THE PASSION TO JUDGE OTHERS The adulterous woman (John 8:1-11)

A woman caught committing adultery. But in what the group of men submits to Jesus, there is a problem: an adulterer, according to the latest news, is committed in pairs. Now, where is the man? The law of Moses punishes adultery with stoning, but a woman and a man are supposed to be stoned (Lev.20:10).

 It is quite curious that, while demanding the strict application of the Law, our men have forgotten this "detail": "we need a male partner". If he is not there, he who had gone to the flagrante delicto, it is because he was able to flee: he was able to leave, but she did not. Strange! Did he have any support among these pious defenders of the Law of Moses?  Was there favoritism or male solidarity?

What reinforces the abjection of this crowd of men is that in fact, they don't have much to do with this woman. Whether she is stoned or not does not matter to them; it is the skin of Jesus that they want. They want to make him speak on this case: perhaps he will say one of his paradoxical words of which he has the secret, and then he too will be caught in the act of transgression of the Law. This woman is for them only a bait to take Jesus. If adultery consists of a man making illegitimate use of a woman's body, then these men are in full adultery: they are ready to subject the body of this woman to an atrocious torture to reach Jesus.

 What our gospel stages and challenges is the passion to accuse that some people are filled with. A crazy passion, obstinate, to accuse others. It can be said that this woman still committed a fault. But if you continue to read the Gospels, you will see that Jesus is totally innocent, and yet he will be put to death at the end of a trial conducted by the highest religious authorities of his time. One is therefore put to death according to the Law of Moses if one has sinned, but also if one has not sinned. This forces us to question the use we make of the Law and religious arguments.

Is it necessary to say then that we cannot accuse anyone, in any case, that everyone has enough to reproach themselves and can therefore never take sides to denounce anything? Of course not. Our gospel teaches us to differentiate between this taste for accusation, which aims only to denounce, to annihilate people, and justice, which is of a completely different order. Justice proceeds with care, it makes different voices heard, it organizes denunciation and defense, it asks for advice. The passion to accuse is a murderous disorder; it leads to violent death, as this woman is now threatened, or to death on a slow fire as happens in our hushed environments.

Why do some people overflow with this passion to judge? Because they absolutely want to be on the side where we judge, where we dispose of the lives of others. But why? Perhaps because they do not wish to be subjected themselves to an outside look at them. The gang of men who bring this woman brandishes the Law of Moses; but, as we have said, these men apply this Law with very little rigor, they who have forgotten to bring also the guilty man, they who have no qualms about slaughtering a woman provided that they also slaughter Jesus.

The Apostle Paul is quite right to say that, through the commandment of the Law, sin is revealed as sin. But beware: these are not only the faults that the Law lists and denounces, but also the sin of some listeners who hear this Law. There are indeed people who, when they learn that such an act is a serious fault, rush to find people who, in their eyes, are guilty of the act in question. The principle of their gesture is: it is them, it is not us.

Our accusers today are an example of this: they do not respect the Law of Moses while claiming it, but they divert the attention that could be given to them by exposing this woman and questioning Jesus. They are out of the question, as they would have us believe. They are lying. And the trap they set is an alternative: either Jesus is with them and he also accuses this woman, or Jesus opposes them and he immediately becomes accused. This is a kind of situation that we know in a lifetime; those who can never be blamed say: "either you accuse with us a common enemy, or you make yourself our enemy". Jesus answers: "
"Let him who is sinless cast the first stone"; by saying this, he breaks their impunity.

 For once, they are implicated. And since they are people who know the Law, even if they apply it perversely, they know very well that Jesus refers them to what they have just done: bring the woman and not the man, for example. And they know that among the prophets of the Bible there is a technical word to denounce those who always mention the Law of God without ever living it: it is the word adultery. The Lord, through the mouths of the prophets, repeatedly calls his people adultery, when this people speaks of the Divine Law while living as they please, on their side, far from what God proposes. Who is adultery in this gospel of the adulterous woman? The oldest of the clique understood this first and are leaving.

 The woman remains alone with Jesus. In fact, if the adulterous man is not there, Jesus is there. He holds the place of the accused and risks his life. If you read the rest of this gospel, you will find that soon after, in another heated discussion, Jesus' opponents will pick up stones and pretend to stone him. Adulterous man escapes stoning, but Jesus is threatened. Sin, the sin of the world, it is he who bears it; the vacant place left by the culprits, it is he who occupies it.

One more word: biblical scholars have often noticed that our text is very similar to the style of Luke's Gospel: a story of a woman as there are so many in Luke, a forgiveness granted. Now, the gospel of Luke tells in its first chapter how Mary accepted to be the mother of the Savior. The fact that she was a virgin and engaged to a man put her in a terrible situation that she therefore agreed to assume. Indeed, a virgin who was discovered pregnant was, according to the Law of Moses, subject to the laws of adultery: she had to be stoned with the man with whom she had been at fault. It was to the point, says the Gospel of Matthew, that her fiancé Joseph wanted to repudiate her in secret. In secret because, if the case had been brought to the public square, she risked death. So Jesus sees today a woman who is going through what her own mother could have suffered. Of course, we Christians know and believe that Mary is not at all at fault, quite the contrary. But she had to go through these circumstances which, from human perspectives, overwhelmed her. Likewise Jesus, the Innocent, was put in the rank of murderers.

There are those who always put themselves out of the cause and accuse others, as the men of our world do today. And there are those who live by accepting to be questioned, to be involved in the difficult stories of our humanity and even to endorse mistakes that they have not committed. 

Prof. Jimi ZACKA, PhD