Reflection by Frances Flatman on next Sunday's Readings :
What does it take to make any of us place all our reliance on God? Most of the time, most of us cling compulsively to our own sense of control of our small world; or do we simply blame others for times when things go wrong – Russians who may well bear responsibility, but won’t ever acknowledge it? Or do we endlessly look for ways out – ‘if only’s’ - such as better responses to Climate Change or other economic issues? Learning to trust another, even God absolutely, is very challenging, though I guess that those of us who have had lots of serious surgeries get something of what it’s about when we place all out hopes in the skills of a great surgeon – and mercifully, so far have come out of these events well.
Second Isaiah (43:16-21), the one writing to his people during the Babylonian exile of the 6th century BCE, knew just how desperate things were with many of his people, especially the elite and the skilled taken off to exile in various parts of the newly expanded Babylonian empire. Yet his message clearly amidst much suffering, ‘By the rivers of Babylon we wept’, chose rather to see this situation, and one in which Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed, as a time of potential and hope; provided the exiles placed all their trust in God their deliverer, just as they had in their rescue from Egyptian captivity, which he graphically recalls here. Yet he reminds them that the past is the past and they are to think in new ways. So he invokes a new Exodus. ‘A road in the wilderness’, in which the wild beasts, the jackals and ostriches, unclean creatures for Jews ‘Will honour me’. The time to come is to be a reformation time for Judaism, not simply more of the same; and as we know now, the work of Jewish scholars in exile transformed the faith. What they, what we, assume to be disaster may well, under our faith and trust in God, turn out quite differently.
In our Gospel, (John 8:1-11) we find Jesus attracting a lot of opposition as well as interest. The chief priests and Pharisees attempt but fail to arrest Jesus, as clearly he has attracted their attention, and we find a number of attempts to remove him; (7:44-46; 11:45-53) and we consistently find them trying to spy on him or set traps for him, as we do in other Gospels. Here, it’s over the woman taken in adultery, and clearly John realises that she is merely a pawn in the affair; theirs is not a real debate on morality, it’s a plot to entrap Jesus, and we must assume this was her profession, and her co-practitioner of course gets off scot-free. But Jesus just won’t play ball, he refuses to get himself off the hook by pandering to the Jewish law, presumably because he knows that his interlocutors don’t keep it as they should either, and morality was never his issue anyway. Here our Jerusalem Bible text fails to recognise the significance of the wording, for Jesus in the Greek kneels to the ground ( God’s creation) and writes in the dust; I suggest something on the lines of ‘What I require is mercy, not sacrifice’, divine words which outface the law. And in the Greek, Jesus and the woman stand facing each other, (not ‘he looked up), indicating the equality between them, and these events are in duplicate, so clearly John wanted to push home their significance, Jesus, God the Son, as we find throughout this Gospel, is always in control of events, never its puppet or its victim. The only remark Jesus makes to the chief priests – sticklers for the law - and the Pharisees, is that it is the one without sin who must throw the first stone – a moment of forceful awakening for them, as one by one they simply walk away. He has entrapped them in their own plot; it’s up to him to deal with ‘sinners’, and we see how he reacts. So this is a piece of drama in which John makes clear Jesus’ superiority to the law, and more than that, he declares it redundant, a new dispensation is dawning in Christ.
Writing to the Christians of Philippi in Macedonia from prison in Ephesus (Phil 3:8-14), and undoubtedly some of his most lucid and beautiful writing, Paul in danger of execution speaks about Christ and the staggering difference he has made to the world and to himself. Unlike many of us who mistakenly still see suffering as ‘divine wrath’ Paul, as we see from Philippians 2, writes of the meaning of the full humanity of Jesus - God and man, and understands that suffering when seen as identification with Jesus even to the point of death, and hopefully resurrection, is what gives our life here and hereafter its entire meaning. Law-righteousness or Jerusalem Bible’s ‘perfection’, is of no meaning. Christ, Paul says, has ‘Laid hold of him’ ; and nothing else has any meaning. He is very critical of all the times we rely on our own efforts, or other means of sorting ourselves out with God, but in extremis places himself in total solidarity with Christ, in death and in the hope of resurrection. Jesus’ life has opened for us a wholly new entry into the life of God himself, and Paul now appreciates that so much else is dross against ‘The advantage of knowing Christ.’ What a focus as Lent draws to its close.
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