5th Sunday in Lent

In her work of counselling couples who are dealing with the fallout of an adulterous affair in their marriage, Ester Perel, a Canadian psychologist, has come to some interesting insights into the motivations behind adultery. Her work has led her to believe that when a husband or a wife is unfaithful to their spouse, it is not so much their spouse that they are turning away from, but rather from the person they themselves have become. They are not so much seeking another lover as seeking another self. For the most part, adultery should be understood as a person rejecting the boring person that they think they have become in order to seek out a more exciting version of themselves. Why else would someone risk the happiness of a marriage and throw it all away with a few moments of stolen pleasure? In order to illustrate this point, Perel gives the example of a middle-aged woman Priah who is blissfully married and loves her husband and her children and would never do anything to hurt him or them. But when she fell, it was not so much about her husband as about herself. She had always been a goodie-two shoes, always done what was expected of her: taken care of her immigrant parents, been the perfect wife and the perfect mother. When she had an affair, it was with someone who was the complete opposite of herself. He was the arborist who had come to remove a tree her back-garden. Covered in tattoos and driving a big truck, he was everything that she was not, mysterious, non-conformist and exciting. Priah’s affair was about the adolescence she never had. Perel also observes that affairs are also lived in the shadow of death and mortality, often coming on the heels of the unexpected death of a loved one. An adulterous affair can often be an attempt to rekindle vitality and beat back death, but an attempt that only ends up in compounding death and killing life. So adultery is not so much about seeking illicit pleasure as it is about a botched attempt at dealing with our inner demons: with the things we most fear, death, rejection, a sense of loss, and a sense that we are missing something in our lives.

In today’s gospel we are presented with a woman who has been caught in the act of adultery. As the gospel is silent on the intentions of the main characters in this story, we can only speculate and imaginatively reconstruct this scene in the spirit of an Ignatian contemplation. In line with Perel’s insights, perhaps this woman was a married woman and was indeed, like Priah, seeking a more exciting version of herself. Perhaps she was feeling neglected by her husband and was plagued by insecurities about her own beauty and attractiveness to men. So she decides to seduce a man, and for a brief moment she gets what she wants and her lover makes her feel like the goddess she longs to be. But all of a sudden this bubble of happiness is shattered and she comes to a rude awakening as she is dragged from her lover’s bed to be stoned in the village square. She went seeking greater vitality, excitement and a reprieve from the boredom in her life, but instead what she found was death and condemnation. This is a profound reflection on the illusory nature of the promises of sin. We let ourselves be seduced by the promise of joy and vitality when we are tempted to paint outside the lines, but all too often these promises let us down and instead of receiving more life, we are led further into despair and darkness.

Let’s take our attention off the woman for a moment and focus our attention on the Pharisees. It is highly probable that what is at play here is an element of scapegoating as expounded by the French philosopher, René Giraud. Giraud explains how since time immemorial human societies have been seeking to externalize the darker aspects of our human nature which threaten us because we can’t control them. We externalize this threat by projecting it onto a scapegoat: someone who can come to symbolize for us everything we most hate and are most afraid of in ourselves. In this case, what is feared is a deviant sexuality. So the way that the Pharisees deal with this is to stone the adulteress – she becomes the symbol of all that they most fear in the human flesh, the symbol of all that is most broken and vulnerable in their own ways of managing their sexualities. This woman with her wanton sexuality represents a huge threat to their own repressed sexualities. But instead of doing the difficult work of processing their own sexual desire and integrating it into their lives in a healthy way, they prefer to eliminate the threat by eliminating the woman. As is so often the case in society, it is the weakest members who end up bearing the brunt of the sins of the collective. Women are so often made to be the scapegoats of human sinfulness, because of their relative position of powerlessness in many societies. We still see this same phenomenon playing out in many of our contemporary societies, with the policing of women’s dressing by men. A far more sinister scapegoating of the woman goes on behind closed doors in so many households across the world with gender-based violence as husbands beat their wives. All too often, this violence comes about because men are unable to deal with their own inner demons and thus project them onto their wives, blaming them for all that is going wrong in their lives, and think that by beating their wives they will be able to solve their problems.

Jesus refuses to enter into this game of scapegoating and instead of answering the question put to him by the Pharisees and the scribes, he begins to write on the ground. We cannot possibly know what Jesus was writing on the sand. We can only speculate. The normal word in Greek for write is graphien, but here the word that is used by the author of the gospel is katagraphien, which can mean to “write down a record against someone.” So one commentator on the gospel text has suggested that Jesus was writing down the sins of the men who surrounded him. As usual Jesus sends us back to ourselves to recognize that the evil we most fear and the most destructive is the one that lives inside of us. The word that Jesus uses when he says “he who is without sin, cast the first stone,” may well be interpreted to mean: “he who is without sexual sin, or sinful desire, cast the first stone.” Whether we like it or not, our sexuality is a place of great vulnerability. We are perhaps all scarred, wounded in a way in our sexuality. It is there that we carry our most intimate fears of rejection and our failed attempts at intimacy. Our sexuality is so much more about just mere genitality, it’s about our ability to enter into relationship and our search for connection. So often we go about searching for this communion in the wrong ways by taking shortcuts, by using and abusing others for our own pleasure. In short our sexuality can be a place where we carry a lot of woundedness and a lot of demons and repressed anger, frustration, hurt or guilt. Instead of projecting this onto others, Jesus wants us to be able to own it. The only way that we can truly find healing for this woundedness is in the loving gaze of God, which may come to us through another person. So it is worth noting that the scribes and Pharisees who all leave one by one not only leave the woman and their intent to kill her, but they also leave Jesus, the one person who can heal them, and therefore forego any chance of real healing. It is only the woman who remains alone with Jesus. And so the woman is once again alone with a man, but this time the atmosphere has completely changed. What will this man do to her? She hasn’t been in control of the scene for a long time now, but at least when she was with her lover or the scribes and the Pharisees she knew what to expect. Now she has no idea what to expect, she is lost, she doesn’t know what trick Jesus is going to play next. Will he want to take advantage of her as well? She has no idea. It is an intimate moment, but now of an intimacy of a completely different nature. Jesus is the first to actually speak to her, he is the first to notice her as a person and not as a sexual object. It is Jesus who is now in control. With his regard of mercy and non-condemnation, Jesus sets her back on her way: “Neither Go and sin no more. This is a good image of what sin does to us – there is an initial bubble of ill-gotten happiness – a brief moment of consummation when the measure of our satisfaction is at par with the measure of our desire. But it is illusory and ephemeral. The bubble bursts and we are brought down to earth confronting cold hard reality – perhaps a bit like a hangover and we don’t feel up to facing the hard world with its condemnatory stares. Or to take another example – having stayed up all night watching Netflix, or having spent the whole weekend playing computer games – as we confront Monday morning or the next day – we are hit by the cold reality of our responsibilities that make us realize how irresponsible we have been and the bad choices that we have made. We are prone to fall into a cycle of self-condemnation and self-loathing – conflating our identity with our sin. If we have sense enough we will hasten our way to the only one who will look at us without condemnation – who is God and there rediscover ourselves and rediscover our sense of freedom. The woman when committing adultery had freedom – a freedom that she abused. Then her freedom was taken away from her – as it so often is, when we sin – we get ourselves into jams – trapped in our own sinfulness and by the circumstances that surround us in a situation of sin. Then before Jesus he restores her freedom and tells her now to use it wisely. It is now not the carefree abandon that she had before – it is a freedom that has sobered up and knows now the weight and responsibility of this freedom – but also the joy of it – when used correctly to build true relationships. Jesus sends her on her way – back to her marriage – go and sin no more – back to her ordinary way of life – it is there that she must learn to confront her demons and there that she must learn the long and painstaking road to holiness and communion – consummation with God which only available to us in the ordinary everyday circumstances of our lives.