The Bold Groundedness of God(dess)
by Rev. Cory Coberforward
John 8:2-11
At dawn he appeared again in the temple courts, where all the people gathered around him, and he sat down to teach them. The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before the group and said to Jesus, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?” They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him.
But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger. When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” Again he stooped down and wrote on the ground. At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the woman still standing there. Jesus straightened up and asked her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”
“No one, sir,” she said. “Then neither do I condemn you,” Jesus declared. “Go now and leave your life of sin.”
Responsive Reading - Psalm 101:1-4
I will sing of steadfast love and justice;
to you, O Lord, I will make music.
I will ponder the way that is blameless.
Oh when will you come to me?
I will walk with integrity of heart within my house;
I will not set before my eyes anything that is worthless.
I hate the work of those who fall away;
it shall not cling to me.
A perverse heart shall be far from me;
I will know nothing of evil.
Read the written message below with music videos
I love how Jesus just straight up ignores the accusers of the woman in our reading from John 8, who they say has been caught committing adultery. It’s a bold move, and not one we see often in any of the world’s scriptures: God or a sage shrugging and literally ignoring someone’s condemnation of another to their face. It’s a funny scene, imagining him just stooping down to doodle (or whatever) on the ground as is described, essentially saying that doodling deserves more attention than this crowd’s attempts to discredit and murder another while also trying to entrap Christ in the process. He’s not dismissing the woman but the destructive nature of the crowd’s intent. And further, when he does respond, it is to point out that not one of them is better than her, saying that he himself also does not condemn her. That being done, and with the crowd dispersed, he then points out that she too isn’t living her best life and that she should move past her own destructive tendencies. He goes full circle in the boldness of his approach, continuing to centre on mercy and peace but also our need to reform our living so that we also can find oneness in Being.
In a way, Christ is teaching us what it means to be human, to be humane. He shows in action what the crowd's deep “religious” concern is worth: less than a doodle on the ground. And when they push their point, he rises up and hits to the heart of the issue: no one is blameless in the eyes of God, at least, on a personal level. Because Christ’s key intent here is to raise us up to a place in our natural beingness where we are blameless and have always been perfect.
We can forget that Christ’s ministry was one of radical transformation, radical justice work. This is partly because many Christians make Christ’s ministry out to be more about believing in Christ than being in Christ, finding our unity with the Divine Father, Mother, and Parent. It’s crazy to think about the differences in Christ’s bold ministry compared to what Christian ministry and the church have become.
Christ wasn’t shy to say that we must change. But sometimes the rest of us are. It can be hard to accept that we personally must change, let alone “tried and true” organizations, traditions, or structures that are nevertheless seemingly on the outs. This can be said about our current economic system to our current state of personal conception (how we think about ourselves). We are due for bold new approaches to just about everything, however, the core of these won’t be new, Jesus and other ancient teachers have been sharing it for millennia. They tell us to turn to the core of life within, to notice that we are like the ground, open and expansive, and our passing thoughts like a passing doodle.
Perhaps that was what Christ was reminding himself of when he started to write on the ground, the destructive nature of the crowd is passing and transient but the wholeness of Life, God, is forever. There are many scriptures that point to this, saying that evil should be viewed as a passing dream. Perhaps this is also why Christ treated the crowd so nonchalantly, and seemingly in passing tells the woman not to sin again. He was teaching us how to treat our own selfish, ignorant intentions and practices: with little attention and dismissively. This doesn’t mean allowing them to continue, quite the opposite, allowing ourselves to not give them so much investment and weight when they enter our minds. He had learned to shrug off “the devil” and was passing it on.
Notice in your own life how doing the opposite is often the root of a bad habit continuing. Often when we are tempted to do something we shouldn’t, our downfall is mulling it over, turning it around in our minds until we pull the trigger. We give investment to the feelings or thoughts: “This is what I am,” “I always do this,” “How great would it be,” or even “I have no power to fight this,” et cetera. Moreover, we miss the ground of being for the passing doodle, not appreciating the breadth, depth, and poignancy of the very moment we’re in. We return to ourselves when we notice the peace of our very consciousness, the peace of awareness, the very ground of being itself, which is what allows all the turmoil to sometimes arise and be noticed as such.
So, funny enough, it turns out that when it says that Christ wrote on the ground, he was both literally and metaphorically pointing to the ground (of being). He was quite aptly already pointing us back to the stability of our Spirit and the rootedness of the vine of life. How amazing! And he didn’t stop there but reiterated what he meant in further action. He stood up to a crowd seeking to use scripture written for many generations past to kill someone, using the opportunity to not only save the lady’s life but to reiterate to each of them that they have their own growing (or turning) to do.
We each are called to turn to the heaven within, which is what Christ meant when he said “Repent! For the Kingdom of the Heavens is near!” Which in more accurate translations should read something like (quite literally), “Turn around, for the realm of the heavens is within you!” Jesus was seeking to empower us in the same way that he was empowered. And although we often make it about the historical figure of Christ, that figure (according to the scriptures about him) was all about pointing to the reality of himself and each of us which is beyond time or limitation. He was bold in his steadfastness of this truth, unto death.
God has spoken to us across the ages and even now, in our own relationship with the reality within. God is closer to us than all of our projections, all of our imaginations, and conjectures. And the best teachings will point us back to knowing this reality within, will point us back to something that is true beyond words or even form. We forget that all of our experiencing and knowing arises in, as, and to our consciousness, the light of the world. But it’s like pointing to the ground, it's easy to miss it. It is so close to us, so inherent to our being that we can’t suss out the truth of it. Our minds can’t see it because it is the very thing that sees our minds, that allows our minds to rise. We instead must be bold enough to settle into our very being, seeing what is beyond sight, accepting its Divine Way as our very own.
Blessings,
Cory