Sin and the Law
Fifth Sunday of Lent Scripture Readings
In today’s gospel passage, we find Jesus confronting not just a sinner, but sin itself. I cringe when I hear people using the term “sin.” Its multiple meanings make it almost impossible to get a clear idea of what’s meant by those using it, and even then, it’s most often misused. We’ve grown up around people who’ve told us, “That’s a sin!” We’ve also heard that if you commit a sin, you’ll go to hell—a very unbiblical idea. What Jesus saw as sin had little to do with specific actions or behaviors. This passage should shed some light on the matter.
The scribes and Pharisees approached Jesus with a sticky situation, hoping to back him into a corner. They wanted to show him to be a hypocrite, making him lose face in front of the crowd whom he was teaching. And they wanted to pay him back for his very public criticism of them. They brought him a woman caught in adultery. The Law of Moses prescribed death as the punishment for that transgression, often death by stoning. By asking him his opinion as to the proper course of action, they were hoping that he would either please the crowd by exhorting them to be merciful, in which case, he’d be speaking against the dictates of the Law, or that he’d say to stone her, causing his followers to be disappointed and to see him as just as harsh and unyielding as they themselves were. They thought that any way he’d look at it, he’d lose.
What Jesus did was pure brilliance. He elevated the discussion to a higher level. Since the accusing witnesses in such situations were to be the first to exact the punishment, he asked her accusers to compare themselves to her. Who was the faultless witness who was prepared to levy punishment on her while they themselves escaped the consequences of their behavior? He made them publicly compare themselves to her. What Jesus wrote on the ground isn’t relevant. He could have listed the sins of the scribes and Pharisees, or he could have written the commandments of the Law, or he could have been doodling. In any event, he paid no attention to them nor to the accused. They came trying to put him on the spot—what would he do?—and ended up having it turned back on them—what would they do? The eldest among the learned Pharisees quickly recognized the “checkmate” in their little chess game, and that understanding gradually filtered down, until all of them recognized that they’d been bested.
What happened there? It’s a confusion as old as mankind itself, tricking us into believing that what’s illegal is immoral, and conflating law with morality. They’re two different worlds, even though sometimes they may overlap. Law is concerned with behavior, and the purpose of law is to establish and maintain social order. Its focus is on the social group: the nation, the tribe, the family. The law seeks conformity of behavior and is only concerned with the individual to the extent that she or he is in conformity or not. Law defines proper or improper, permitted or prohibited. The law has no opinion on right or wrong, moral or immoral. Law prescribes punishments not to create a metanoia—a change of mind and heart—but to enforce conformity of behavior.
Morality operates in a whole different sphere, namely the sphere of intentionality. The moral compass guides and directs the person from the inside. The exterior behavior may or may not reflect the interior intentions. The focus of morality is on the person primarily, and only secondarily on the group. Morality promotes growth and connections, but disregard of the moral conscience leads to decay—decay of the person and consequently, alienation from the true self, from others, and therefore from God. That’s the nature of sin—acting with intentions contrary to the good of the self and others. What Jesus did that day was to kick the conversation upstairs from conformity of behavior to intention of the heart and mind and soul. Albert Einstein was on the same page when he said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” Since sin is an entirely interior condition, there is no punishment appropriate for sin. Immorality carries with it its own deadly consequences.
When we look at what happened in this gospel story, there are a few things we can say about the situation. The most obvious is that the woman transgressed the Law of Moses and was eligible to receive the punishment prescribed by the law. What we cannot say is, first of all, whether she sinned or not. No one, except perhaps Jesus, knew the intentions of her mind and heart. That, by the way, is true always and everywhere—from the outside, we cannot tell whether transgressive behavior is a sin or not. Nor can we say whether lawful behavior may not just as readily be a sin. Only God and the person’s conscience can tell for sure.
We also cannot say whether Jesus forgave her or not, because, first of all, we don’t know if her actions were sinful. Secondly, Jesus ignored her for most of the incident when she was in front of him. He simply waited until the scribes and Pharisees who had accused her had finished examining their own motives and had walked away. As far as we know, she did not ask for forgiveness for her motives, and Jesus didn’t offer any. He just counselled to embrace the metanoia—the change of mind and heart he always preached—and she went on her way.
We get into serious trouble when we apply laws to the spiritual, moral realm because it’s a personal matter and mere rules of group conformity don’t apply. There’s only one pair of moccasins for each of us, and no group has any authority to judge how we walk in them. So, we do wrong when we presume to pass judgment on anyone’s inside based on their outside. We wind up humiliated like the scribes and Pharisees when we step into that trap. Furthermore, we act unjustly when we coopt the authority to punish anyone for what we assume are moral lapses. Our God is not a punishing god, but one who insists that we accept the consequences of our decisions. If we’ve worked hard to roll a boulder to the edge of a cliff, it’ll do us no good when it teeters on the edge to beg God not to let it tumble over.
In the end, we are all the woman accused of bad behavior for violating some rule or other. And, we are the scribes and the Pharisees, tempted to judge others’ moral character by how they look and how they act. And, we’re also the ones reminded that, when we point our fingers at others, there are three pointing back at us. Finally, we can only pray that, when we’re in such a situation, confronting someone accused of wrongdoing, we can be the voice of Christ to them, saying, “Has no one condemned you? … Neither do I condemn you. God, and do better from now on.”
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