Fr. James Martin – who spoke at Spiritus in October of last year – recently published a piece entitled “Four Lessons from my Jesuit Ministry of Walking with the Excluded.” In it he tells the story of working for the Jesuit Refugee Service in Nairobi. He was tasked with interviewing refugees and helping them process their applications for UN papers. At the time, he was a young Jesuit and new at the job and the first person he interviewed was a man from Somalia. The man looked disheveled and was dressed in old clothes. Fr. Martin admits that he saw this man as a “refugee” and assumed that maybe he was a cattle farmer or something and had lived a rural, nomadic life. So he says to the Somali man in his broken Swahili, “What language would you like to speak in?” The man responds in perfect English, “English is fine. But so is Swahili, Italian, French and Latin…” Turns out this “refugee” was a philosophy professor at the University of Mogadishu and was far more educated and worldly than Fr. Martin himself.
Fr. Martin said that this was a humbling moment for him when he realized that it is dangerous to see people just as categories or stereotypes because we just do not know people’s lives. We often base so many judgments on so little information. And we know that how we frame a particular situation determines a lot of what we will notice. That is especially true in today’s gospel.
I have always heard of today’s passage referred to as the story of the “woman caught in adultery”. And while that is a part of the story, it was until more recent history when feminist scholars started to get their hands on these texts and said, “Whoa…hold up a minute?”
They noticed that in this passage the woman has no name. Furthermore she’s the only woman in the gospels who is referred to by her sin. And, of course, it’s a sexual sin. Surprise, surprise…They also noted that by calling it “the woman who was caught in adultery” it keeps bringing our attention back to her and her actions. No mention is made about anyone else’s actions.
These scholars said that the real problem here is not the woman or her sexuality. The problem here is how others are using their power. And moving forward we might have to call this passage something else so that our attention gets directed elsewhere. So I thought of a few titles. How about, “The woman who was caught in toxic power trips?” Or perhaps we could name it, “Jesus confronts men who abuse their power,” or “The woman who helped Jesus become a better ally.”
Like Fr. Martin reminds us, how we name a person or situation determines a lot of what will pay attention to.
Now at the beginning of today’s gospel, Jesus goes off to the Mount of Olives – probably to get a little “me” time with his mocha latte and his journal – getting himself ready for his day before he heads on over to the temple area where people start to gather to hear him teach.
And then the religious leaders show up quite literally dragging this woman in before him. These men are angry and trying to prove a point. Anne Lamott once said (and I’m paraphrasing) that when God believes all the same things that you do, you can be pretty sure that you have created God in your own image.
I couldn’t help but reflect on our psalm response today, “The Lord has done great things for us; we are filled with joy.” Do these guys seem like they are filled with joy? Hardly. And we can get a sense of the God someone serves by the energy that they bring.
I’ve got to believe Jesus knew that the whole thing was a set up. How could they “catch her in the very act” unless they somehow had a hand in it? And the law that they supposedly cite required that both parties appear for some form of judgment. Yet only one person – the woman – has been brought. He also knows that if he says, “Leave her be…” then they will call him “soft on crime.” But if he says she sinned, he plays right into the trap.
I know that I can be tempted when I read the scriptures to see myself on the side of Jesus like we’re on the same team and think alike. But before I or we do that today, I’d invite us to pause for a moment and identify with the religious leaders and the crowd. They were not “bad people.” But they, like all of us, had an agenda that was too narrow and were acting out of a small space inside of themselves. They could not see what we hear in the first reading from Isaiah that something new was happening in their midst and they just could not perceive it.
While we no longer gather in the public square like people used to, we now gather on social media. And we live in a culture that, like the religious leaders, regularly uses shame and public call outs to address behavior. We like to put people on the spot and watch them squirm, and somehow it just seems to feel so good to put someone on blast and watch as FB, Insta and Twitter light up against someone.
The internationally known speaker and researcher Brenee Brown has spent a good deal of her career exploring shame and its harmful effects on people. She says that shame is often used to force people to change their behavior because it is both effective and efficient in the short-term. And a lot of us are quite familiar with shaming because it was used in our family of origin, our educational systems and our faith communities.
But Brown says that “shame promotes change by using fear – a fear of rejection, fear of not being accepted and fear of disconnection,” and that ultimately, it is “very destructive to both the person doing the shaming and the person being shamed.” She goes on to say that public shaming takes things to another level and actually increases defensiveness, decreases self-awareness, decreases self-regulation and has been linked to increased violence against self or others.
Brenee Brown concludes that if we are committed to social justice and real behavior change, shame is not one of the tools that we can use. Shame is a tool of oppression.
The great Elie Wiesel – who knew all too well the pain of shame and humiliation of the Nazi concentration camps – once said, “Never allow anyone to be humiliated in your presence.” I suspect that Jesus would agree.
Historically, when we have read this story we noticed that Jesus does not publicly shame or humiliate the woman who is brought to him. He knows that she is far more than an “adulterer” and can see past this label to her humanity and personhood. But notice that Jesus also does not shame the religious leaders or those who are witnessing what is happening. He could have gone off on them in front of everyone. He might have been tempted to air their dirty laundry and make them feel small. He could have chastised the crowd for just standing there.
But Jesus knows that meaningful change will only come when people feel their own self-worth and make thoughtful decisions. So he offers a solution that gives everyone a chance to reclaim their humanity – in spite of whatever label has been put on them.
Shaming, punishing and canceling others might make us feel good and bring about short-term change, but, ultimately, these are not the building blocks of authentic community. The work of forgiveness and transforming relationships is difficult work and requires a lot from us – a lot more than shaming someone – and it necessitates new responses that are not always immediately accessible.
Maybe that is why Jesus wrote in the sand. To give himself a moment for reflection and processing so that he could respond from a place of thoughtful creativity and not punishment or raw emotion.
Speaking of writing in the sand, I could not help but think of Jesus as I watched Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson respond to some of the questions from senators in her recent confirmation hearings. I don’t know if you got a chance to listen to or watch some of them. But while some senators were asking what I believe were honest questions to really discern if she should be on the nation’s highest court, others were asking questions solely to trap her. I loved how she would pause, breathe deeply, put on a little half smile and then give an answer. I figure that whatever she was thinking in those moments is the same stuff that Jesus was writing in the sand! You can fill in the blank.
Detroit activist, adrienne maree brown, writes and speaks a lot about our current context. She has a great book called We Will Not Cancel Us that explores punishment mentalities, cancel culture and shaming practices. She says that we all mess up and say and do things that are harmful. And when we move too quickly to shaming or punishing – especially online where everything feels urgent to address – it keeps us stuck in old patterns.
Adrienne maree brown is also quick to point out that not all harm is equal. Some people have more power than others and need to be held accountable for that power. Jesus recognized this as well – which is why he addressed the actions of the religious leaders separate from the woman. They each were invited to reflect, grow, process and take responsibility but in different ways.
So the question for me today is not whether we will label or stereotype or make assumptions about people. I assume we’re going to keep doing that and that we will keep facing the desire to call out and shame people. I mean the programming we’ve had is so deep. For me the question is whether we will pause and remember the toxicity of labels or shaming or exclusion and choose to do something different.
James Martin who I mentioned earlier says that “whenever Jesus meets someone who is excluded…we see him listening to them, asking them questions, and treating them as individuals, not as categories or stereotypes, with their own hopes and dreams and griefs and anxieties.”
Are we willing to do that for the excluded that we come across?
Are we open to doing that with those whom we want to exclude?
During Lent we have been having a Wednesday-night Lenten series with some amazing guest speakers. A week ago our speaker was Rev. Miriam Spies – a PhD candidate, minister and disability activist from Hamilton, ON, who herself – as a person living with cerebral palsy and in a wheelchair – must navigate a world that is not structured to include her. During her presentation, she said a line that will stay with me for some time. She said that people living with disabilities “do not just want to be tolerated, we want to be desired.”
God doesn’t just tolerate us – although most of us were probably taught that. God desires us and wanted to show this to us so much that God decided to be among us and model what it looks like to do that for each other.
In his public ministry, Jesus was always hanging out with those who others deemed “undesirable” or “sinners” to make sure that everyone knew that they were included, forgiven, welcomed and desired. And God’s going to do it again in just a few minutes when we’re all invited to the table to eat together.
Jesus called it the kin-dom of God. Martin Luther King Jr. called it the “Beloved Community,” and both believed that it was possible to do here on earth.
Judgments, shaming, exclusion, canceling, punishment and domination do not get us closer to this goal.
Love, forgiveness, inclusion, kindness, understanding and accountability do.
This is ultimately what Jesus offers to the woman, and it is what he offers us.
Our job is to offer it to each other.
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