This passage from the Gospel is one of the strangest in the whole new testament in that it seems to have no certain home. It is not in the Gospel of John, the oldest manuscript we have. Then in later text, in later manuscripts it starts showing up. Then it shows up in several places in the Gospel of John. It also shows up in the Gospel of Luke. I think most scholars believe that it is far closer to Luke in theology than it is to the Theology of the fourth Gospel. Why. Because Luke's has been called the Gospel of the Great forgivenesses and if there was anything going on here it is forgiveness.

It is interesting to ask: why does this wonderful story not find a place in the earliest forms of the Gospels and why was it later retrieved from the tradition and stuck in the Gospel? Raymond Brown suggests this solution. This is the background for his solution. In the course of the early church are certain rigourism set in, i.e. severity in judgement on part of the Church leaders in regard to people who had sinned. We know for a fact that very early Christians were persecuted and many abandoned their faith to avoid suffering. But then they changed their mind, repented and they wanted to come back into the community. Now this was a huge crisis for the early Church and the returnees were severely punished by the Church authorities So Brown suggested that today's Gospel story was reintroduced into the Gospel because it addressed a real problem in the Church.

What then is the point of the text? What is the result of this whole thing? This woman is restored into the community. She is no longer an extern, but now she is part of the community again. If you take Brown’s suggestion that is was the severe judgement on the part of the leaders of the community that kept people out, then we can see that in the light of this text and say "What was going on was the abuse of power. Because the whole point of the movement of Jesus, the whole point of the Jewish God is to bring people together, with each other and God. It’s the beginning, the middle and the end of this thing. So acceptance of people who sin and are repentant is of the essence. The main problem with any abuse of power is that it separates people. For example, every time Jesus talks about authority is the locus of power, he warns against this abuse. Rather, those who want to be leaders must be the servants of all. Power is supposed to be an exercise of ways of embracing people, not excluding people, not intimidating people, because that is the crucial issue: fear. Power if it is exercised is the great weapon of inducing fear. Politically we can see this very clearly in all the sycophants that surround political leaders.

Power has multiple forms among human beings. I have lots of money that makes me powerful. So the poor people can be intimidated. Everybody has had some kind of experience with the very wealthy who do intimidate. Even if they do it unconsciously they are so full of their own possessions and their own sense of confidence in themselves that they can scare the wits out of everybody else. So there is political power, economic power, intellectual power. There is the power of a personality, there is physical attractiveness, which is a power. And they all work the same way; they can make people afraid in various ways. And in doing that they simply separate people. But the worst kind of power, which is what this reading is about what we can call moral power. Moral superiority, that is the issue. These good people, scribes and Pharisees are those who knew the law, and kept it. They could take the moral high ground. I hope that when people use that phrase, "the Moral High Ground", they do it with a keen sense of irony because usually when one says, ‘I’m looking for the moral high ground" that just means, I am looking for leverage that I can use to beat somebody up who does not occupy those heights. Listen to political rhetoric and this comes up over and over. And what does Jesus do? Jesus is simply there. Does he berate these people? No He says OK folks here we are. But the first one without sin can throw a rock at this woman. Now we go around pointing fingers and badgering and berating people. Did Jesus say that to that lady? Rather the upshot of this episode is that her accusers went away with a keener of their own frailty and came to more honesty, integrity and therefore constituted a community because without theses you can’t have a community. It is very simple. Finally, there is this lady with this man of enormous authority who says OK here we are.

You can use what I've said as a way of tying together all three readings. When Isaiah has God saying, "I’m going to do a new thing". We ask, "What is this new thing?" Well, we get all of these metaphors of wild animals honoring God and God giving water in the wilderness and his chosen people. What does all that mean? That God is somehow going to do exactly what I said. If you read the rest of Isaiah you see God is going to rescue human beings who live under the sign of fear, either being made afraid or making other people afraid. God is somehow going to act in such a way that all of that is going to go away and we are going to have a new thing. People being with each other nonfearfully.

And then you get this great text from Paul. The letter to the Philippians is one of the most tender documents to come from his own hand. It was written in jail when he was fully expecting to be killed. He talked with great warmth and enthusiasm to these people about two things: about the cross and about his not having made it yet. Paul says " I do not consider, I have made it, that I forget what I leave behind, I press onto the goal. It is very interesting to apply all this to the notion of power, because power usually resides in people who have convince themselves, and other people, that they have already "made it". The word that fits here best is perfection. The Latin word "Perfacio" means to have done something thoroughly. When I have done something perfectly, it means I am finished, it’s all over, it’s perfect. And having that state of finishness and perfection, then I’m in a great position to have all kinds of power and to exercise it on other people. Here is Paul saying "I don’t have it". So Paul precisely undercutting from himself any inclination that he might have had to terrorize people because he was morally superior. In fact, we know that every time Paul ran into a problem, he would not go around and point fingers, and make accusations against people and make them feel guilty. Rather his typical response is this. "There is a situation folks, now you judge for yourself." "You judge for yourself", that is Paul’s classic pastoral injunction. But there is something that is even more important. He keeps talking about the Cross and suffering. There is so much rubbish talked about the meaning of the Cross among us Christians. I would lay money on some preacher in Jones borough, Arkansas, in the past week talking about those murdered little girls and their teacher, and saying "well this is our Cross, this is our Cross". Parents weeping over their dead children and their wounded. This is your Cross. That’s not the cross. It is evil, it is unspeakably awful, but it’s not the cross, Because whether Jesus had come into the world or whether God was in the world that stuff would still go on, and worse. For instance, between last Sunday and today, do you know how many little kids, on this planet, under the age of 6 have died of starvation 250,000 little kids, every week on this planet, die of starvation. Pretty awful stuff.

Evil is not the cross. The cross is that place where I tried to get beyond where I am. Where am I? Pathetically attempting to prove to myself and other people that I have some kind of superiority, some sort of power over them. My brain, my money, my book, my house, my dog, I can use anything. We all use anything to try to establish that sense of being better than somebody else and therefore be detached from somebody else. For me to move from that point to this kind of freedom that Paul talks about for himself even more to the freedom that Jesus had where he didn’t have to beat anybody on the head. How do I get from who I am to there? That passage in the name of God, constitutes the Cross. That’s the Cross. And I constantly resist that. I just want to close in on myself, just want to protect myself, just want to shut other people out, just want to intimidate other people, just want to ignore other people To get from that place to this unimaginable openness of Jesus and the freedom of Jesus, that passage is the way of the cross and only that. That is really important with Easter two weeks from now. We need to know what we are doing when we get there.

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Created: 30 Nov 1996
© Copyright: R. Trojcak, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2002
London Ontario Canada
Last Update: September 05, 2005
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