Canter Bridge

By the time Jesus asks the woman famously ‘caught in the act of adultery’ about her accusers, they are nowhere to be seen. ‘Where are they?, he probes. ‘Does no one accuse you?’

Her answer is poignantly brief and plausibly full of the brief intimacy of shared wonder

No one, sir.

Jesus appears to anticipate the shift of moral guardianship onto his shoulders.

Neither do I accuse you. Go and sin no more.

It is one of the gospels’ finest moments. The anonymous woman—the tradition has energetically tried to name her—goes off to a life of we know not what. There are no metrics tracking moral transformation, no judgment regarding the long-term effectiveness of Jesus’ rogue action. The woman described only by her sin is not brought back for periodic checkups and revision of treatment protocols.

She is merely dismissed boldly to do as Jesus has ordered her to do. It is a dangerous way to deal with sinners.

Yet there is more. She is renamed. No longer is she the woman caught in adultery. She is now the woman freed of accusation. The careful reader will note the weight of this reconfiguring of the woman’s identity. From this point forward, she is not defined by her sin. She is, rather, a woman empowered by the experience of having not been condemned by the man whom the Gospel of John portrays as the most qualified to render such condemnation. The woman caught in adultery is now the woman uncondemned.

We miss the point of this delectable vignette if we assume that Jesus has simply relaxed the moral demands incumbent upon Jewish people at the time or that his editors have merely taught us that such things don’t matter as much as religious men used to suppose.

To the contrary, Jesus’ last word is to recognize her sin and to tell her to leave it behind her, presumably in the dust upon which Jesus has sketched his unrecorded words, the same dust into which her accusers’ moral indignation has drained.

Yet he has separated this daughter of Israel—words he is recorded to have used elsewhere—from her sin. She is no longer defined by it. She is in fact in control of it.

He has recognized this human being and in the doing has elevated and empowered her. He has directed her to shake off her sin like a nasty clump of mud that clings to a man’s ankle but is no more a part of him than the wet patch back there from which it came.

There is no relaxation of demands here, no comfortable denial of righteousness and its incessant demand upon people whose destiny has become intertwined with the life of Jesus’ Father.

In its stead, there is a renaming, a looking in the eye, a chance to take dominion over one’s conduct in the empowering light of forgiveness. A woman unchained.