A Finger in the Dust

Last sunday's reading was taken from St.John's account of the woman found ou in the act of adultery (Jn.8.3ff). This is the woman whom the Scribes and Pharisees brought to Jesus, saying: 'Master, Moses in the Law directed that a woman guilty of adultery should be stoned: now, what do you say?' Jesus did not reply. Instead he knelt down and started writing in the dust with his finger. But the Scribes and Pharisees persisted and finally Jesus stood up and delivered himself of the most famous line 'Let he that is without sin cast the first stone.' Then, says John, Jesus knelt down again, and went on writing in the dust. At this, the Scribes and the Pharisees dispersed, one by one, leaving Jesus and the woman alone. 'Where are your accusers?' asked Jesus, 'has no one condemned you?' 'No' said the woman. 'I don't condemn you either' said Jesus, 'now go home and behave!'.

The question that occurred to me with rather unexpected force was what Jesus was doing, writing in the dust with his finger? Was it merely a gesture of contempt for the Scribes and Pharisees? A refusal to dignify their malicious and insulting strategem with his undivided attention. Well, that's what I used to think, but last sunday I began thinking more carefully about the context and wondering whether my response was more characteristic of the way in which I would have behaved than the way in which the Saviour did.

In the Gospels, Jesus is more than once seen as the new Moses, most pointedly, perhaps when he gave the Sermon on the Mount. The blessings which Jesus there bestowed on the poor, the despised, and the rejected make a pointed contrast with the rugged injunctions and prohibitions delivered to Moses on Mount Sinai. Jesus is generally portrayed as concerned to uphold that law (Matt.5.18), but his attitude to its nature and purpose shows that this concern was not such as to make the observance of the Law an end in itself. Questioned by the Pharisees on the circumstances in which Moses had permitted divorce, he said 'This he did for the hardness of your heart' (Mk.10.5): elsewhere he showed what the Scribes and the Pharisees would have considered and unbecoming levity in realtion to the strict observance of the Sabbath (see Mk.2.27). The law, he seems to imply, was necessary, but not sufficient: it had to be interpreted in the light of the two greatest commandments: 'Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart and all thy soul, and with all thy might' (Deut.6.5), and 'Thou shalt love thy neighboour as thyself' (Lev.19.18).

The second of these commandments was particularly apt to the situation of the woman taken in adultery, for it is preceded by the words 'Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people.' The exaction of any penalty was not to be a source of secret satisfaction, but was a matter for the Lord (Deut.32.35).

If one sees Jesus not simply as the new Moses, but as the Son of God himself, the situation becomes more heavily freighted with irony.

Here are the representatives of the Jewish church and state 'tempting' Jesus, or 'putting him to the test.' This, had they acknowledged whom Jesus was, would itself have been a breach of the Law, which stipulated that' You shall not tempt the Lord thy God' (Deut.6.16, Ex.17.7). Moreover, Jesus, as the Son of God, was the one person present who, being without sin, would have been in a position to carry out the sentence imposed by Moses. That he chose not to condemn the woman was consistent with the doctrine of forgiveness which he taught during his life, and which he reiterated on the cross (Luke 23.24).

Exodus 31.18 describes how, on Mount Sinai, 'God gave unto Moses... two tables of testimony, tables of stone, written with the finger of God.' When Jesus wrote in the dust, a person disposed to see him as the Son of God might have been struck by the parallel.

Stone was, and is still, an image of the permanence of lifeless things, dust the image of the impermanence of life, and, especially of human life. Adam was made out of dust; his given name means 'dust'; and after the Fall, God was to remind him that dust he was, and that unto dust he should return.

By writing with his finger in the dust, Jesus may have been saying something about the relationship between God, the Law, and Humanity. What had been written in stone had become set in stone; Man had begun to exist for the Law, and not the Law for Man. The point had been reached where Man's interpretation of thw Law was being used to justify what might, in common sense, have appeared no more or less than the breach of it (Mark 7.11).

In writing unspoken words with his finger in the very stuff of humanity, Jesus was, perhaps, asserting the life giving relationhip between God and man that was at the very heart of his Gospel: he came, not to destroy the law, but to fulfill it (Matt.5.17-18).

History and Memory

I was listening to the wireless this morning when I heard the Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks say that there was no Hebrew word for 'History', and that the word used to describe the events recorded in the Bible was 'Zakhor' which. he said, means 'Remember' .' The Chief Rabbi went on to say that he distinguished the the two for his own purposes by thinking of History as 'His-story', something that happened at some time else to someone else, and memory as My story which he though of as 'part of who I am'. The example he gave of the latter was the Passover meal, where Jewish families still re-enact what I suppose one might call a 'folk memory' of the opening of the great liberation of the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt.

In fact the word History, like nearly all words describing the branches of traditional liberal arts, is derived from the Greek word 'Historia' and it means 'Inquiry.'

The first historian opens his work with the words 'I Herodotus of Halicarnassus here set out the fruits of my inquiry, so that human achievements may not be forgotten in time, and so that amazing achievements of mankind, whether Persian or Greek, mat not be without their proper renown'. And he passes at once to a consideration of the causes of the great war between the Greeks and the Persians, giving first the Persian , then the Phoenecian account - both of whom in fact referred the causes to the abduction of women well-known in Greek myth. Herodotus, however, concludes his introduction by saying that he has no intention of passing judgment on those accounts but that he will rely instead on his own knowledge, and 'point out who it actually was that first injured the Greeks' . This turns out to be Croesus of Lydia, a figure the existence of whom is entirely accepted by contemporary historians.

Herodotus' introduction is striking in the way that it sets the pattern for 2,500 years of the western historical tradition. The reader notes at once the individualistic assertion of the writer of his identity, his declaration of purpose, his comparison of sources, and his final assertion of the primacy of his personal judgment. Herodotus is true to his agenda. Those reading him will soon become familiar with the formulae 'Some say... and others say... but in my opinion...' Here is a writer who is determined to get to the bottom of things and who will do so by gathering information, analysing it, and pronouncing his opinion on it: he is, by inference, always ready to correct his conclusions in the event that he comes across more trustworthy evidence: in short, this is the scientific mathod at work.

The Bible goes about things in a different way. "In the beginning," it tells us, "God created Heaven and Earth". This statement is one that owes nothing to the scientific method. The record-keeper is not identified; he does not state a purpose;he does not seek to evaluate the evidence: what he tells us is what he believes, and what he believes is what he has been told: when he comes across more than one account of things, he does not weigh them against one another, reason them through, and select one or the other: he simply combines the two accounts, and ignores the inconsistencies. Biblical scholars tell us that the person, or persons, who composed the Book of Genesis knew that there were competing traditions, and combined them into a single account: the determination here was not to eliminate by selection, but to ensure that nothing whatever should be lost.

In Western culture, it is the Classical model of historical writing that has, since the enlightenment, become dominant, and its methods have long since been applied to the Bible itself. Initially, it was hoped that the application of these methods would help to prove that the facts alleged were 'historically' true. When that failed, many concluded that the Bible was simply false, and lost interest. Today, people are still trying to reconstruct the 'real' events that are held to have 'given rise' to the the biblical record: there are, for instance, many scholars who have taken the gospels apart, and have then reassembled them along lines suggested by investigations of the contemporary milieu. The variety of roles which such figures have created for the 'historical' Jesus is already large, and likely to grow larger. But some may think that the enterprise is not as valuable as such critics have imagined, and that the relatively simple message proposed by the text itself is not one which requires a great deal of scholarship to understand (see Deut.30.11-14).

Mutual Subjection

In his Meditations and Prayers on the Way of the Cross (CTS, 2005, p.4) Pope Benedict XVI writes that the fathers of the Church 'considered heartlessness to be the primary vice of the pagans': the prophecy of Ezekiel in which the Lord says 'I will give them one heart, and I will put a new spirit within you; and I will take the stony heart out of their flesh, and will give them an heart of flesh' (Ez.11.19) was understood by the Fathers to have been fulfilled in the person and teaching of Christ so that the laws engraved by Jaweh on the tablets of stone at Sinai had been re-enacted by Jesus in the hearts of those who imitated his life and put into effect his teachings.

In the eastern empires by which Israel found herself surrounded this heartlessness was evident in the very structure of society. The King was at the apex; everyone below him was a slave; and everybody below them was the slave of slaves. The King on his throne spoke in the peremptory language of absolute power, while his subjects, and his subjects' subjects, uttered the formulae of prostration and suffered their backs (or their necks) to be used as his footstool. The fact that the Jews placed such emphasis on the Law, and the fact that the Law was conferred, guaranteed, and visibly enforced by God was itself an oddity which distinguished Israel from the despotisms around it, where Law was subject to the whims of Kings.

In the West, where societies of a looser kind emerged, inequalities of birth and wealth made for uneasy alliances. In the sixth century Greece isonomia (the principle of equality before the law) emerged as a rallying call among a mercantile class which were beginning to challenge the social power formerly wielded by the landed gentry. But even in the fifth century, Themistocles is recorded as saying that he hoped he would never enjoy a position of authority if he did not use it to help his friends, and to put his enemies down (Plutarch, Aristides, 24).

When Jesus told the parable of the good Samaritan, his hearers, whether Jews or Gentiles, would not have been surprised to hear how a Priest and a Levite had looked the other way when passing by one of their countryman who had fallen among thieves (Luke 10.30). There was, after all, a widespread belief that if bad things happenned to you, it was because you, or your family, had offended God (see Luke13.1-5 Jesus refers to the doctrine with evident irony). But the intervention of the Samaritan would have come as a shock, for the relations between Jews and Samaritans were less than friendly: in the Gospel of John the term 'Samaritan' is used to insult Jesus himself('Aren't we right in saying that you are a Samaritan, and that you are possessed by a devil?' (John 9.48).

The revolutionary model of kingship and community that Jesus brought is exemplified in the the words which he spoke after washing of the feet of his disciples: 'You call me Lord and Master; and you are right to do so; for so I am. And if I, your Lord and Master have washed your feet, you ought to wash one another's feet as well. For I have given you an example, that you should do as I have done to you... The servant is not greater than his lord; neither is he that is sent greater than he that sent him (John 13.13-16).

It is this doctrine of mutual submission for which was unique in the ancient world: it is interestingly distinguishable from the humanist world-view of individaul rights which is currently in the ascendant.

Thoughts on St Patrick's Day (Part 2)

When I wrote in my last that St.Patrick 'would not have seen Ireland as a nation at all but as a peripheral wilderness inhabited by savage, lawless and godless men' I meant no offence to the Irish of today.

Strabo, the Greek geographer, was the first writer to refer to the Irish: he had heard that they were cannibals - the fabled anthropophagi.

Writing in the twelfth century, Gerald of Wales said that the Irish were so barbarous, that they could not be said to have any culture at all. 'Mankind' he says, 'usually progresses from the woods to the fields, and then from fields to settlements and towns... but the Irish have not progressed at all... They scorn to work the land, have little us for towns, and despise the priveleges of civil society.'

In the fourteenth century, Froissart was writing that Ireland had no towns to speak of, only 'high forests, great waters... and places uninhabitable'. The people lived in 'caves and small cottages, under trees and among bushes and hedges, like wild savage beasts'. He described the Irish as cruel enemies, given to ripping open the bellies of their captives, and eating their hearts.

So the Irish were considered as savages, barely distinguishable from those soon to be discovered in the New World fit only to be forcibly dispossessed, put down, and enslaved.

Of course the Irish differed from the Indians in being Christians, but after 1540, they became Christians of the wrong kind - at least as far as English Protestants were concerned, and the sopposed superstition and idolatry of their religion (a religion which the English had of course shared until the Reformation) was seen as mark of their primitive and unredeemed character.

Even after the conquest and reduction of Ireland in the ensuing century, English attitudes remained contemptuous and dismissive. To the Jacobean poet and conquistador, Sir John Drury, the Irish were 'little better than cannibals', and there are stories from that less than heroic period of colonial history of bounties paid for severed heads of the natives. A century later, Dean Swift was to pen his famous 'Modest Proposal' which invited the Irish to solve the linked problems of famine and over-population in Ireland by eating their own babies.

For those puzzled by the modern the history of Ireland, these attitudes will be revealing: savage Ireland may have been, but that savagery was mirrorred in the way that they were treated, and it is scarcely to be wondered at when savagery is repaid with savagery

Like their patron, the Irish have had their share of the abuse, enslavement and neglect. It is in the coping with this poisonous legacy that St Patrick offers so potent an example: the bitterness and hatreds which tore Ireland apart for so long are not the only ways in which the nation can deal with the legacy of its past. Like St.Patrick, those who have sufferred can look within themselves for a spirit which leads them away from the bitterness and resentment of victimhood and towards the message of reconciliation and hope that St.Patrick himself was to freely return to Ireland and preach.

Thoughts on St.Patrick's Day (Part !)

It is the Feast of Saint Patrick, and I have been reading the Life of the Saint in Butler's Lives of the Saints (s.v March 17, Ed. 1999, p.168).

When we think of Patrick, the association which we make between the saint and the race of which he became the patron is so immediate that it is easy to forget that Patrick was not an Irishman at all, but a native of what still thought of itself as part of Roman Europe.

Patrick, as his name implies, was of distinguished family, and bought up in an environment in which Roman standards of urban civilisation were still maintained. Such a person would not have been seen Ireland as a nation at all but as a peripheral wilderness inhabited by savage, lawless and godless men.

A boy carried into this desolation by a party of slavers would hardly have welcomed the idea that he would one day be identified with its people,, and Patrick's plight might seem to have been such as to make him a more suitable candidate for the patronage of modern immigrants deceived and betrayed into a life of exploitation, wage-slavery and prostitution, were it not foir the fact that even they seem generally to imagine that they are on their way to something better than their previous way of life and not on their way to something infinitely worse.

What is remarkable about St.Patrick lies in the view that he was later to take of his captivity and subsequent servitude.

Butler's says ‘Nostalgia for his own country, people, and kin, plus loneliness and poverty and exposure to the harshness of the climate bought him to that degree of denudation where God alone is found to be the sole, inalienable treasure of the spirit… The love and fear of God, he says, took over more and more, as his faith deepened and the Spirit worked within him… He came to regard his captivity as a blessing, his life of prayer as pure unmerited grace.’

What we see in St.Patrick is a man on whom there is imposed the challenge that Jesus Christ issues by way of an unwelcome invitation in Matthew 16.24:

'If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross and follow me.'

St. Patrick would certainly not have chosen for himself the fate that befel him in his early teens, and as we view the pitiable condition of the poor, the despised and the exploited immigrant few of us will feel that their situation can usefully be set before us as a model for our own salvation.

Would we not, if overtaken by such a fate, be far more likely to indulge our feelings of victimisation, and to be filled with bitterness against the world?

Would we not lose any faith that we might otherwise have in a just and benevolent God?

Many are the Saints in whom the yeast of the Spirit has worked to drive them from their homes and families and into the desert to seek God, but St.Patrick offers the more interesting spectacle of a Saint in whom the yeast of the Spirit only began to work when he had been stripped of all that seemed to define him.

He is a Saint who was a victim, a slave, and a failure: he speaks to all who are despised, cut off and rejected of men, and he offers them the hope that there is, within them, a greater treasure than all the others rhat they may have lost, and which no one can take from them.