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Daily Scripture

In You, O Lord, Justice and Mercy Meet

Today’s gospel reading triggered off in my memory the number of times I have jumped the gun by passing judgment on someone before knowing all the facts — the soft data as well as the hard data. It’s clear to me now that prejudice and bias covered up by pride have a great deal to do with this jump; our comrades can do no wrong; our foes can do no right! Of course, it’s easy to meet out mercy to those we like and easier to meet out justice to those we don’t like.

The words of Isaiah introduce the theme of mercy and pave the way for the encounter of Jesus with the adulterous woman recorded in the gospel of John. The people of Israel had prostituted themselves if not in truth, at least metaphorically. God had espoused himself to them, for better or worse for richer or poorer forever. It was an irrevocable covenant that remains to this day. The people of Israel to whom Isaiah addressed these words abandoned their God and aligned themselves with foreign powers for political and economic gain. In effect, they entered an adulterous alliance and were literally carried away to a foreign land by their greed and lust for power.

In the name of their God, a disciple of Isaiah writing in his name and style reminds them of the great exodus when God led the people out of Egypt through the Red Sea into the Land of Canaan, the land they called home for centuries. In words similar to these, the prophet declares, “You think that was great? Forget about it; you ain’t seen noth’in yet! I’m about to do something even more spectacular. I’ll pave a way through the wilderness and bring you home again. I will forgive your unfaithfulness and forget your affair. Your misery will meet mercy and you will be saved.”

It has been said that pride is the worst of all sins because it distorts the truth of who we are. In fact, pride is a lie. But more than this it is a distortion of who God is. Recall that the sin of Adam and Eve was not that they wanted to be like God but that they did not recognize that they were already like God — made in God’s image and likeness.

There was another encounter taking place in John’s story beyond that of the meeting between Jesus and the woman. It was between Jesus and the woman’s accusers. In was in this encounter that justice was enjoined to the ‘trial’. “Let the one who is without sin be the first to cast the stone!” Their pride blinded them to their own sins. Jesus exposed their hypocrisy as his mercy engulfed the sinful woman.

Was he being soft on sin? Hardly. “Go now”, he said to the woman “and avoid this sin.” Might we not rightly assume that this initiative of mercy effected a dramatic change in her life? God’s saving grace was fully manifested in Jesus. Oddly enough, the same mercy resulted in the hardening of her accusers. They drifted away one by one from the eldest to the youngest but they sought another opportunity to trick him into mercy mending.

John’s story about the woman caught in the act of adultery revealed the depth to which Jesus extended himself to the sinner. “In you, O Lord, justice and mercy meet! [Psalm 85] or in the words of St. Augustine, “Misery meets mercy” in the person of Jesus.

Lent is about opening ourselves up to the saving grace of God but repentance is not something we do. It is allowing the forgiving power of God to touch our life, indeed, to engulf us and point us in a new direction. It’s about God empowering us to goodness and about our initiating a new pattern of life.

Lent is also about dropping stones and the acceptance of the humanity of others, despite their sins and failures. It is about entrusting others and ourselves to the tender mercy of God. More than that, it is about allowing ourselves to become conduits of God’s mercy and saving grace—helping others to find their way out of the wilderness of failure, sin and rejection.

“To err is human; to forgive is divine.”

At the same time, to forgive is not so much an act of the will as a disposition of the heart and in many situations, the conclusion of a very long process. We dare not be presumptuous or simplistic about it.

Forgiveness does not absolve the sinner from taking responsibility for the sin or from its consequences. Thus the mantra, “There is no forgiveness without justice, no justice without truth, no truth without full accountability.”

Here is the story that a rabbi colleague shared with me many years ago. A man went into the temple for the observance of Yom Kippur, which is the Jewish observance of atonement. As he entered the Temple, he noticed all his sins were listed on the board at the entrance. He tried to erase them but he was unable to do so. Then he went inside to participate in the penitential service. As he left the temple, he attempted once more to erase his sins but again was unable to do so. He departed and set about making amends for his sins and then returned to the temple. Lo and behold, his sins had disappeared.

This story is akin to the teaching of Jesus, “When you are bringing your gift to the altar and recall that your brother or sister has something against you, go first to be reconciled and then return with your gift.”

The Scriptures set the tone not only for our Lenten journey but also for our life long journey. Our destiny is not Jerusalem the earthly city but Jerusalem the heavenly city. Mercy is our mission but we must first pass through the gateway of justice and truth. In you O Lord, justice and mercy meet and when they do, reconciliation is complete.

From where Joan stands

Wednesday May 30, 2007

Joan Chittister is a Benedictine from Eire PA who has been known to ruffle the feathers of more than one ecclesiastic, politician or random person in the pew. Many of us consider her a prophet of sorts. Others condemn her outright as a nuisance at best or a troublemaker at worst. I suppose the latter is proof of her prophetic role. That’s the impact prophets have on many of us and even those of us who may be ‘shaken’ or at least provoked by her pronouncements can’t help but react—pro or con. Shall we agree that at least she makes us think? and even examine our consciences? Okay. I’ll settle for that. So, in the words of the ancient prophet, “Okay folks, ‘Listen’ up!” Father Lasch

All right, now we’ve seen it with our own eyes. So now what?
The picture of a small girl, naked and screaming, running down a dirt road in Vietnam covered with U.S. napalm all over her tiny body galvanized this country against the Vietnam War. For the first time, we could see exactly what was happening there, exactly to what lows the God of War had taken us.

After that picture ran in every newspaper in the country, it became even more difficult to excuse that war on the grounds of our political ideals. It became all the more difficult to go on driveling about the glorious service we were doing for the people there. It became all the more impossible to go on congratulating ourselves for what we were doing for the simple people of another country. It became impossible to applaud ourselves for the great sacrifices we were making to destroy that country.

The poetry of war had been particularized in all its horror, in all its excess, in all its bloody sinfulness in one tiny little girl.
Now we have another picture to deal with.

This girl is 17. She is being stoned to death, half-naked, by the men of an Iraqi village for fraternizing with a boy from another religion. And all the while it is happening other men look on cheering and take pictures of the carnage with their mobile phones. The police stand by and do nothing while other men disrobe and dishonor a woman for the sake, they say, of restoring their own.

By the end of the television news report, the girl is not writhing anymore. She is dead. And not one man did one thing to stop it.

People watched speechless at the sight. But not all.

Instead, women everywhere are standing up, speaking out, screaming “Stop!”

The only problem is that they have been shouting that for years: Stop looking the other way when we’re beaten or raped. Stop paying us less for the work we do as well, or better, than you do. Stop leaving us out of your deliberations about our lives. Stop telling us what our relationship with God is supposed to be and start asking us to tell you what it is. And now, stop murdering us for your pleasure, for your sense of proprietorship, for your honor and, finally, finally, recognize our own.

Yanar Mohammed, president of the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq (OWFI), in an interview with Women’s Human Rights Net highlighted the effects of this war on women (whrnet.org/docs/interview-yanar-0603.html).
The list is a long one: They are homeless, alone, destitute, raped, beaten and inmates of refugee camps as dangerous as the streets.

Most of all, they are prey.

Mohammed, in a CNN interview, May 19, 2007, made two points no U.S. citizen wants to hear.

First, she said, the number of honor killings in Iraq have increased by the hundreds since the invasion.

Second, she went on, 10 years ago, long before the country was “freed,” honor killings did not exist.

Pressed by the CNN reporter to explain the difference, Mohammed was short and to the point: “Someone came in from the outside and gave us “democracy,” she said. The problem, she went on, is that the new democracy became Islamic—not secular.

Now, she reports, men come to a house, bang on the door, say “This is a whorehouse” and murder all the women there. … It is sectarianism hiding behind religion.”

The situation is even worse than that, however. With the change in the Iraqi Constitution, articles that protected the rights of women were eliminated. Now discrimination against women is, indeed, “honorable,” is “religious,” is legal.
In the new constitution, she says: “Islamic Sharia was considered the base source of legislation. This automatically aborted decades of feminist struggles in Iraq. It was an enormous setback in women’s status and made Iraq into a country ruled mostly by religion. With the current government, the resulting family law will be one that legalizes polygamy, disciplining of women, stoning of adulteresses and sexual apartheid. The first results were clear in the recent days, when the current Al Jaafari’s government passed a resolution of segregating sexes in the universities and colleges.

The temptation, of course, is to say something like, “You know how those people are” or “What kind of a religion is that?”

But not so fast:

Not too many years ago, in our own country, when high school girls became pregnant, they were not permitted to graduate from our high schools. The boys who impregnated them, on the other hand, walked proudly across the stages to pick up their diplomas. We never said a word. That had something to do with honor, too. His, of course, not hers.
That was a kind of stoning, too.

Not too many years ago, those same boys walked away from the baby, no proof of paternity, no financial obligations attached, while the woman and the child went on in poverty. In fact, in some states today, men can still walk away from obligations that are not being enforced.

That is a kind of stoning, too.

And in our time, women can get jobs but, unlike women in many other countries, have no access to state-supported child care.

That is a kind of stoning, too.

The stoning of 17-year-old Dua Khalil Aswad is not a woman’s issue. It is a human issue. It is simply the rawest indicator of the mindset that underlies any society that privileges men over women in any socially structured ways at all.

The truth is that this is as much a male issue as it is a female issue. It is, indeed, dishonorable—but not of women. It dishonors governments that call themselves honorable. It dishonors the men who can stand by while women are stoned—one way or another—and say nothing. It dishonors the religions that dare to justify such stonings in the name of God.

From where I stand, the picture makes it all too clear: Women of courage are not enough. We need men of conscience, as well, if the human race is ever to become fully human.

Joan Chittister, OSB