Lay down your stones
Fiducia Supplicans and the Bible.
A biblical scholar compares the Vatican’s cautious opening to couples in relationships disapproved of by the Church to the expansive generosity Jesus showed to those the religious leaders of his day considered sexual sinners.
The reaction to Fiducia Supplicans – which permits “pastoral blessings” (but not liturgical blessings) of couples in irregular or same-sex unions (but not of the unions themselves) – has revealed levels of Catholic homophobia that are a scandal. A shocking number of bishops’ conferences and dioceses have prohibited or suspended the application of the document in their territory, and I am alarmed not just by what is being said by those opposed to it, but by some of those defending it.
Fernando Morales LC, for example, after noting – correctly – that it is “same doctrine, new attitude”, felt it necessary to denounce homosexual acts as “highly self-destructive”, often leading to “illnesses, depressions, addictions”, and “sinful because they are the cause of profound evils for those that practise them”. How can the Church have any hope of being respected as a moral voice when such sentiments are proclaimed in its name?
Jesus says nothing about homosexual acts, and it is impossible to imagine him doing so. Everything he teaches about sin is focused on attitudes rather than on acts. “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matthew 5.27-28). This is not to say that Jesus thought there were no sexual sins, but his priority was to urge his disciples to love people and he attacked legalism. He had a dire warning for the chief priests: “The prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you” (Matthew 21:31). Might he say in our day to those bishops so quick to judge others as sinners: “LGBT people are going into the kingdom of heaven ahead of you”?
Jesus not only refused to condemn those whom society considered sexual sinners but sometimes went out of his way to honour them. The first person favoured with hearing from Jesus’ lips that he was the Messiah was a woman in an irregular union, who had had five male partners and was now on her sixth (John 4:18). She went off to invite her townspeople to come and meet this potential Messiah, and so became the first apostle, the first person to be sent out with the good news.
The woman whom Luke identifies as a “sinner”, who broke into a dinner party and covered Jesus’ feet with kisses and perfume in an embarrassing show of sensuous emotion, was affirmed by him and compared favourably with the Pharisee hosting the meal. “Your sins are forgiven,” he says to her, but he does not specify what her sins are; he leaves that interpretation up to her. In the parallel anointing story in Matthew and Mark, Jesus places this woman on the highest possible pedestal: “Wherever the Gospel is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her” (Mark 14:9).
In its new declaration and the “clarification” issued last week the Vatican is walking on eggshells. We are told that the pastoral blessing of couples in irregular unions “lasts 10 or 15 seconds”; it might not even include the word “bless”; it cannot be performed with “any clothing, gestures or words that are proper to a wedding”; and it “must not take place in a prominent place within a sacred building, or in front of an altar, as this would cause confusion”. But confusion is exactly what Jesus caused by the way he responded to those regarded as sexual sinners, and indeed by his response to those considered traitors because they collected taxes on behalf of the Roman Empire.
There is an even more striking example of how the Church has tried to suppress the example of Jesus in the story from the beginning of John 8, which is usually titled “The Woman Taken in Adultery”, though I call it “The Woman Saved from Stoning”. It ends with Jesus saying to the woman: “Neither do I condemn you. Go your way, and from now on do not sin again.” As with the anointing story, Jesus does not specify what her sins are: she will know that. I have spoken of “those regarded as sexual sinners”, rather than just “sexual sinners”, to leave open the question of the sin involved.
In cases of women stoned to death for adultery in our day we hear that sometimes they had been forced into a marriage against their will, so the marriage would not be valid anyway, or that there is a set-up of witnesses so that a man can get rid of a wife. Maybe Jesus had insight into the particular circumstances, but the point is not that he freed the woman because he knew she was innocent, but rather that he freed her on the principle “Do not judge” (Matthew 7:1). Many Catholics today question whether homosexual acts are “intrinsically disordered”, but irrespective of one’s views on that, the Catechism denounces “every sign of unjust discrimination” against homosexuals, and that should include the refusal of a pastoral blessing just because the people asking for it are gay or lesbian.
Many scholars believe the story of the woman saved from stoning was not originally written by the fourth evangelist. C.H. Dodd in his 1953 commentary opted to omit it “as being no part of the original text of this Gospel” and so did Rudolph Bultmann for the same reason in his 1964 commentary. Some Bibles place it in brackets (e.g. the New Revised Standard Version and the English Standard Version); others place it at the end of John’s Gospel (e.g. The New English Bible); some omit it altogether. It contains words and phrases not found elsewhere in John but only in the other gospels: “the Mount of Olives”, “early in the morning”, “all the people”, “the scribes” and “condemned”. On the other hand, it includes a phrase that has been called “virtually a Johannine signature”: “They said this to test him” (John 8:6), which is a virtual replica of “He said this to test him” (John 6:6). It is also argued that most of the early Greek manuscripts omit the story, and when it does appear it is sometimes in another place, either after John 7:36 or at the end of John, or after Luke 21:38. The Greek fathers, such as Origen, Cyril and Clement of Alexandria, do not mention it in their commentaries. But Jerome, who made the Latin “Vulgate” translation of the gospels, wrote that “the story of the adulterous woman who was accused before the Lord” is found “in the Gospel according to John in many manuscripts, both Greek and Latin”, so he included it.
A minority view put forward by Zane C. Hodges is that internal textual evidence is in favour of it having been written by the fourth evangelist, and for precisely that position in the text. I follow him on this, for in the subsequent dispute with the scribes and Pharisees that occupies the rest of chapter 8 it seems to me that it is dotted with references to what has just taken place. Jesus says he judges no one, but those he sets free are free indeed; and he accuses his opponents of having the devil as their father, who “was a murderer from the beginning”. They taunt him with implicit references to the rumour that he was not the biological child of Joseph: “Where is your father?” they say, and soon after: “We are not illegitimate children.” The hinted message is that if Jesus was born of adultery himself, no wonder he wants to defend an adulteress.
Finally, to complete the association between Jesus and adultery: “They picked up stones to throw at him” (John 8:59), just as they had earlier threatened to throw stones at the woman. Far from the story sitting awkwardly in its place in chapter 8, the context gives theological and dramatic depth to the whole chapter. Jesus has taken our sins and our punishment upon himself.
Why then was the story so often omitted in the early manuscripts? Augustine gives us the answer quite explicitly. It was deliberately omitted because some people did not accept its teaching: “Certain persons of little faith, or rather enemies of the true faith, fearing, I suppose, lest their wives should be given impunity in sinning, removed from their manuscripts the Lord’s act of forgiveness toward the adulteress, as if he who had said, Sin no more, had granted permission to sin” (De Adulterinis Conjugiis, 2.6-7).
If we are shocked by this shameless attempt to edit the Gospel to remove parts of Jesus’ teaching that some in the Church did not like, we may be equally scandalised to read that John Calvin reacted to the story in a not dissimilar way more than a millennium later. He criticised those “who infer from this that adultery ought not be punished with death”, and claimed that then “the door will be thrown open for any kind of treachery, and for poisoning, and murder, and robbery”. The “popish theology” that said that “adulterers are freed from punishment” would “pollute with unbridled lust almost every marriage-bed”.
For Catholics, the canon of the Scriptures is determined by the Vulgate text, not by what some biblical critics argue might have been the source of each story. So it is thanks to Jerome that we still have this beautiful and important story. The desire to edit it out comes from the same stable as the blindness that has ignored for centuries the privileges Jesus heaped on the Samaritan woman and the anointing woman.
We may fail to notice Jesus’ example not to judge or condemn those accused of sexual sins but rather to attend to the good they are doing, but as Catholics we cannot excise these stories from our bibles. Beside the expansive generosity of Jesus, the Vatican’s new “blessing” seems faint-hearted and measly.
Margaret Hebblethwaite is writing a book about the women in the gospels.
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