Readings for 5th Sunday of Lent: Isaiah 43: 16-21; Psalm 126: 1-6; Philemon 3: 8-14; John 8: 1-11
Did you ever wonder why religious leaders seem so preoccupied with sex?
I have.
I bring the question up, because today's reading from the Gospel of John presents Yeshua as confronting that clerical obsession. I'm referring to the famous case of the woman caught in the act of adultery.
Before I get to that, however, think of the preoccupation itself.
Clerical Preoccupation with Sex
We witness it all over the place, don't we? Clerics, it seems, constantly worry about a long list of cringe-worthy and curious topics that include abortion, contraception, transgenderism, homosexuality, pornography, masturbation, artificial insemination, sex before marriage, oral sex, vasectomy, divorce, priestly celibacy, male-only priests, and (I guess) pedophilia.
Moreover, the clergy's own sexual failings never inhibit their volubility on those topics. I mean, the record shows that Catholic priests have rather regularly sexually molested little boys. Famous evangelicals have consorted with prostitutes of both genders. Yet, Catholic or Protestant, both continue to pronounce on the topics just listed as though they retained their long-lost moral authority to do so.
Why?
I think it's all about the social control that over centuries religious "leaders" stumbled upon with increasing clarity and emphasis. Here's what I mean focusing on the Catholic tradition with which I'm most familiar and which, of course, also shaped Protestantism:
- To begin with, religion is a very powerful means of social control. If religious authorities can convince people that the clergy's understandings of life and morality are shared by God, they've won the day in terms of power over "the faithful."
- This is where sex comes in. As the second most powerful (and arguably the most enjoyable) drive shared by human beings, there is virtually no human being who can refrain from sexual activity.
- Therefore, making all sexual acts sinful outside of marriage (and "mortally" sinful at that - i.e., deserving of hell) the church guaranteed that every church member would sin and need absolution (which only the clergy was empowered to give.)
- Without that absolution, the church taught (infallibly) everyone who thought sexual thoughts or performed sexual acts (looking, touching, fornicating, committing adultery) would be tortured eternally in hell's Lake of Fire.
- Even married couples would suffer such fate if they engaged in contraceptive acts.
- And since only the clergy and their Sacrament of Penance (confession) could save people from hell, the clergy possessed God-like power over the lives and fates of believers.
Incredibly, within my own lifetime, Catholics believed all of that - literally! Consequently, Saturday nights in any given parish would find long lines of people waiting to confess their sins in order to receive the absolution necessary for them to "save their souls" from a vengeful sex-obsessed God. Wow!
Yeshua & the Adulterous Woman
In Yeshua's day, his religion's clergy played a similar game. They had established themselves as the sex police. Only, instead of sending sexual transgressors to hell, Jewish law punished adultery with death by stoning.
That was a biblical requirement. However, the Jewish patriarchy applied that law differently to men and women. A man, they said, committed adultery only when he slept with a married woman. But if he slept with a single woman, a widow, a divorced woman, a prostitute, or a slave, he remained innocent. A woman, on the other hand committed adultery if she slept with anyone but her husband.
Yeshua calls attention to such hypocrisy and double standards in today's gospel episode. You probably remember the story.
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