How many of you
enjoy being publicly humiliated? How
many of you look forward to having your most embarrassing moments shared with
the world? How many of you appreciate it
when your most shameful actions become the topic of conversation around the
water cooler or the lunch table?
Nobody? Well, I can’t say I’m all
that surprised.
There’s an old
saying that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. But I think we all know that’s not really
true. Sure, for a celebrity or a company
almost anything can be spun to their advantage as long as they’re name is in
the news. But for you and me, for
regular people…there are things we’d like to keep private. There are things we’d like to keep anyone
else from knowing about. There are things
that we might even wish we could forget about ourselves.
Our gospel reading
for today deals with a woman who I have to think experienced a kind of
mortifying shame and embarrassment that blows anything any of us have faced out
of the water. To begin with, she was
caught in the act of adultery. Even if
she had been with her husband, that would have been hugely embarrassing for
people to walk in on. But when it wasn’t
her husband…that just made it that much worse.
And then to add to the insult, she didn’t just face dealing with
whispers and gossip about her spreading around the neighborhood. She was dragged out into the public
square. Her shame was loudly made known,
possibly even seen depending on how clothed they allowed her to get. And then to add injury to insult, she was
facing the prospect of rocks being thrown at her until she was dead.
Often when we look
at this account from Scripture, we approach it a sort of morality tale. It’s kind of a go-to story for the idea of
“judge not lest ye be judged.” We focus
not on the woman, but the crowd. We look
at the Pharisees and those who were preparing to stone her. We focus on how Jesus’ words convicted them, how it caused them to drop their
stones and go on their way. The primary
relationship in the story becomes not Jesus and the woman, but Jesus and the
Pharisees. The woman’s situation, her
safety, becomes an interesting epilogue.
So often when we
look at this story, the grace of Jesus is almost an afterthought. A happy accident brought about by the angry
crowd being shamed into leaving. But
that’s just simply not the case. Grace
is central to this story. It’s the
driving, transformative power at work.
It’s Jesus’ grace toward the woman that leads the change, it’s grace
that makes all the difference. Because
here’s the thing we tend to overlook for some reason. She was guilty.
