In the 1990s the Wall Street Journal coined the term Oprahfication’ to describe the practice of making a public confession as a form of therapy. In TV programmes like the Oprah Winfrey Show there was an implicit recognition that sharing parts of your life that cause you unhappiness or guilt can provide a sense of relief. It also might, depending on the response of your peers (the studio audience), give the confessor a sense of affirmation or even approval. Of course a confession may awaken a variety of emotional responses ranging from contempt and condemnation to empathy and compassion. Immediately the confession is made the audience is invited to make some kind of judgement about what the confessor has said and what sort of person they are.
This seems a long way from the religious idea of confession where Christians confess their sins before God so that they may receive forgiveness. Sin is any thought or action which separates us from God. By admitting our sinfulness and opening ourselves up to God’s forgiveness and mercy we are reconciled to him. No longer separated from God we are able to be more fully ourselves. Forgiveness is not about affirmation or approval but about liberation from those things which bind us.
As we enter the season of Lent we are called to set aside time to meditate and reflect on our lives and all those things that separate us from the love of God.
The woman in today’s gospel reading has not had the chance to reflect on her life and present herself before Jesus in a spirit of penitence as we might want to. Instead she has been caught in the act of adultery and is brought before Jesus by those seeking to condemn her. We can only imagine the sense of shame and indignity that this aroused within the woman, but although she is brought before Jesus it is not really she who is on trial in this scene, it is Jesus himself- or at least this is the intention of the scribes and Pharisees.
Jesus has been preaching a gospel of forgiveness and compassion. He is also a law-abiding Jew. If He thinks this woman should be forgiven he will be going against the Law of Moses; so his opponents have spotted a potential contradiction and aim to catch Jesus out. The woman is merely the means through which Jesus may be exposed.
But Jesus turns the tables and neatly illustrates that the contradiction lies not within his message but within the hearts of those men who have stood in judgment over the woman. How can they stone her when they are not without sin themselves? They can’t and they don’t. They depart led by the elders. Traditionally the elders would have been the first to cast a stone but here they are the first to leave.
I remember once making my confession and as an act of penance my spiritual director asked me to read this account of the woman caught in adultery. I think his intention was for me to understand that God’s response to sin is very different from human responses to sin.
Where the religious elders seek to condemn the woman Jesus’ refuses to do so and instead instructs the woman to go your way and do not sin again.’ He calmly accepts the woman but in his instruction acknowledges both the woman’s responsibility for her sin and her capacity to turn away from sin.
Jesus avoids the human tendency to either condemn the sinner or to dismiss the reality of sin. Increasingly in the media we are hearing the call to take a harsher line towards those who have committed crimes. Our prisons are on the brink of overcrowding but still people have the sense that we are too lenient; that there is not enough regard for authority. So the call to condemn becomes louder and louder. Too often it seems that the alternative is one where any kind of responsibility is denied; the reality of the damage done to the lives of both the victim and the perpetrator is ignored.
The difference between condemnation, which is a very human response to sin and forgiveness, which is God’s response to sin, might be related to the distinction between shame and guilt:
We feel shame when we’re aware of having violated a cultural or social value. Guilt on the other hand arises from the violation of internal values. Shame then is related to the condemnation we believe we will receive at the hands of others- or the condemnation we direct towards ourselves.
A psychotherapist writes (Fossum and Mason);
“While guilt is a painful feeling of regret and responsibility for one’s actions, shame is a painful feeling about oneself as a person.”
That is why shame tends to paralyse us; we believe we have done something wrong due to who we are, due to our very nature which is inadequate in some way. Guilt on the other hand is related to regret over a specific act and so we are better able to hear Christ’s words go your way and sin no more’.
Throughout the trial scene in today’s gospel reading Jesus writes in the dust; we are not told what he writes and I think this is significant. Whilst those around him are preoccupied in judging one another Jesus seems entirely detached from this process of trial and accusation. It may be that he was doodling in the sand. This is a beautiful image; whilst we judge and condemn ourselves and one another God just doodles in the dust.
And so finally the woman is left entirely alone with Jesus. His response to her is almost matter of fact but it contains within it liberation. He acknowledges her sin but does not engage in condemnation.
On Ash Wednesday, as we hear again God’s call to repentance, we do so in the light of our own mortality. We remember that we are dust and to dust we shall return. Except that when we die there shall be no we’ only I’. We each stand alone before God- as the woman caught in adultery stood alone before Christ; empty, without personal defence and caught in the act.
The human voices which we might’ve heard all our lives, which we’ve internalised and that tell us we’re no good, will cease. Instead we will stand alone before God who, if we speak from this perspective of shame, might surprise us by just doodling in the sand.
In tonight’s OT reading the prophet Joel warns the people of the coming day of the Lord’, he means the day of judgment. But God, it seems, does not want to engage in condemnation, rather it is not too late to return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning’ (v.12) for The Lord your God, is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love’.
Over the next 40 days, as we confess our sin before God, we do so knowing God will bring to us reconciliation not condemnation. He will encourage us towards greater responsibility and maturity so that we may turn away from those things which inhibit us and make us fearful. So let it be our prayer this Lent that we may hear Christ’s words “Go your way, and from now on do not sin again”. Amen