It’s strange isn’t it, that although Jesus doesn’t seem interested in sexual sins, the Church down the ages has gone on about them. You can hear and see me give this Homily on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfDjCAZ7sO8
This lack of interest by Jesus isn’t just shown in our Gospel today, (John 8:1-11) but in all the other passages where he might have been expected to address our human tendency to misuse our sexual desires. There’s the story of the woman at the well (John 4:4-30) who seems to have run through a series of men, and is now living with a man who isn’t her husband. All Jesus does is talk to her about the nature of God. Then there’s the discussion about divorce, (Matt 19:3-12) where Jesus speaks mainly about the ideal marriage, calmly saying that because of this they should accept the fact that if they are in a second marriage then they are committing adultery. And then there’s the teaching that if a man looks at a woman lustfully, he has already committed adultery with her in his heart; (Matt 5:21-48) where his point is to use this, amongst many other examples, to make people face up to the fact that we are all sinners, that no-one is perfect.
And that’s surely the point of today’s Gospel passage. The scribes and the Pharisees come full of accusations about this woman’s sexual misconduct; and find that Jesus turns the tables on them. He tells them to look at themselves, rather than spending their time judging and condemning others, and he does this by using the clever challenge of “If there is one of you who has not sinned, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.” This highlights for me the fact that for Jesus the sin that is far more deadly than sexual misconduct is the sin of hypocrisy. It is those who think, or even worse say, that they do not sin who are the worst sinners. Of course, Jesus isn’t saying that her adultery is acceptable, but he knows only too well what so many men get up to in order to satisfy their sexual desires. Some people have the idea that Jesus had a sheltered upbringing; that Nazareth was a quiet little village on a hilltop away from such things. What we have to realise is that some years ago the archaeologists found a 1st Century Roman Bath House in Nazareth; and where there was a Bath House there were bound to be Roman soldiers and thus there were bound to be prostitutes!
I have been reading a Book by Anthony De Mello recently. It’s called Awareness ; and in a rather unconventional way he challenges many of our illusions about ourselves : the kinds of illusions Jesus was also getting at. He suggests forcibly that awareness does not mean working out what we ought to say to others to make things clear to them; rather whenever we speak (or I might add in these Internet days “write”) we need to listen to ourselves, to be more sensitive, more aware of what we actually sound like, what hang-ups and prejudices lie beneath the surface of what we say. He tells how when he was learning to be a professional Counsellor he had to take a recording of one of his counselling sessions to his Class. Given that he was learning the technique of non-directive counselling, he was startled when he was asked, after his recording had been played, why he had asked so many questions; and didn’t believe he had until the recording was played back to him again, and he heard the questions that were implicit in what he had said. He was also asked why he didn’t like the person he’d been counselling. Again, listening to the recording, he could now hear his tone of disapproval.
Making one’s Confession is not just telling the priest about the things we have done wrong; much more it is about being honest with ourselves, about attempting to look at ourselves and our actions from God’s point of view. That’s why when a priest advises us to pray for someone we find hard to get on with, he is not telling us to pray that the annoying person will change, rather he is telling us to try and see that person from God’s point of view. More often than not, we cannot change people who irritate us or who behave in ways that we think are wrong; we can only seek ways of coping with our own irritation, of looking at ourselves rather than at them.
This is what St Paul is telling us to do in our 2nd Reading isn’t he? (Phil 3:8-14) He shows us that we have to live with our imperfections. This doesn’t mean being satisfied with where we are, as he puts it using the analogy of the race, “I am still running, trying to capture the prize for which Christ Jesus captured me.” No, we are not to be satisfied, but neither are we to spend our time desperately trying not to be sinful. Instead, he tells us not to try for perfection by our own efforts, but rather to look at Christ, to seek “To know Christ and the power of his resurrection.” What he’s implying is that when we look at Christ, it should be like looking in a mirror, and seeing more clearly what we are really like. And he goes further with this in that great passage about love in 1 Corinthians 13 (v.12) where he says “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood.” And the point is the more we know God, the more we know Christ, the more fully will we know ourselves.
Humanists often say that they cannot see the point of believing in a power outside themselves; but I would say to them that even if there was no such thing as God, we humans still need to look outside ourselves, to look beyond ourselves. Even if we cannot think of that power outside ourselves as “God”, often because of the hang-ups many people have of that concept and the way it has been misused, we need to conceive of a power that is greater than we are, and to turn to that power to enable us to see others and ourselves in a less self-centred way. Indeed, I often ask non-believers if they believe in the power of love, and they almost always say that they do; and then I ask them if they realise what the Bible says about God, that “God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.” (1 John 4:16) God is staring them in the face if they only had eyes to see. This is precisely why God gives us himself in the supreme act of love, where someone lays down their life for others. We must look at him on the cross and learn to be much more honest with ourselves.
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