Isaiah 58. 1-12; John 8. 1-11

In that reading from John chapter 8, we have both a story and a metaphor. The story is a powerful one. An unnamed woman, defined by her gender (female) and her crime (adultery), is brought to Jesus by a group of unnamed men, defined explicitly by their status (teachers of the Law and Pharisees) and implicitly by their gender (male): it is an unequal contest.

Condemnation of sexual sin features prominently in the scriptures of most religions and the Hebrew Bible, our Old Testament, is no exception. Adultery, the most serious of these sexual sins, attracted the death penalty under Jewish Law as interpreted in the ancient world and the teachers of the Law and the Pharisees are waiting to see how Jesus will react. Will he uphold the principle of the death penalty or will he, as they clearly assume he will, undermine his own authority by denying the application of the law in this particular case? Jesus does neither. He turns the question round and confronts the questioners with their rank hypocrisy. Jesus throws down a gauntlet: what's so significant about this particular sin that has impelled you publicly to condemn this woman? Has none of you sinned in ways that contravene our Law? The gauntlet is not picked up. Jesus shames the men into silence and withdrawal from the scene. Then, in a moment that is curiously charged both with intimacy and sternness, Jesus speaks with the woman for the first time: I do not condemn you… Go, but do not sin again.

That's the story. The metaphor ought to be clear, although 2000 years of the Christian story suggest that might not be the case. The woman represents all those whom society finds it easy to condemn: the single mother, so often described in tabloid-speak as feckless or loose; the prostitute just a mile or so from here on Spencer Place servicing clients some of whom might well live even nearer St. Edmund's; the drug addict, buying illegal substances from a dealer to dull the reality of homelessness or unemployment.

The teachers of the Law and the Pharisees, on the other hand, represent those in society who are quick to condemn: the shrill why-oh-why journalists who fill the tabloids' columns with scare stories; the comfortably off who draw simplistic connections between the poverty of our society's less advantaged groups and those groups' idleness or lack of ambition; the moralising clergy whose constant denunciation of sexual sins has made them so similar to the teachers of the Law and the Pharisees in the story. Gradually the metaphor begins to dissolve into reality as we, perhaps, become those who condemn the woman.

Then, in the end, Jesus. He transcends the particularity of the story and the unspoken parallels of the metaphor. Jesus speaks truth into this and into all our stories. He gently but relentlessly uncovers our hypocrisy for what it is, shaming us, like the teachers of the Law, into silence. Jesus loves us despite our sinfulness yet at the same time challenges us, like the woman, to sin no more. The truth is that we might at different times be both hypocritical Pharisee and frightened adulterer, in a position of power and influence or on the margins. That is quite a difficult thought. But what tempers the difficulty is that in Jesus we see a God who, in the words of Augustine, condemns the sin but not the sinner - no matter what the sin and no matter who the sinner. Amen.

© St Edmund's Church, Roundhay