Accused

Our pilgrimage to Jerusalem with Jesus has come to an end.  In John’s gospel, Jesus makes three trips to Jerusalem, for the feasts of Tabernacles, the Dedication, and finally, the Passover.  The synoptic gospels consider these a single event, encompassing the final teaching of Jesus and his controversies with the leaders of the people.  We have reached our destination, the place where everything is going to happen.  And now we simply stay close to Jesus in the days and hours leading up to his passion and death, remembering.  Our memories are embodied, imprinted upon us through our senses of sight, hearing, taste, touch and smell.  Remembering makes this present viscerally in the here and now, nowhere more powerfully than in the liturgy of the Eucharist.  Today’s gospel scene is one that evokes such embodied memories in a powerful way.

Where am I?  Jesus comes to the temple area, where he has been teaching the people each day.  The place is abruptly transformed into a court of law by the arrival of the scribes and pharisees, who come to test him, this time bringing with them a woman accused of adultery and making her stand in the middle.  Who is on trial here?  Is it the woman?  Like Susanna, she is said to have been caught red-handed, in the very act of adultery.  Is she guilty?  The fathers of the Church assume so, because Jesus told her not to sin again.  Contemporary readers question if she was unjustly accused, framed like Susanna by unscrupulous old men.  But is it she, or Jesus, who is really on trial?  In response, the giver of the Law on Sinai bends down to write with his finger on the earth, as he once did on tablets of stone.

What am I looking for?  Or who is looking for me?  Remember the scene from a grade school classroom: a child inadvertently drops a tin of crayons on the floor, and the other children’s voices cry out in chorus: “Oh Thomas!”  Who among us has not been forced to stand in the middle, accused of wrongdoing: a ritual humiliation.  Am I guilty or innocent?  Is it more humiliating to be accused of something I haven’t done, or of something I have done?  It’s hard to say.  Innocent, we want justice and retribution.  Guilty, we want mercy and understanding.  Either way, we want to be seen as we are, innocent and guilty, a sinner and loved.

Can I stay here?  Can I do this?  Will I survive such an encounter?   Is there anyone who does not feel fear, anger, and humiliation rising within at the prospect of being forced to stand once again in the middle, accused?  No doubt this is why we fear judgment and shrink from the image of Christ as judge.  But if so, is the Accuser who has taken the place of Christ.  Instinctively, we want to run away, rather than face the risk of condemnation.  But Jesus says: Let the one among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone.  So we know that there is no-one who can claim innocence, and no-one who has the right to accuse and condemn another.

Do I entrust myself to him who stands before me?  The Lord goes on: Remember not the events of the past, the things of long ago consider not; see, I am doing something new!  Now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?  Jesus has taken the last place, the place of the accused.  He himself stands in the middle, becoming sin, though he knew no sin.  Looking upon us and seeing us as we truly are - innocent and guilty, sinners and loved - it is he who speaks the words we hear after absolution:
Go and sin no more.


Image: The Woman Caught in Adultery, by Julia Stankova