Clergy and Educators

ICJS Scripture Forum, 2001
Session #3

Scripture Forum
Session #3
Chizuk Amuno Congregation
January 4, 2002

Texts for study: contrasting models for understanding the dynamics of sin and repentance

Matthew 5:21-26
John 8:2-11

Discussion returns to the Matthean and Johannine texts from session #2:

• Texts exhibit a tension within the Christian tradition regarding sin and repentance:
• The Matthean text is more closely tied to the Jewish tradition in terms of its demand for confession and restitution and its connection to the Temple.
• The Johannine text was found in the December session to have a background
  in keeping with halakhah. Read through Jewish legal eyes, it did not seem alien to the Jewish tradition and did not become a bone of contention during the discussion.
• As the text has been read by Christians, however, it tends to create a greater distance from the Jewish tradition than
  does the Matthean text. In the traditional Christian reading this text sets up a dichot-omy of Christian and Jewish sensitivities by condemning those who would insist on living according to the letter of the law.
• In this Johannine text forgiveness precedes repentance. E. P. Sanders (Jesus and Judaism) makes sense of the break between Judaism and Christianity on the basis of the tension in the way in which repentance and forgiveness play out in the New Testament: The notion that forgiveness can precede the act of repentance poses a challenge to the sacrificial system and the rabbinic tradition. The Johannine text of the woman taken in adultery and the Lukan text about Jesus and Zacchaeus (Lk. 19:1-10) are both relevant to Sanders' reading.
• Calvin and Luther were both very nervous about the story of the woman taken in adultery because of the ease with which Jesus forgives the woman.
• John 8 serves a polemical purpose, providing an answer to why the Christian community was expelled from the synagogue. This may be why
  the floating story of the adulterous woman found
  a place in John's Gospel.
• The Matthean and Johannine texts illustrate competing ways of understanding the dynamic of sin and repentance, and they represent a tension that is unresolved in the New Testament. The Roman Catholic tradition, which recognizes the individual's inability to recognize his or her own sinfulness, tilts toward the text in John 8.
• The Johannine text is shocking from two points of view: (1) it can be read as a polemical text (i.e.,
  a sinner who judges another's sin is behaving like
  a "Pharisee"), and (2) as a non-rabbinical way of viewing sin and repentance.

Free-flowing discussion:

• Is Jesus' saying that he does not condemn the woman equivalent to an act of forgiveness? He doesn't say that she is forgiven, so how can this text be read as an act of forgiveness?
• One possible explanation: Christians may collapse the text in John into texts from the Synoptic Gospels in which Jesus says to various people, "Your sins are forgiven. Go and sin no more."
• Another possible explanation: The act of forgive-ness in this text is the woman's continuing stay in the community. She is neither stoned to death nor expelled from the community.
• Another set of questions was then asked: Since texts take on a life of their own, how has this text been preached and taught, and when did the conventional reading of the text originate? Another person suggested that it would be interesting to trace the interpretation of the Johannine text in terms of the culture in which each of the interpreters lived.
• Most Christians would not read this as a polemical text. They would read it as a text that says: If one is guilty of sin (which everyone is), one cannot judge other people. Given such a reading, there is then no way to negotiate any standards of behavior, which would cause the community to collapse.
• There has to be another way of reading the text in John 8 other than as a polemic or as a kind of reverse "I'm O.K., you're O.K."
• One problem with the way Christians read this text is that we miss the power of the text because we universalize it before we pay attention to what the text is saying.
• The other person in this text is Jesus. If Christians are to live in the world as Jesus lived, this text tells us we are to say, "I don't condemn you; don't sin anymore." If moral behavior is the criterion for judging who is in and who is out (of the commu-nity), it's the wrong criterion. This text says that breaking a commandment that has to do with moral behavior does not put you out of the community. The question then becomes, "What does?" The issue in this text is that the community is a community of sinners, so how is the commu-nity to judge people who break the moral law? --
  a question of boundaries.
• Boundaries depend on how you live in the world.
  In the first century, being caught in an act of adultery put you not only outside of the commu-nity but also cost you your life. The text may be saying that this outcome is exactly right [i.e., according to the law] but also exactly wrong because there would then be no way for the woman to be restored to the community. This text poses the question: What acts relocate the person beyond the boundaries of the community?
• The fact that boundaries don't exist in regard to the woman's adulterous behavior makes this a scandalous text from the first-century Jewish point of view.
• Someone then asked what behavior(s), according to the New Testament, would cause one to be put out of the community. Answer: The one sin that puts you out of the community in the New Testa-ment is the sin against the Holy Spirit, a text no one can explain.
• From a Jewish point of view, the problem in this text is the challenge to the authority of the community in the denial that the sin committed is a sin. Just because the Jewish community has always found ways to avoid putting the adulterer to death does not mean that adulterous behavior is O.K.; there's a lot of ground between those two extremes.
• Rebuttal: The text is unequivocal: Go and don't sin anymore (i.e., refers not just to this sin, but to any sin).
• Speculation regarding the Christian community: Is there a polemic within the Christian community that this text addresses? Is one of the points of this text a rank-ordering of sins? Did some people within the Christian community want to set boundaries on the basis of sexual sin?
• Restoring someone to the community is harder than expelling him or her. It can be very disruptive within the community, especially when the sin becomes public. Is the move that is driving this text the idea that we're meant to be whole as a community, and the way to be that is not to throw people out of the community but for everyone to live within the community without sinning? The inclination of this text is to restore.
• Forgiveness precedes repentance, but restoration to the community requires repentance, which involves steps that must be taken publicly. Forgiveness has the power to motivate the sinner to repent.
• Suggestion: The rabbis have the capability to overturn a text without openly saying that "The Torah is wrong." That is, it is possible to teach scripture in a way that is not what was originally intended, while insisting, where change has been introduced, that this is what the text means and has always meant. (The text cannot simply be ignored because it's part of the community's tradition.) Can it be that Christianity does not have the same flexibility of interpretation because ethics are based on leading life the way Jesus did, and it's not possible to say in regard to any particular text that Jesus got it wrong?
• Response: Christian interpreters can do and have done the same things the rabbis do. For example, in a Roman Catholic Church document, the words "as the Church has always taught" are a signal that something new is coming. In Christian interpretation, the tradition weighs as heavily, if not more heavily, than the scriptures do, but that fact goes without acknowledgment.
• Protestants may radically reinterpret Jesus, but they still have to base their interpretation on texts and tie it in with the Jesus of Scripture.
• Authenticity in religion depends on being able to draw a line that shows that one's interpretation is still part of the tradition.

In the next session, to be held on January 25, 2002, sin and repentance will be examined within the context of Jewish and Christian liturgies.

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