Turning Back (Part II)
‘The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery, and placing her in the midst they said to him, “Master, this woman has been caught in adultery, in the very act. Now in the law Moses commanded us to stone such. What do you say about her?”… But Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. And as they continued to ask him, he stood up and said to them, “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her!” And once more he bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. But when they heard it, they went away, one by one, beginning with the eldest, and Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him. Jesus looked up and said to her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” She said, “No one, Lord.” And Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you; go, and sin no more'” (John 8.3-11). An intolerable text! It is missing from several manuscripts. Our moral conscience, indeed our religious conscience, cannot admit that Christ refuses to condemn this woman who says nothing, who shows no repentance. She has been taken in delicto flagrante; the crime she has committed is one of the most serious known to the Law, not only because it undermines the patriarchal structure of Jewish society, but because Scripture describes the relationship of God with his chosen people in terms of marital faithfulness and unfaithfulness. Christ confounds her accusers by reminding them that evil is universal: spiritually, they also are adulterers; they also, in one way or another, have betrayed love. ‘Let him who is without sin …’ No one is without sin. And he concludes by saying, ‘Go and sin no more’, giving her a new start in life.
Being aware of our state of separation, while longing to end it, is a prerequisite of the breaking up of the superficial self, of the shattering of our stony heart. Without this breaking up, Christ cannot be resurrected in me. That is why the monks say that repentance is the ‘reminder of death’, making us personally aware of our state of separation.
St John Climacus says, ‘To define repentance as the awareness of individual guilt is to risk emptying it of meaning’ (Sermons, ed. Constantinople, p.118). Again, to define sin as mere individual guilt would be to do without God, since all we should have to do in order to quiet our conscience would be to keep the Law. But, as St Paul reminds us, the law cannot ‘make alive’ (Galatians 3.21). We who are reminded every day of our death, that is of the daily murder of love, know that only the victory of Christ over hell and death can ‘make alive’.
Once we have made this great return journey across the flood, receiving presentiments of the nature of death, we are thenceforward filled with a sorrowful joy. Our whole being is pervaded by a tenderness which is not the denial of passion, but its transfiguration by the passion of the Lord. We become capable of receiving others no longer as enemies but as brothers and sisters – this is the mysterious ‘love of enemies’ of the Gospel – of welcoming them without judging them, and perhaps of finding the right words to enlighten them in their turn. Without any effort on our part, we become different in our most ordinary words and actions, and may succeed in conveying to others that there is a meaning to life, that death has not the last word.
The outlook of a person who is in Christ cannot be understood except through penitence and prayer. Even then, if we speak of it at all, we shall preserve a certain reticence out of respect for the promise of life, the possibility of beauty, which we have learnt to discern in the individual person, as in the history of the human race. The words which spring from a purified heart can take root in the heart of another. In the same way Moses, on Sinai, could see God only ‘from behind’, and in the same way words become, so to speak, the other side of silence, the other side of peace. And this peace, from the resurrection appearances to the disciples – ‘Peace be with you’ – down to the liturgical celebrations of today – ‘In peace let us pray to the Lord’ – testifies to the presence of the Risen Christ. The gentleness of strong people makes them trees of peace – ‘he is like a tree planted by the waterside… and his leaf shall not wither’ (Psalm 1.3-4). We have massacred the trees under the illusion that they are useful for nothing. And now we realise that without trees the earth is no longer fruitful. This age needs people like trees, filled with a silent peace, rooted at the same time in solid ground and in the open sky.
~From Olivier Clement, On Human Being: A Spiritual Anthropology
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