Blame is Bondage
Shame and forgiveness in John 8:1-11
How do you define forgiveness?
Our passage today from the Gospel of John will be a familiar one for many of you. A woman is caught in adultery, and the Pharisees, eager for any excuse to accuse that rabble-rouser Jesus, are quick to pounce on her and present her for his judgment. But as usual, Jesus doesn’t play to their script. Instead of condemning the woman, he invites the Pharisees to condemn her – if they can honestly say they themselves are innocent.
The word ‘forgiveness’ doesn’t appear in this Scripture passage. It would be very easy to miss that forgiveness is what’s happening. But I’m going to read it again, and I want you to think about who seems to be forgiving who, here, and for what.
“Now very early in the morning, [Jesus] went to the temple again, and all the people came to him. He sat down and taught them. The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand in the middle, and they said to him, “Teacher, this woman was caught in adultery, in the very act. Now in our law, Moses commanded us to stone such women. What then do you say?” They said this to test him, so that they might have something to accuse him of.
But Jesus stooped down and wrote on the ground with his finger. When they kept on asking him, he looked up and said to them, “Whoever is sinless among you can throw the first stone at her.” Again he stooped down and wrote on the ground with his finger.
Now when they heard this, they began to drift away one at a time, starting with the older ones, until Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him. Jesus stood up and said to her, “Woman, where are your accusers? Did no one condemn you?”
She said, “No one, Lord.”
Then Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you. Go, and from now on, sin no more.”
Now, the obvious conclusion that many of us will have jumped to is that Jesus is forgiving the woman for her life of sin. But you’ll notice it doesn’t actually say that.
Jesus often tells people that their sins are forgiven them… when he’s healingsomeone. Isn’t that interesting? Someone is blind, or they can’t walk, and Jesus’ solution is to forgive them their sins. Is it a sin to be ill?
And yet this woman, who was caught outright in a major break with Jewish law – he doesn’t tell her she’s forgiven. He instructs her not to sin again, but he doesn’t explicitly forgive what she’s already done. He refuses to condemn her in the first place.
Christian forgiveness is not about moral absolution. It’s about liberating us from the cycle of blame and shame that kills our souls and keeps us trapped in perpetual interpersonal violence. Jesus shows us a forgiveness that doesn’t cover up guilt but actually breathes new life into those who are burdened.
Most of us probably inherited a moral picture of forgiveness. First someone does something bad, and then they need to be forgiven for it. It’s up to the good people, the people around the offender, to let them off the hook for whatever it was they did.
The problem is that this view of forgiveness is rooted in morality. It starts with a moral division of the ‘bad guy’ from the ‘good people’, which is what we see the Pharisees doing here when they bring this woman before Jesus. They’re the good guys; she’s the offender. She’s to blame for doing something wrong, and she must be cast out.
Any time something is causing a division between people instead of a connection between people, we should be very, very suspicious about the powers at work.
The problem with a forgiveness based in morality is that God is not in the business of morality.
Does that sound shocking?
God is not in the business of morality. God is in the business of aliveness. Life, and life abundant. Growth, vitality, possibility, these are God’s business. Morality is an important social construct insofar as it helps us humans to create maximum aliveness for maximum creatures. It’s not irrelevant to the equation; we’re not here to chuck out the rules. But the rules should always be in service to the aliveness. God is in the business of eternal things, and morality is not eternal. It is contextual. Would anybody in this room think it appropriate to stone this poor woman to death for having an affair? No? Because morality has changed over the years. Thank God!
So who is doing the forgiving, here, if it isn’t Jesus?
Here’s a hint: who is doing the blaming? ‘Cause it’s not God.
The Pharisees have bound this woman. They have stuffed her in a cage labeled ‘Adulteress’. They have ceased to see her as a human being and have reduced her to one word: bad. She’s not a person, she’s a problem, and as such she can be used as a pawn in their campaign against Christ.
There’s an academic term for what’s happening in this passage. René Girard called it “the Scapegoat Mechanism” and anthropologically, it lies at the foundation of every human civilization on Planet Earth. There’s no culture that doesn’t do it. For the entirety of our evolution to date, humans have learned to create a false sense of peace by ganging up against a scapegoat and kicking them out.
This does create a kind of togetherness, because then we get to pat one another on the back and say, “Hooray! We got the right bad guy, and the proof is that now we all get along!!” We fail to see the part where it’s the act of collectively exiling someone that actually created the sense of peace, and that very shortly, we’re going to fall right back into rivalry with one another and have to sacrifice someone else to restore order.
This is what makes it a false peace: we have to keep doing it. It’s not the eternal peace and eternal life of God. We have to keep accusing people, feeding them to the blame machine.
Whenever we are pointing a finger at someone in condemnation, we are scapegoating.
It is the life of God we kill when we condemn.
We are heading into the teeth of a particularly fraught election season right now. If you make it through the next three months without ever pointing a finger in blame, I will personally nominate you for sainthood in the Catholic Church, because that might be a miracle.
It’s human to do this.
But we are all part of one another. Part of one Body – the Body of Christ. If I am blaming and exiling you, then I am by definition blaming and exiling a part of myself. We are not separate creatures. We are individuals within a collective human organism. Anything I can’t love in you is something I can’t love in myself. I am divided against myself. Anything I can’t forgive in you is something I can’t forgive in myself – and there’s our bind. There’s where our Pharisees are stuck.
Because they haven’t only bound this woman with their blame. They’ve bound themselves. If they can’t forgive her for what she’s done, they can’t forgive themselves for what they’ve done, and they will spend their entire lives running from it and trying to justify themselves. This is what Jesus creates space for them to realize when he invites them to cast stones at her. (This might be why the older Pharisees, who’ve had more time to make mistakes, start to get the picture first!)
Blame is not accountability. Christ holds me accountable – he stands beside me and says, “Hmm, yep. Missed the mark there. How can I help you do better next time?” But he never blames. He never stands at a remove and points a finger and tells me I’m bad. If that’s the voice you hear when you read the Bible, then the Devil’s quoting Scripture.
Blame is not accountability. Blame is the flip side of shame. Blame is what we do to avoid experiencing shame ourselves. It’s too painful to look at my own responsibility, my own complicity, so I point the finger elsewhere and I put someone else in the place of shame to avoid having to go there myself. I keep that person trapped behind that label, and I refuse to see them or myself clearly.
This is what the Pharisees are doing to this woman – they are publicly blaming and shaming her. And the result, if they get their way, is death. She dies. End of story.
It is the life of God we kill when we condemn.
I’m going to make a pretty radical assertion here and I’m hoping you will take this and wrestle with it in your own life, rather than taking it as a given just because I’m standing up here when I say it.
The ultimate enemy of life in human beings is not physical death. I think it’s shame.
Death only happens to most of us one time. All it is is a transition into a different form of aliveness. The molecules that make up “me” are no less alive as soil and earthworms and bacteria than they are as a human body. I might not maintain the same conscious awareness, we can’t know what happens to that after the body decomposes. But my component atoms are still participating in the cycle of life. That hasn’t stopped.
Shame kills us over and over and over again. I might be breathing, my heart might be beating, but I am not participating in the cycle of life. After all, what do I do when I’m feeling ashamed? I hide. I disconnect. I numb out, because it hurts. I avoid myself, I avoid my relationships.
I blame.
Remember what happens in the Garden of Eden? The serpent comes along and makes Eve feel deficient for her lack of wisdom, so that she tries to fix herself by eating an apple from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. I kind of think that tree should be called the Tree of Moral Judgment because that’s what leads her to label herself “bad” — shame. She and Adam then hide from God because they’re ashamed of their perceived badness. And when God comes along and asks Adam and Eve what the heck, what’s their response? Adam blames Eve. Eve blames the serpent. They can’t take ownership of their own actions; it’s too painful to feel that shame. They have to point the finger at someone else. And so do the Pharisees. And so do we.
Theologian James Alison says, “If you really hate someone, forgive them their sins but refuse to deal with their shame.”
Tell them they’re okay, but leave them stewing in the toxic poison that’s eating them from the inside out. That’s not what I would call okay!
So what does forgiveness have to do with any of this?
Many of you know that I’ve had an experience very like that of the woman in our passage. Five years ago, my front door was kicked in by detectives from Homeland Security, and my partner of twelve years went to prison because he’d been collecting and distributing child pornography out of our apartment while I was at work every day. And for completely legitimate reasons, the police initially thought I was involved in this. Of course they had to investigate me. Children’s lives were at stake!
I wasn’t involved, and the investigation eventually declined to charge me with anything, but the initial police report made me sound preeeeeeetty darn sketchy. And somebody, who believed they were doing the right thing and protecting their community, took that police report and put it on Facebook, where it promptly went viral just like everything ugly does.
As a result, thousands of people – maybe hundreds of thousands – believe that I am a pedophile. Or at the very least, that I enabled one. There’s not a darn thing I can say or do that will ever convince any of them otherwise. There were death threats; my home address was published. I lived in daily fear for my life for a solid 18 months or so. COVID was background noise, for me.
You want to talk about the place of shame, friends?
I am intimately familiar.
I had wonderful humans in my life who wanted to forgive me for failing to see what’d been happening right under my nose. But I couldn’t receive the forgiveness they were extending. I had internalized the blame of my community. There was forever a voice in the back of my mind saying, “Yeah, but if you really knew everything, you wouldn’t say that. You wouldn’t forgive me.”
There is no way around that voice, not for humans. It’s hell. Actual and literal.
It was in that stew of toxic shame that I walked into a service at Bellevue First. I wasn’t there for religion; I just wanted some familiar faces to do social justice projects with. I felt like trash about my life and thought maybe giving back to my community might help a little. That was it.
I was completely unprepared to hear Christ speaking to my soul from the front of that room.
And like the woman accused by the Pharisees, he didn’t forgive me outright. He didn’t tell me I hadn’t done anything wrong. I wouldn’t have believed him, if he’d said that – I knew that, whether the law considered me guilty or not, I had not behaved according to my own values. So I actually trusted Jesus more because he didn’t try to tell me I was off the hook for screwing up. I can imagine that this woman, caught in her act of adultery, may have felt similarly.
What I did hear Jesus say was that he didn’t condemn me. And unlike human beings, he did know everything I’d ever done. That voice of shame in my head had no traction on him. I heard him say punishment was never the point, that I was already punishing myself more than anything God could do to me. All he wanted to do was give me a hand up out of hell. All he wanted to do was free me from that shame. All he wanted to do was love me.
What is there to say to that, but ‘yes’?
The forgiveness of Christ is not a moral absolution. It is a steadfast refusal to condemn.
But that’s Christ. The Holy One. The Son of God. What about the rest of us mere mortals who are unlikely to make it through this day, let alone the rest of our lives, without condemning anyone?
What about those of us who already have some condemnation going? How do we forgive?
If we were to map a traditional understanding of moral forgiveness onto this scene, we’d probably conclude something like, “Well, the Pharisees were the ones who did something bad to this poor woman by using and shaming her, so it’s up to her to be like Christ and forgive them for being jerks.” It’s possible. That happens. But it sure puts a lot of weight and obligation on the shoulders of someone who’s been harmed. And you’ll notice it’s only a solution after someone has been harmed.
What I want to suggest is that in fact it’s the Pharisees who are doing the forgiving, in this passage, because they are the ones who are ceasing to harm. They have let go of their blame. She doesn’t have to forgive them for condemning her if they release her from their condemnation.
By inviting them to reflect on their own mistakes, Jesus asks these Pharisees to remember the reality that God has already released them from condemnation for their sins. And because they’ve been released, they are able to turn around and release her from their own condemnation.
This woman gets to keep her life because they release her from the bondage of their blame.
How different might my life have looked, if others had released me from condemnation?
How different might the Crucifixion have looked, if the Pharisees had been able to release Jesus from their condemnation?
It is the life of God we kill when we condemn.
Friends, who are you holding in bondage?
Who are you pointing a finger at and blaming? Who are you standing at a distance from, instead of standing beside them and asking, “How can I help you do better?” Who are you labeling “bad”, and what part of yourself have you condemned with that judgment?
Every single one of us is the villain in somebody’s story.
This week, I challenge you to practice forgiveness in a new way. Don’t ask who is guilty. Ask who needs liberation. Who is trapped? Who is shamed? Who is being cast out? We are free to stop blaming others, because Christ doesn’t blame or shame us. You are not defined by your worst day, you are defined by unconditional love. Imagine the transformation we could see — in our lives, in our communities — if we embraced our power to stop blaming and start forgiving.
Who can you set free this week?
Originally delivered as a guest sermon at St. Peter’s UMC in Bellevue, WA on September 1, 2024. Particular gratitude to Andrew McCrae of Mimesis at the Movies for questions and inspiration that helped alchemize this work.
If you are struggling to release your grip on condemnation, I highly recommend The Work of Byron Katie as a tool that can help.