5th Sunday Lent C - Homily 2

Homily 2 - 2010

In reflecting tonight on the Gospel we have just heard, I would prefer to focus, not on the woman, nor specifically on Jesus, but on the Pharisees and on the bystanders. We are dealing with a potential lynching, even if a lynching validated by long-standing law.

I would like to raise two questions: the first has to do with moral blindness; the second with the abuse of power. 

The Pharisees saw themselves as exemplars of righteousness, and guardians of true law and order. They saw the destructiveness of the woman’s behaviour. What they did not see was the depth of their own violence: they were prepared to stone her to death. They saw her sinfulness. They were completely blind to their own callous, self-interested, murderous intent.

They enjoyed the moral high-ground. The law was on their side. They had the power. No further need for reflection! They would use the woman to further their own broader interests, which were, essentially, to wrong-foot Jesus. By the end of this chapter in the Gospel, after a series of intense exchanges, as the Gospel’s author would comment: They picked up stones to throw at Jesus. They tried to lynch Jesus!

The interesting thing is who these potential lynchers were. They were the moral guardians of Israel. They were conscientious men. They were deeply religious men, the protectors of Israel’s precious religious institutions. They truly believed that God was on their side. Yet they were prepared to kill, to murder, not just the helpless female in the adulterous relationship (where was the male?), but also Jesus.

How could they feel affronted by the woman’s sin, and not see their own greater sin, their intent to murder? The question was one that greatly concerned the author of John’s Gospel. Why did deeply religious men crucify Jesus, without, apparently, the slightest moral qualm? How could they have been so blind?

The spotlight of the sexual abuse crisis moved recently to settle on Ireland and, even more recently, on Germany. How could so many bishops not move to respond effectively in order to protect so many vulnerable, powerless children? What blinded them? What paralysed them?

Part of the answer lies in the power that institutions seem to have over those who exercise authority in them. The dynamic tends so to mesmerise them that they look instinctively to protect the interests of the institution – its stability, its reputation, its influence to the virtual neglect of other responsibilities.

The dynamic affects the Church, certainly; but it affects all institutions – the Police Force, the military, governments, and so on.

It is easy for those of us not in power to point the finger. Yet, somehow or other, institutions influence everyone in them – from the top to the bottom. All tend to be complicit. For example, when the sexual abuse crisis broke in Australia, most Catholics were indignant at the victims for going public, and at the press for relentlessly publicising it. Instinctively, most defended the institution.

Moral blindness affects us all. We are highly selective in what we get indignant about. We are so used to it that it is difficult, almost impossible, to detect. We all need the continual radical conversion required to break free from the roles given us by the  institutions to which we belong or that we adopt for ourselves. We can’t live in society without institutions. But we need to learn to be our own persons within them; and that starts with the determined pursuit to see and to know ourselves. For this, it is hard to go past the importance of meditation, particularly prayerful meditation.

And, perhaps, also helpful are those who disagree with us. We need to let ourselves be challenged.