April 5, 2025
Guilt. How we use it against each other….which Sunday’s Gospel powerfully points out. Here’s a short reflection:
Firing squad? Really? I was totally puzzled when Brad Sigmon chose to die by this method in South Carolina about a month ago. It had been 14 years since the last person was executed by firing squad. He argued that the other methods the state might use seemed worse to him, both the electric chair and injection. But I suspect he had another motive.
As a Christian, Brad Sigmon argued against killing out of revenge, “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,” in the classic phrasing of the Old Testament. My sense was that he deliberately wanted to die in a repulsive way to point out how repulsive our attitudes are in terms of punishing people. He saw little need to disguise something gruesome behind technological messages.
In the powerful Gospel we have today, from the Gospel of John, it is pretty clear that Jesus wanted to make some direct points about how people were condemned in his day. Just reflecting on how the scene was set up shows how outrageous the situation is. We see this woman, virtually dragged before Jesus by a group of men, asking Jesus to condemn her to death by being stoned.
Isn’t it too easy, Jesus points out, to make someone a scapegoat? We always want to project the sin we have onto some other person or some other group; and we use that projection to hide from the truth of our own lives. “Let the one without sin throw the first stone,” Jesus says. He forces the crowd to look at its multiple sins instead of looking at the woman they wanted to shame.
Guilt is a dangerous game to play. It’s so easy for us to insinuate the guilt of someone else. It’s so easy for us stereotype a group as evil. These groups might seem different from us because of their race, their language, or their social standing. But the more I draw attention toward them the more I can hope that no one is watching me.
But of course we are always being watched, particularly by a God who sees behind every lie we tell ourselves, who sees the dirt we have long tried to hide. Our ultimate judge is not what others think of us, or make up about us; our ultimate judge is God. And Jesus teaches us today that God has one standard of judgment: did we show the love, mercy and compassion that God has shown us? Or did we presume we could take God’s place on the judgment seat?
The first Reading from Isaiah has God telling us that God is doing something new. God is calling us beyond the revenge and scapegoating that we so often fall into, attitudes that trap us into illusions about ourselves. Before we look at others ready to condemn, we need to look at God and how God offers to treat us. After all, at Easter, the great feast for which we are preparing, God has shown us the greatest compassion by raising his Son, so grossly and unjustly accused, from the dead. This is how God offers true life to all of us.
In the Carolina execution, three men volunteered to pull the trigger, prison guards who probably had their own attitudes toward prisoners. But all of us have had people we would like to have shot. This Sunday’s readings hold out the hope that someday mercy might loom so large in our lives that it would drive out the petty vengeance we often long to show.