Not condemning; not condoning

Isaiah 43.16-21 ‘Behold, I am doing a new thing and I will give drink to my chosen people.’

Philippians 3.8-14 ‘For the sake of Christ I have suffered the loss of all things, becoming like him in his death.’

John 8.1-11 ‘Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.’

 

Jesus stood 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 from now on sin no more.” (John 8.10-11)

 

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The Gospel account of a terrified woman being dragged along by a group of men ready to kill her with rocks and stones for committing adultery is chilling.

 

It will not have been the first time, nor the last, that something like this has happened.

 

The condemnation and righteous fury of the scribes and Pharisees is challenged by Jesus and the scene turns into one of forgiveness, healing and restoration – it takes us deep into the heart of Jesus’ mission.

 

Before we go into the Gospel let’s just go back to paradise, to the Garden of Eden, as described in Genesis.

 

There is method in this! And you might start to make some connections between Eden and the gospel reading as we go along.

 

In the Garden God creates Adam from the dust of the ground (Genesis 2.7).

 

But Adam is alone in the garden and, as Adam names the creatures, none can help in the task given to Adam of tending paradise.

 

So, as equally in God’s image as the man, God creates the woman (Genesis 2.22): from one flesh they’re created so they can find fulfilment in each other and be complete and fruitful (Genesis 2.23).

 

They enjoy the Garden paradise, tasting the fruits of all the trees, but God warns them not to eat of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, for that is knowledge only God can bear.

 

But eat they do.

 

And then they hide.

 

Out of God’s sight.

 

God finds them, and blame is passed around: from the man, to his wife, to the serpent. (Genesis 2.6,7; 12,13).

 

God clothes them in protecting garments and then they are driven out of the Garden paradise. (Genesis 2.24)

 

Any connections?

 

What’s the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise got to do with today’s gospel reading?

 

Before addressing that, it’s worth knowing that although humanity left Paradise, there was always an echo of it in the Temple of Jerusalem.

 

In Hebrew thought the Temple is the representation of paradise on earth, a microcosm of how creation should be, with purity of worship and unity with God, just as the Garden of Eden in the beginning.

 

Our gospel opened with Jesus in the Temple, at the beginning of the day: a new creation day.

 

He is there, teaching people how to live lives worthy of Paradise.

 

And in come the scribes and Pharisees with the woman.

 

You might ask, where’s the man, the co-respondent in the adultery? (see Leviticus 20:10-12).

 

The scribes and Pharisees had singled out this woman, just as Adam blamed Eve for the fruit of the tree being eaten.

 

Adultery is a grave sin which takes two people, a violation of the seventh of the Ten Commandments ((Exodus 20.14) and a breach of fidelity between husband and wife.

 

Adultery is used throughout scripture as an image of human infidelity towards God: God as a spurned bridegroom whose bride turns away. (cf Hosea)

 

Just as in Eden the man hides, and both man and woman have breached a relationship of trust and covenant.

 

It was eating the fruit that broke that trust: that was the moment of infidelity: cheating on God.

 

Here it is the scribes and Pharisees who take it upon themselves to condemn and pass sentence: they put themselves as arbiters of good and evil; precisely why Adam and Eve were expelled from Eden.

 

This is the moment for Jesus to restore, to bind up and to heal, to recall everyone in the Temple – the echo of Eden – to a restored relationship with God.

 

But Jesus’ first action is puzzling: he bends over and writes in the dust. Why?

 

Dust is the very stuff from which Adam was created in the first place before being set in the Garden of Eden, even from dust God brought life, even from the dust of sin Jesus can bring forgiveness.

 

It’s so intriguing. We have no written words of Jesus, he wrote no books, and the only reference to him writing is in the dust.

 

He is the one whose words stand for ever (Isaiah 40.8b; 1 Peter 1.25), but these written words are blown away in the dust.

 

It is only when Jesus stands up and confronts the baying mob with their own sin, that they see they are in no position to stone this woman.

 

She had violated the Law.

 

They violate the Law.

 

No one stands innocent before God, as St Paul says, ‘For there is no distinction: for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God’ (Romans 3.22,23)

 

Sin is not just about breaking rules; sin is the words and deeds that estrange us from God, be that in Eden, in the Temple that morning, or in our daily lives.

 

The scriptures reveal patterns we know to be true of ourselves.

 

Jesus’ project for humanity is bigger than rules kept or broken, it is about the renewal of Creation, about restoring men and women in the image of God, about making us holy by being as he is, in perfect relationship with the Father, unobscured by sin and death.

 

The man and the woman were expelled from the earthly paradise, the Garden of Eden: Jesus’ mission is to restore men and women to their first innocence.

 

I wonder if Jesus wrote in the dust the words of Isaiah from our first reading?

 

Behold, I am doing a new thing;
now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?

I will make a way in the wilderness
    and rivers in the desert. (Isaiah 43.19)

 

From his writing,

 

Jesus stood 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 from now on sin no more.”

 

Jesus both refuses to condemn the woman, and he refuses to condone what she has done.

 

Scribes and Pharisees wanted condemnation.

 

Given attitudes to marriage and fidelity today perhaps some would condone.

 

But being humane is not being just or merciful or true; it doesn’t reconcile or restore.

 

As St Augustine says, ‘It is sin [Jesus] condemns, not people’ (Augustine, Homilies on the Gospel of John, 33.6-7)

 

We come into Jesus’ presence like Adam and Eve, like the woman caught in adultery – ‘guiltie of dust and sin’, as the priest and poet George Herbert puts it. (George Herbert, Love [III])

 

And as we come into his presence, feeling under condemnation of others or of ourselves, may we hear Jesus’ words: “I do not condemn you; go, and from now on sin no more.”

Sing we, too, of Mary's sorrows

Exodus 2:1-10 This is one of the Hebrew children

2 Corinthians 1:1,3-7 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ

Luke 2:33-35 “Behold, this child is appointed for the fall and rising of many in Israel, and for a sign that is opposed”

 

‘Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,

the Father of mercies and God of all comfort,

who comforts us in all our affliction,

so that we may be able to comfort those

who are in any affliction,

with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.’

(2 Corinthians 1.1)

 

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At home our family has an icon, known as the Icon of the Seven Sorrows of Mary.

 

Around the serene figure of Mary, the Blessed Mother of the Lord, there are seven swords, each representing a sorrow.

 

Her face, in its serenity, is suggestive of a woman who has seen affliction, and received comfort from ‘the Father of all mercies and God of all comfort’ of whom St Paul writes.

 

And, Paul continues: having received comfort in affliction, we ourselves are to comfort the afflicted in turn.

 

In the icon Mary’s face of maternal love reflects comfort received and comfort shown.

 

The Blessed Mother, Mary, certainly knew affliction.

 

Her seven sorrows begin with the prophecy we have just heard when the aged man Simeon speaks on the day Mary and Joseph present Jesus in the Temple when he is 40 days old (Luke 2:34-35).

 

The second sorrow is the flight of Mary and Joseph with their infant son to Egypt, as Herod seeks his life and kills all the little children in and around Bethlehem and Jerusalem (Matthew 2.13-21).

 

That sorrow is an echo of the life of Moses.

 

The third is the utter sense of loss Mary and Joseph experience when the 12 year old Jesus is missing in Jerusalem, eventually to be found in the Temple with the Teachers of the Law (Luke 2.41-50).

 

So, the first three are in Jesus’ infancy and are shared with Joseph.

 

The next four are in Jesus’ adulthood.

 

Sorrows four and five are in the midst of the crowds, as Mary sees Jesus carry his cross (John 19.17) to his execution and is then crucified (John 19.18-30): how alone she must have felt in a surging crowd baying for her Son’s blood.

 

Mary saw Jesus born now sees him die.

 

The film The Passion of the Christ, portrays Jesus stumbling whilst carrying the cross, and Mary has a flashback of Jesus as a little boy falling over, as little boys and girls do, and cutting his knee.

 

She scooped him up; how she wanted to now as he falls, once, twice, three times, already bloodied from the brutality of being whipped and scourged, stumbling under the weight of the Cross.

 

In the sixth and seventh sorrows Mary is with the intimate circle of disciples, who love her.

 

One of them, known as the Beloved Disciple, will take her into his own home; but her firstborn Son is dead.

 

She sees his dead, limp, lifeless body, in sorrow six, taken down from the cross (John 19.39-40).

 

And in the final sorrow her boy’s body is laid in a tomb (John 19.39-42.)

 

Those seven sorrows capture in an intense way the pains of motherhood and the cost of love.

 

Mother of affliction indeed.

 

And we see the anguish of Moses’ mother who, rather than see her son die in Pharaoh’s genocidal massacre of Hebrew boys, placed him in a basket amongst the rushes on the bank of the River Nile and trusted the God of all comfort in affliction.

 

Both mothers, Jochebed (cf Exodus 6.20, Numbers 26.59) and Mary - daughters of Israel - had to let go of their sons to enable the Lord to work his wonders through them.

 

The spiritual writer Esther de Waal captures this, saying that, ‘The loving is in the letting go’.

 

What a painful, haunting yet comforting phrase.

 

It is true that when we let go we love, because we are letting someone go into God’s hands, and we relinquish our control.

 

As we might say, children need a loving mother not a controlling smother.

 

Indeed, in what human relationship is that not true?

 

And their mothers having let them go, God raised up both sons: Moses to liberate the Hebrews from slavery to the Egyptians; Jesus to liberate all humanity from our slavery to sin.

 

And Jesus is, of course, greater than Moses (cf Hebrews 3.1-6): the Gospel of John tells us, ‘For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ’ (John 1.17).

 

It is on Jesus that we fix our sights in Lent.

 

Mothering Sunday converges with Refreshment Sunday as we journey towards the annual proclamation of the life giving Cross and saving Resurrection of Christ; the time when we know the comfort in affliction that flows, with maternal care, from the loving heart of God.

 

Thankfully there is also a tradition of the Seven Joys of Mary too (they’ll be for another time): joy and sorrow, tears and glory intermingle in Mary’s life as they surely do in our yours and mine and all mothers.

 

In that joy and sorry, in tears and glory Mary points us, rightly to her Divine Son, the Saviour.

 

 ‘Do whatever he tells you’ she says to the servants at the Wedding Feast at Cana (John 2.4).

 

They are to prepare abundant amounts of water which Christ will take and transform into the flowing wine of the kingdom, which to believers is the lifeblood that flows from his body on the Cross:

 

Glory be to Jesus,

who in bitter pains

poured for me the lifeblood

from his sacred veins.

 

This child is destined for the falling and rising of many in Israel.

 

Christ falls on his way to the cross, and falls into death. Having descended into the depths he is raised, bringing life, hope and comfort in his resurrection.

 

In the conviction of the resurrection of the Lord, St Paul writes, ‘Our hope for you is unshaken, for we know that as you share in our sufferings, you will also share in our comfort’. (2 Corinthians 1.7)

 

May we all, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, one in the Lord know His comfort in our afflictions and sorrow.

 

Getting our Foundations right

A sermon preached on Whitgift Founder’s Day, 21^st March 2025

 

Proverbs 3.1-12 My child, do not forget my teaching, but let your heart keep my commandments.

Matthew 7.24-29 He taught them as one having authority

 

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Build your house on rock, not on sand.

 

That seems pretty good advice if you’re building a house.

 

And it prompts us, as Jesus intends, to consider the foundations on which our own lives are built.

 

And, today, we reflect on what foundations Archbishop John Whitgift’s life was built, and the Foundation that exists bearing his name and seeking faithfully to carry out his legacy in our times.

 

I think it would be hard not to say that John Whitgift made the foundations of his life some of the principles outlined in our first reading from the Book of Proverbs - loyalty, faithfulness, trust and honour.

 

Today we might call them ‘values’.

 

John Whitgift clearly valued them, but more than that they shaped him in how he sought to live his life as a Christian.

 

John Whitgift had clear foundations in his life – what we might call a ‘Christian social vision’ - and his was a life that had to bear considerable turbulence and challenge, both political and ecclesiastical.

 

Whitgift was born in a time of great flux and change in England and Europe.

 

Does that sound familiar?

 

He was born around the year 1530.

 

Henry VIII was king and the social, political and religious upheavals of the Reformation of the Church were getting more and more powerful.

 

Henry VIII exploited the church and declared himself sovereign over it.

 

Henry’s son, Edward VI, pursued an undiluted Protestant agenda; Henry’s eldest daughter, Mary I, changed direction into restoring Catholicism; and Henry’s youngest daughter, Elizabeth, came to the throne seeking to bridge the extremes, not peering into men’s souls, but also making sure people were loyal to the Church as she understood it.

 

It was a bloody time: otherwise good people, on both sides of the divide, killed and were killed.

 

In that time young John had been growing up in Grimsby but, as Edward came to the throne in 1547, the gifted John was studying in Cambridge and soon became a Fellow of Peterhouse at the beginning of a stellar academic career.

 

The universities in those days, like today, were not immune from politics and John had to navigate the politics of his day, politics which could cost lives, not just reputations.

 

In 1560, with Elizabeth now on the throne, John was ordained into the Church.

 

In Elizabeth’s time the Church of England was split three ways, between those who thought reform had gone too far, and those who thought it hadn’t gone far enough, and those somewhere in between.

 

Elizabeth needed Bishop and Archbishops who could hold it all together, and she found that in John. He became Bishop of Worcester and later became Archbishop of Canterbury and helped shaped the Church and what is known as ‘the Elizabethan Settlement’ which, on the whole, brought people together and which John enforced.

 

The times he lived through saw seismic changes as the tectonic plates of church and society shifted.

 

And when tectonic plates shift, as all good students of our schools know, there are earthquakes, things shudder.

 

I sometimes find myself peering into building sites and it’s amazing to see just how deep foundations have to be dug. And the taller the building the deeper the foundations go.

 

So it must be hard to build foundations in places where there literally are earthquakes.

 

So as I was considering the seismic changes in John Whitgift’s lifetime, and those we all face, I also thought about how you build foundations in earthquake zones.

 

I am no engineer, so, I did a bit of research - academics close your ears - I went onto Wikipedia!

 

There I read about building in Japan which is hugely prone to earthquakes.

 

One of the key features of Japanese buildings is the use of ‘seismic isolation bearings’.

 

These bearings allow the building to move horizontally during an earthquake, reducing the stress on the structure and minimizing damage.

 

So today, as we remember and give thanks for our Founder, we have a chance to ask what our lives are built on: being built on rock, not on sand; with foundations that are deep and resilient, absorbing tumult and shock in a fast-changing world with old challenges presenting in new ways.

 

Economic shocks, social and political change would all be recognisable to John Whitgift.

 

And those challenges didn’t go away after his time: after all, Croydon, and the Whitgift Foundation, has faced the English Civil War, the Blitz, and the 1960s.

 

How we handle change and threat is the measure of our fidelity to the values of the passage of Proverbs I referred to earlier: loyalty, faithfulness, trust and honour.

 

It is with valuing those virtues that we face: the sadness that this is the last year that Old Palace School is part of this Foundation; the new challenges of how best to support carers as provision in the borough moves on to a new chapter; that Whitgift and Trinity have to handle the introduction of VAT on school fees; that residents face the challenges of longer lives with all that brings in financial, health and social care concerns.

 

And in all those adversities loyalty, faithfulness, trust and honour root us into the core of the Foundation, and John Whitgift’s vision, that of education for the young and care for older people.

 

It is remarkable in many ways that, with all John Whitgift’s preoccupation with exalted matters of church and state, he still sought to give the place - Croydon – that he had fallen in love with a legacy that sustains people here today.

 

I wonder, then, in the foundations on which you build your life, what will your legacy be?

 

I wouldn’t mind betting, ultimately, that if John Whitgift were in this pulpit today, not lying in his tomb over there, that he would say to us that the foundation of his life was his conviction that Jesus Christ was, and is, the authority in his life. He would remind us that with Christ nothing is impossible. He would say, I suspect, that whilst he was a bit ostentatious with his wealth in his life, care of the poor is more rewarding.

 

And as we look at his Christian, virtuous example, more words of Proverbs echo as we face the future:

Honour the Lord with your substance

   and with the first fruits of all your produce;

then your barns will be filled with plenty,

   and your vats will be bursting with wine.

 

May God bless us and this Foundation abundantly. May we continue to be inspired by our Founder’s legacy, as a man who built his life on the foundation of the rock that is Jesus Christ, his Lord and ours.

Call on the Name of the Lord and be saved

Deuteronomy 26.4-10 The confession of faith of the chosen people.

Romans 10.8-13 The confession of faith of believers in Christ.

Luke 4.1-13 ‘Jesus was led by the Spirit in the wilderness and tempted by the devil’.

 

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Today’s readings set the bearings for this holy season of Lent: holding fast to God and resisting temptation.

 

The first reading from the book of Deuteronomy gives a summary of the Exodus of the people of Israel from their slavery in Egypt, through deliverance by God, who brought them through the wilderness into a promised land flowing with milk and honey.

 

That maps out what we know as the Paschal Mystery, the movement from death to life, slavery to freedom, darkness to light.

 

We enter into that mystery through baptism, which is at the heart of how Easter becomes real in our lives, so that we know the spiritual deliverance from death to life, slavery to freedom, darkness to light.

 

St Paul, writing to the Christians of Rome, our second reading, reminds us that this deliverance is made possible because God raised Jesus Christ from the dead. The confession of faith, ‘that Jesus is Lord’ and that belief in one’s heart ‘that God raised Christ from the dead’ is our salvation.

 

And the final verse of each reading gives us the tools to navigate what Jesus faced in the temptations he underwent in the wilderness at the hands of the devil.

 

From the letter to the Romans, ‘everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.’ And from Deuteronomy, ‘worship before the LORD your God.’

 

Before we look into the gospel reading it’s worth reminding ourselves what the Church says about evil and more specifically about the devil.

 

First evil is not a thing in itself.

 

St Augustine argues that evil is the 'privation of good. ' (Enchiridion 3:11)

 

Evil is good that falls short; extreme evil is an absence of the good.

 

So, an evil action happens when the good in someone’s life retreats.

 

That means we cannot say that a person is evil, but rather that what they have done is evil.

 

In the Bible the devil is the name given to the absence of good. And the devil has a number of titles.

 

He’s the diabolos a Greek word from which we get the word ‘diabolical’.

 

Diabolos means the one who scatters, who divides. This is contrasted with the action of the Holy Spirit which unites, and binds together.

 

The good is the work of unity and drawing together, the diabolical pulls apart.

 

He’s Satan, a Hebrew word which means ‘adversary’, the one who is against us. This is contrasted with the paracletos a Greek word, a title of the holy Spirit, which means ‘advocate’, the one who speaks on our behalf.

 

As the scripture says ‘if God is for us, who can be against us?’ (Romans 8.31b)

 

Jesus also describes the devil as the ‘father of lies.’ (John 8.44)

 

Let’s go to the gospel reading.

 

Jesus, full of the Spirit, goes into the wilderness for forty days and forty nights.

 

So he is filled with the Holy Spirit, ‘the Lord and giver of life’ the Spirit that unites him to the Father in love.

 

He goes into the wilderness, from which the Israelites were delivered, to battle the deprivation of the good, and, as we know, he prevails.

 

The three temptations press this deprivation of the good.

 

In the first temptation the deprivation of food is a possible way in for the one who anti-Christ.

 

The devil knows where to press, how to push the bruise.

 

He says to the famished Jesus, ‘If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become bread.’

 

He is the Son of God and his sonship is revealed in his reply, resisting the food his body craves, to state that bread is not what sustains him ultimately: it is every word that comes from the mouth of God.

 

In the second temptation we see the great lie of the father of lies.

 

The devil shows Jesus all the earthly power anyone could possibly want.

 

‘To you I will give all this authority and their glory, for it has been delivered to me, and I give it to whom I will.’ (Luke 4.6)

 

There’s the lie.

 

The devil has been given nothing; the devil has nothing to offer, because the devil’s domain is the deprivation of good, not a thing in itself.

 

If the devil is given authority over anything it is certainly not by God.

 

We give the devil authority when we diminish the good: that’s when Satan enters in.

 

The gospel news is that the good is restored when our lives being flooded with God’s grace, when we remain faithful to the command:

 

‘You shall worship the Lord your God,
    and him only shall you serve.’ (Luke 4.8)

 

The third temptation tests the human desire for physical safety and God’s capacity to save.

 

But again, the devil is not given quarter.

 

The very name Jesus means ‘God saves.’

 

It is God who saves us, not our own merits, schemes or strategies: ‘You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.’”

 

And when the devil had ended every temptation, he departed from Jesus until an opportune time.

 

When is that ‘opportune time’?

 

Surely it is when the good is diminished or absent, for that is the devil’s opportunity.

 

Let us not then give the devil opportunity in our lives.

 

Let us hold to those words from the letter to the Romans, ‘everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.’

 

And from Deuteronomy, ‘worship before the LORD your God.’

 

May we continue through Lent resisting evil, showing the marks of a true Christian:

 

Let love be genuine. Abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good. Love one another with brotherly affection. Outdo one another in showing honour. Do not be slothful in zeal, be fervent in spirit, serve the Lord. Rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints and seek to show hospitality. (Romans 12.9-13)