In the 1st Reading, Prophet Isaiah who wrote during the Exile interpreted the subsequent return of the people in the light of the first Passover where Moses led the Israelites from Egypt to Palestine. For Isaiah, this journey to freedom will be even more glorious than the first Exodus when the Jews were set free from Pharaoh’s slavery. In this return from Exile, the desert will now be a free-flowing highway for the sons and daughters of God to traverse.
In charting the journeys of God’s people either from Egypt or the Exile to Palestine, liberation or freedom is the language of God’s love. Written into the relationship with God is that Man has been created for freedom. This is where the adultery case in the Gospel comes in.
Firstly, just from a covenantal perspective, adultery is the proper description of Israel’s repeated infidelity to God. In Hosea, Israel is compared to a harlot selling herself promiscuously. Despite her many betrayals of the compact with God, He does not abandon her. The Gospel illustrates the length with which God would go to in forgiving despite Man’s treachery.
Secondly, with respect to the adulterous woman, the background is rather simple. The Pharisees and the Scribes were not at all sympathetic to this woman’s plight. Her religious conversion was not on their menu. Instead, they saw her a pawn in the chess of entrapment. They cooked up a catch-22 dilemma for Jesus to either defy the Mosaic prescription or to usurp the Roman’s authority to punish and put to death. Neither was a tenable or viable option for Jesus.
In place of these two non-viable options, Jesus issued a challenge that severs the Gordian Knot His enemies had woven for Him. There is no doubt that the woman caught “in flagrante dilecto” was a sinner. Sadly, what was reflected in the accusers’ lofty perch is how our poor vision does not need any corrective or magnifying glass to spot the sins of others. On this point, we are very much like the Scribes and Pharisees who could not even recognise their own sinfulness. In such an instance of blindness, the genius was simply Jesus inviting any sinless person to cast the first stone. In the end, Jesus set the woman free.
To understand what Jesus is offering us, we may need to explore the idea of progress because it is entwined with the notion of liberty or freedom. In terms of change or evolution, progress is not merely technological advances. For example, Tony Fernandes should be able to advertise: “Now everyone can launch into space for leisure”. Embedded into this developmental process is the idea of personal autonomy flourishing which means that one should have absolute liberty to express oneself in any which way one desires. As an illustration, the current concept of progress should include the possibility that a male who claims to be a woman, be allowed to enter into competition with female swimmers. That is the kind of freedom we have come to expect, except of course, to be a murderer, a rapist or worst, a paedophile.
This notion of progress that is linked to the deepening of individual freedom is captivating. We are enamoured by material progress as witnessed through the embrace of “newer” ideas, inventions, innovations because the concept promotes greater convenience, wider possibilities, etc. We are coasting through an expressway of technological upgrades. The more developed we are, the freer we expect to be. While the feel of freedom is exhilarating, what we have never asked is why have our addictions become deadlier. The very fact that countries are liberalising the usage of narcotics like marijuana or cannabis is not because they have become more permissive but because the “latest” or “newest” opiate, stimulant and dope have become even more lethal or addictive. So much for the freedom that we crave.[1]
God’s love for us should result in our freedom but it is “less” than what we think. In other words, it is more sober than stimulating, more austere than awesome. Perhaps, in terms of the definition of freedom as stimulating and awesome, “selfishness” has somewhat perverted our sense of freedom.
Take for example a male celebrity who with his boyfriend decide to have a child through surrogacy. Presumably because technology[2] has not caught up yet, which means that the couple has to procure the human oocytes from the ovum market. Have them fertilised with either one of the partners’ reproductive fluid. Then proceed to surrogate the embryos.[3] But what happens when the child comes of age and begins to ask who his or her mother is? The love of the couple for the child is not the issue here. Instead, the child’s query is existential for every human person wants to know his or her origin. The irony is that we are a generation that needs “closure” for completion and to move on in life, and yet does not seem to recognise that the same need exists for the “manufactured” child.
This case underlines the reality that we have been drinking from the well of “selfish” freedom where to be free is generally limited to thinking of one’s needs and self-fulfilment (selfish-fulfilment, more like it). The male celebrity and his partner wanted a child for themselves without considering the existential truth that a child needs a father and a mother.
Our unfettered liberty is never absolute because for Jesus, freedom is tied to the extirpation of sin. In no uncertain terms, He told the woman “Go and sin no more”. This profoundly challenges our approach to God because we seemed to have pigeon-holed Him to this cubicle of soft love. He is understanding and ultimately, He bends to our will. Freedom is not the liberty to behave as we want but a decision to live as what God has intended for us. When translated, our freedom equals emancipation from selfishness, to live independent from sinning and to submit ourselves to God’s will. To do God’s will is freedom and as Jesus told the adulterous woman, to be free, is to sin no more.
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[1] If you do not care for narcotics, think how deadening our addiction or compulsion towards mobile devices has become. We wake up and the first thing we grab is our cellular phones.
[2] We cannot “manufacture” human eggs.
[3] Employ someone from a third-world country to surrogate the foetus. Ukraine is facing a problem because it is thought to have the biggest surrogate industry in the world.
