Adulterous "Church", accused Jesus

(Jn 8:1-11)

What about an ancient codex of the Gospels with a torn 'page'?

Husbands did not want women to have a license of immunity from the Lord himself: God's action baffles.

But how does the Lord deal with those who have made mistakes in life? Or with people of a different cultural background [e.g.] from the West?

Can they be admitted to a direct relationship with Jesus, or must they undergo a long rigmarole of doctrinal and moralistic x-rays?

Christ proceeds without enquiry or accusatory penitential tares.

He only puts people and heterogeneous groups back on their feet - albeit all humiliated and mocked souls by the veterans of the postilion (who secretly indulge in everything).

He imposes - and chisels - Justice where it has been transgressed, at least in our conventional view.

The only reliable and convincing solution and judgement is the Good.

In Ephesus, bishop Polycrates had had to clash with the intransigents on the question of the readmission into the community of the lapsi ['slipped' in the confession of faith, under blackmail] or of those who had 'surrendered' the sacred books (traditores) because intimidated by threats of persecution.

The bishop of Rome, Sotère, had taken a position in favour of the rigorists. But as the Apostolic Constitutions testify, the more sympathetic ones explicitly referred to the episode of the adulteress, bearing in mind that God's action is a creative act that recomposes - not a gesture of hasty punishment.

Having disappeared from the Gospel according to Lk (cf. 21:38), the Gospel pearl has been recovered by Jn (8:1-11).

Again St. Augustine complained that the passage was excluded by leaders of some communities.

But going beyond petty moralisms, the pericope has significant theological weight.

In religions, the idea of divine just judgement is identical, because it is in harmony with the concept of common justice: unicuique Jus suum.

All the sarcophagi of ancient Egypt reproduce the scene of the scales with the two plates in perfect balance: on one the feather symbol of Maat goddess of wisdom; on the other the heart of the deceased, who is led by the hand by the god Anubis.

On the weighing depends the future happiness or ruin of the one being judged.

The Qur'an attributes to God the splendid title of 'Best of those who forgive'; yet even in Islam, the Day of Judgement is the moment of separation between the righteous and the wicked - the some ushered into paradise, the others banished to hell.

The rabbis of Jesus' time held that mercy intervened at the moment of reckoning: it prevailed only when good and bad works were equal.

The adulterer and the adulteress were to be put to death (Deut 22:22-24): how come the male escapes?

In many biblical passages, the 'woman' is a collective parable - here evoked for a catechesis against the traditionalist prosecutors who also came forward in the early communities.

The trouble with moral courts is that too many protagonists seem more inclined to condemn 'symbols' than to get to the bottom of matters.

Despite the strict penitential practices of the early centuries and the controversy between laxists and strictists, the gemstone recovered and formerly removed from many manuscripts reiterates the incriminated phrase: 'I do not condemn you'!

And he even sketches a Jesus who does not ask beforehand whether the woman was repentant or not!

Shocking episode? No, because this is about theology, not the news.

Every day at sunrise the people from the Mount of Olives contemplating the Temple recited the Shemàh, and so did Jesus.

Like many, he spent the nights in a cave, in the open air (Lk 21:37-38; Jn 8:1-2), then went to the Temple to teach.

Another 'Day' begins.

The confrontation with the sinner who represents us begins a new 'dawn' - on the Face of God.

What sentence does the Lord pronounce in his House [Church]?

It is not said what Jesus was teaching, for he himself is 'the' Word, the Teaching.

Each gesture tells how the Father relates to the one who has strayed, or comes from an uncertain background.

He helps the lost son to recover, and says [in short]: 'I do not condemn you, but stop hurting yourself'.

Jesus crosses the bridge-viaduct over the Cedron valley and enters the temple esplanade through the Golden Gate.

There he finds hearts steadfast in the retributive justice of Sinai, that of the cold tables of stone.

Justice of the scribes and Pharisees of the vice squad who - pressing - were standing over him [so the Greek text].

Justice by scales and sanhedrin? No, Benevolence that makes the wicked righteous, that makes pure those who draw near - those from multiform paganism, considered theological adulterers."Justice is done" for us means that the guilty are straightened out, punished and separated from the unrighteous.

God instead makes righteous those who once were not. He precisely retrieves the wretch from the abyss, and makes him breathe.

[Perhaps the woman is a symbolic image of a subordinate primitive community, coming to the Faith but with mixed cultural origins and uncertain practices, judged tumultuously free].

Forgiveness is not a defeat, nor a surrender. After all, there is no shortage of those who make a shield of laws to annoy and hide behind screens.

In short: the true defendant of the pericope is the Son and his idea of Justice!

Hence the Finger on the Ground: resting on the stone slabs of the Temple esplanade in Jerusalem.

This is a very serious accusation against the spiritual guides of official religiosity and all those who, upon becoming leaders of the first Christian realities, immediately intended to replicate their hypocrisies.

Inebriated by the rank and file of leaders and censors, they too show that they have remained in the Sinaitic, stone age.

An age of old supponents without a heart of flesh, strangers to the warmth of the divine Spirit.

Indeed, not a few manuscripts from the first centuries demonstrate the obsessive communitarian attachment to a very rigid ethical discipline.

There was a risk of returning to the ideology of the 'best': ruthless and gabellant, icy and judgmental, chastising; confusing about the passions - that of the 'chosen' and 'upright'.

Acolytes who were proponents of death; corpses incapable of fiery desire, of explicit passion; because - at least in façade - they were calibrated to room temperature.

Instead, throughout the scene Jesus remains crouched on the ground!

He even relates to the adulteress by looking up at her from below (cf. Greek text)!

He is even subjected to the adulteress, an icon of an uncertain or 'lesser' church - one that gathers the formerly distant free. The same ones who now approached the threshold of fraternities with a past and moral baggage that was perhaps questionable.

In short, every demand for mercy is authentic even when it remains only implicit - and in any case Christ relates to each of us without looming!

In the life of Faith, God is beneath us, and so do those who authentically represent Him.

The LORD is not a legislator, nor a weigher, nor a plaintiff - not even a notorious judge who passes sentence at once.

In this way and 'lapidary' tone, Pope Francis has repeatedly said:

"I prefer a Church that is bumpy, wounded and dirty from being out on the streets, rather than a Church that is sick from being closed and comfortable clinging to its own security. I consider missteps less serious than not moving at all!".

The difference of Faith's approach with the assessments of banal religiosity? The qualitative leap between Finger on the plates and Look at the people.

To internalise and live the message:

In what situations have you considered, 'Justice is done'?

On what occasions have you experienced divine judgement as understanding and grace?