A Certain Solidarity

Fifth Sunday of Lent. Fr Matthew Jarvis preaches on the woman taken in adultery.

Today’s gospel is a story of solidarity. It shows the solidarity with God with us and it carries a lesson to grow in solidarity with one another, as we ask for forgiveness and turn away from our sins.

Basil Hume once wrote, ‘There is a certain solidarity in sin.’ The phrasing was carefully chosen. As sinners, we know we are in the same boat; we feel solidarity in our weakness and failure. ‘For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God’ (Rom 3:23). That’s why the raging accusers of this woman caught in adultery eventually wander off, unwilling to cast any stones, knowing themselves to be sinful too. The oldest depart first, because they see more clearly the commonality of human failure.

But Cardinal Hume spoke only of ‘a certain solidarity’, because in the end there can be no true solidarity in wrongdoing, which actually divides us. The Devil, the Diabolos, is literally the ‘Scatterer’ or ‘Divider’. Sin locks us up inside ourselves, isolates us in pride and self-centredness. It is the antithesis of relational love and communion. The scribes and Pharisees are stuck in this prideful mentality, trying to isolate this woman to condemn her. They ‘place her in the midst’ (probably dishevelled and indecently dressed), under the glare of all, but they have failed to bring her male partner in adultery who should be equally liable to judgement (Lev 20:10).

Our Lord does not deny that the woman is guilty and deserving of punishment, but he refuses to go along with that diabolical logic of unfairly isolating this one woman as a test case. This is literally a ‘test case’, since he sees that the accusers are doing this ‘to test him’, and that the woman is merely a pawn of their scheming. So, he opposes their isolating tactics with a show of solidarity: he gets down on the ground himself. I imagine the woman as having been thrown on the ground, not daring to raise her head from the dust. Jesus gets down to her level, to show his solidarity.

In his Incarnation, Jesus had already showed his solidarity with all humanity: ‘the Word became flesh and dwelt among us’ (Jn 1:14). Adam, the first human, is literally the ‘earthling’, the one made of ‘dust from the earth’ (Gen 2:7). We remember, especially on Ash Wednesday, that we are likewise dust, and to dust we shall return (Gen 3:19). So, Jesus gets down in the dust, the same dust of which he is made – having received his human nature from the Blessed Virgin – and he starts to write. This could simply be a delaying tactic, but an old tradition holds that he was writing down the sins of the woman’s accusers. Or perhaps he was writing the Law, which ultimately puts a greater accent on mercy than on condemnation. The coming of Jesus into our sinful world was precisely to save us, not to condemn us (see Jn 3:16-17). Or perhaps this writing is the mark of a New Creation: for the Father had formed Adam using his ‘hands’, which St Irenaeus (Adv. Haer. IV, Pr. 4) identified as the Son and the Spirit, and now the Incarnate Son, using his own human hand, writes in the dust to remake us in his own image and likeness: earthly matter shaped by the divine Word. Jesus is the New Adam, the New Earthling, who is at the same time the Heavenly Man, and in the union of his two natures (human and divine) Jesus opens a way for us to share in the life of God: ‘Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven’ (1 Cor 15:49).

The solidarity of Jesus with us goes all the way to the Cross. In his Passion, Jesus, though personally sinless, identifies with sinners: ‘God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us’ (Rom 5:8); and ‘Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God’ (1 Pet 3:18). St Paul goes so far as to say that Christ ‘became sin’ for us: ‘For our sake [God] made [Christ] to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God’ (2 Cor 5:21). Christ took on himself all the ugliness and isolation of sin in order to make manifest what sin really looks like, and to wipe it away in his precious blood.

In the end, sins cannot last for ever. Justice and truth demand that they be wiped out, when God will be ‘all in all’ (1 Cor 15:28). There is no room for sin in the everlasting kingdom of heaven, and ‘the wicked…like winnowed chaff shall be driven away by the wind’ (Ps 1:4). Does this mean we are all doomed? Only if we cling to our sins and choose to go down with them! If we let go of our sins, by repentance, it is only the sins that get destroyed – ‘You will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea’ (Mic 7:19) – while we are saved. Saint Augustine helpfully points out that when the Scriptures say God will destroy sinners, he wants to do this by converting us. The sinner exists no more, because he or she has become a saint!

So, the last words of Jesus to the woman caught in adultery are her lifeline: ‘Neither do I condemn you; go, and from now on sin no more.’ His solidarity with her is expressed by this call to new life, where sin is left behind and her humanity is healed. We have a certain solidarity with the sinfulness of this woman – we cannot cast the first stone – but like her we are called to a new and real solidarity with Christ, who raises us from the dust to share his heavenly life.

Readings: Isaiah 43:16-21 | Philippians 3:8-14 | John 8:1-11

Image: ‘Woman Taken in Adultery‘ from the US National Archives and Records Administration, public domain.