The irony of a vulnerable woman circled by hostile men with rocks at their feet or in their hands; the contrast of soft flesh and tears of terror, with lumps of hard igneous missiles lying in the dry dusty heat; the tragedy of a woman reduced to a case study of man managed Holy Law (the gender is not generic but specific – men were the interpreters of the Law) while they tried to trap and damage one whose whole life was a fulfilling of that law; and yes, that film director's dream of an image of the self-possessed nonchalance of the lead man, tracing something in the sand without saying a word.
In conversation with a good friend yesterday about that displaced but not misplaced Gospel story of the woman taken in adultery. It comes at the start of John chapter 8 and if read there (rather than in the further displaced position of bottom of the page in small type) then it comes immediately before Jesus' outrageous declaration, "I am the Light of the World". Whoever placed it there made one of the great interpretive text critical decisions in the entire formation process of an early church cherishing its foundation documents.
This is one of the great scandalous stories in a Gospel full of them; this is subversion of power personified in the casual therefore unmistakable authority of one who will look power in the face and die rather than let it win; this is the story of a man and a woman in which neither man nor woman get each other and instead the exposed woman is clothed with dignity, mercy and love, and the departing men are stripped naked of their self righteous postures and sent away judged by their own departure and closed to the realities of the love and mercy that lies at the beating centre of the faith they represent.
It is a story in which the Light of the World blazes with love and the shadow of each person's own sins are seen to fall on the ground behind those who dare stand before the Light and question its truth. As to what Jesus wrote, or doodled, or drew? We'll never know – commentators guess and the possibilities are richly ambiguous. You does your exegesis and you takes your pick – my own modest suggestion, entirely speculative textually, but in the person of Jesus replete with internal probability, is that the phrase 'I desire mercy and not sacrifice' was doodled the first time – and when there was no response and he stood holding the stone and daring them to enact their claimed sinlessness, he knelt and doodled again. And my mind goes to those searing searching words in the Sermon on the Mount about adultery starting in the heart…and he who is without sin becomes a much harder case for men to prove of themselves. Whatever he wrote the second time - they scarpered!
The painting is by Titian and is in the Kelvingrove Art Gallery in Glasgow.
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