“Extreme Forgiveness”
Psalm 139 May 25, 2008
John 8:2-11 Dennis Union Church
Today I have chosen to preach on a text that the church has done its level best to ignore. This story of Jesus and the woman who is caught in the act of adultery appears only in John’s Gospel. New Testament scholars claim that at times it was omitted from the Bible. Why? Not because of the super charged issue of adultery, but rather because the Church was uncomfortable that Jesus forgives this woman. In my own economy of values, I think that when we are inclined to avoid a text in the Bible, it probably means that it is a text with which we need to wrestle.
So let’s take a look at this story. The first temptation is to side with Jesus as our natural instinct. When we do this we think of the scribes and Pharisees, those caretakers and copiers of the law, as narrow and judgmental.
Jesus is teaching in the Temple in the early morning. We don’t know what his plan for the morning was, nor the particular text from the Torah that he was using. I’m a former school teacher and I think about those teacher training classes. We were taught always to have a lesson plan and always to be willing to ignore it.
That seems to be exactly what Jesus did here. In the middle of his planned lesson, the scribes and Pharisees bring a woman caught in adultery right into his teaching moment. Remember those moments in school when we inwardly cheered that we wouldn’t have to hand in our homework, because some major disciplinary issue erupted in the classroom?
Such a teaching moment has erupted, but Jesus doesn’t seem willing to play according to the hoped for script. He has a ready made opportunity to make an example of the woman. The scribes are careful to emphasize that this is not a case of hearsay, a case where second hand, someone has said that she is an adulterer. No, this is far more serious; she has been caught in the very act itself. And they even quote the Torah, the Jewish law, as they appeal to Jesus, saying, “Moses in the law commanded us to stone such women to death. What do you say?”
The scribes are not exaggerating in any way. In fact, Jewish law seems at times to consider adultery as a more serious crime than even murder itself, so great was the regard for the sanctity of marriage. The law actually commanded the stoning to death of both the woman and the man.
But there is no predicting the response of Jesus. He stoops down and writes on the ground with his finger. Someone in Bible study class once suggested that it sounds like he is “doodling” in the dirt. Certainly, to us, it doesn’t sound like a very authoritative gesture. And John says that they continued to question Jesus and he stood up saying, “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her. And once again he bent down and wrote on the ground.”
So uncomfortable was the 4th century church with this passage that one scribe added, “And he wrote their sins in the dirt.” That sounds pretty unlikely as authentic text. The Jesus we encounter in this story shows nothing of vindictiveness.
At this point each of them who has accused her leaves with the older ones going first. Now Jesus is alone with the woman. He stands up, saying, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” Perhaps he wants to make sure that she must acknowledge herself as part of the human family.
And this she does when she replies much as a school girl, “No one, sir.” And Jesus says, “I don’t condemn you either.” We might wonder whether, when she returns home, her husband will choose to forgive her. But Jesus sends her off with a word of encouragement and caution, almost like a fatherly benediction, saying, “Go your way, and from now on do not sin again.”
While I was working on this sermon Bette Anne Crowell stopped by. She said she absolutely remembers the day her pastor/father read this text in worship. Instead of preaching, he followed the reading of the text with a long period for the congregation to sit in silent meditation and ponder. Then they all shared the sacrament of the Lord’s Table. So if you find that my words aren’t truly helping you today, you might try going home, reading the text and simply sitting with it.
As I was thinking about this text last week, I was reminded of a movie we had seen in 1995, “Dead Man Walking.” I watched it again last Sunday night, thinking that Jesus’ compassion for this woman might be similar to the experience of sister Helen Prejean who befriends and counsels with a man on death row who is convicted of murdering a young couple after first raping the young woman.
This movie explicitly explores the issue of the death penalty as a punishment in our system of justice. Sister Helen Prejean tries valiantly to build a relationship with and understand Matthew Poncelet as he awaits his execution on death row. She becomes involved with his mother and siblings and also with the parents whose children were murdered by Matthew. She is unprepared as a Christian nun for the hatred and vindictiveness of the parents.
They are furious with her for providing a compassionate presence to Matthew in his last days before his execution.
Sister Helen Prejean is perhaps most like Jesus in her insistence that every person is a beloved child of God, no matter what.
Intellectually, she can see that Matthew has done terrible deeds, but this doesn’t prevent her from caring deeply about him and being willing to enter into his suffering.
As for the parents, there’s no way that they would consider forgiving Matthew as the murderer of their children. While the story in John’s Gospel and the story in the movie may be extremes, I think that the issue of forgiving is a key issue for us all. Jesus deals with the issue in many stories. I’ll mention just two.
When he tells the story of the prodigal son, the boy’s father runs to meet the son who has run away, squandered all his money and been all around foolish in every way. Not only does the father forgive his son, he runs to meet him, has him ceremonially robed and throws a feast with his son as the guest of honor to celebrate his return. Most of us probably find ourselves identifying with the disgruntled older brother who is outraged at the fuss over the younger brother and the seeming neglect of himself.
When Peter asks Jesus how many times we should be willing to forgive, Jesus responds saying “seventy times seven”. And what about us? My own sense is that many of us believe in being forgiving, particularly if the offense is minor or about something that is just not very important to us. We might be forgiving or understanding of children forgetting to pick up after themselves, a friend who neglects to call.
So we feel that on balance we are in favor of being forgiving, generous hearted persons. But then, we might have another category of more serious offences. And I suspect that like me, we all have some places within us, where we have not yet been able to forgive.
I have a friend who struggled mightily to forgive his parents. He yearned to forgive them, but inside he was still deeply angry with them. He never understood as a child that his mother and father were afflicted with the disease of alcoholism. He did know that as a small boy he sometimes awakened from a frightening dream and called out for them. But they never wakened. In desperation he would go into their bedroom and climb up on his father, sitting astride him pushing upon his chest, all the while calling out “Wake up, wake up!” He was afraid that they had died, since they never awakened when he tried so hard to arouse them.
Then one day authorities from the state of Connecticut swooped into the house and removed the three foster children they were also raising. No one ever explained why the state removed these children until his parents died many decades later. His aunt and uncle confessed to him that they had turned his parents into the state, because of their serious alcoholism. It all made sense to his adult understanding. Now in mid-life my friend struggled with his lingering anger towards his parents. He didn’t want to carry around all this anger, but it just didn’t go away. A therapist suggested that he visit their graves and try to express himself to them.
The advice made sense to him and he took some time to make the trip. When he arrived at the cemetery, he tried to speak his peace, calmly at first, but as the words tumbled out, he began to cry. The space was deserted of other persons and he found himself screaming at his parents. He flung himself prone on the ground and pounded the ground with his fists, the tears streaming, his throat gurgling with rage. When he was totally spent, he could feel his spirit quieting and slowly the words of forgiveness began to flow from his lips. It was as though the Holy Spirit was speaking through him. Finally, he spoke the words that he loved them, that he forgave them and he knew that he was speaking the truth. As we can imagine a heavy load was lifted from him from that day on. He had a new spring in his step, a lightness in his being and a new joy in living.
That, my friends, is one of the great gifts of being able to forgive. Today in the media we see endless stories of persons who have been wronged in the death of a loved one who say on camera that they cannot have closure, (oh, how I hate that word!), until they see the guilty person punished. We hear a lot today about the need for justice or retaliation or even revenge. I doubt very much that people really feel better, because they see a guilty person punished.
The truth is that none of us will ever have the peace that God intends for us without first being able to forgive the injustices and the perpetrators of injustice. This is perhaps one of the strongest spiritual principles of our Christian faith. The capacity for forgiveness is closely linked to another Christian teaching from Jesus. Jesus asks us to love our enemies, saying that it is not such an achievement merely to love our friends. In fact, I believe that the Christian faith is the most radical of all faiths in its understanding of forgiving and of loving one’s enemies.
And something else I’ve decided as I go along in life. These aren’t just ideas or concepts. They’re practices. If we want to be able to forgive the wrongs and injustices that we’ve suffered, we might start by doing so as a matter of daily practice.
Daisuke Matsuzaka and Jonathan Papelbon practice pitching, so that in the big moment they will be able to survive the tension of the real thing in the crush of the game. So it is with us. In worship each week, we draw inspiration, that is, we breathe in the very breath of God. Or we could say that we conspire with God. That is we breathe together with God. We practice being thankful. We practice being forgiving. We practice being loving, so that worship is a rehearsal of what the Christian life is about. And trust me, these practices can take over in our lives and gradually replace some of the habits of heart that this troubled and troubling culture infuse into us.
To those who see religion and Christianity in particular as a crutch for the weak, I would say “no, not if you understand this faith in its deepest implications for life and the way of life to which Jesus calls us.” For those of us willing to wrestle with our faith, this faith of ours is one of the greatest challenges for living that we can choose. We read, “Ask and it shall be given, seek and you shall find, knock and it shall be opened.” In the prayer that Jesus taught us the teaching is “forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.”
Perhaps this suggests that unless we learn the compassion to be forgiving, we will never be able to image God as being any less stern and judging than we are ourselves.
God knows the innermost secrets of our hearts and God desires for us the freedom to live and love abundantly. Our God loves us absolutely without qualification, not because we deserve such love, but simply because we are all children of the living God. God’s love and forgiveness will always exceed and precede our own. This is one of the absolutes of our faith. I believe that whenever we are able to hold on to this belief, it can be the strongest anchor of our lives. In marriage, in friendship, in parenting and being parented, there is a natural ebb and flow of love and forgiveness.
We are far more able to accept the flaws in ourselves and others, when we are secure in the knowledge that God always loves us no matter what. God’s forgiveness is greater and deeper than any that we can ever know. Yes, God, you have searched me and known me. You know my thoughts even before a word is on my lips. And you love and forgive each one of us all the time, no matter what! Thanks be to God.
Shalom and Amen
