5th Sunday of Lent. C.

John 8:1-11

Two hundred years ago today, on March 25th 1807, the Act of Parliament which abolished the Slave Trade in Britain was passed by 114 votes to 15 in the House of Commons and by 41 to 20 in the House of Lords. An attempt at passing a similar Act had failed two years earlier, in 1805, when it was passed in the Commons but blocked in the Lords. The Commons would probably block it today on the grounds that it was interfering with the free market, but the 1807 Act made it unlawful for any British Subject to capture or transport slaves. We should not imagine, however, that this meant an immediate end to what was a very profitable business. There are wealthy families in Britain today who made their money from slavery and many continued the practice after 1807. Any captain then caught transporting slaves was fined £100 for every slave he was carrying, which led to the practice of throwing slaves overboard to save money whenever a government ship was seen approaching. It took some countries years before they followed Britain’s example and in America it took a civil war before slavery was done away with. And it continues in the world today, even here in Britain.

So why am I saying this? Well, the anniversary is worth remembering in its own right, but I also mention it because the anniversary has coloured my whole approach to this week’s readings. The very first passage we heard in Lent this year was about God liberating his people from slavery and as I have reflected on the story of the woman caught committing adultery I have found myself being drawn down a road part of me would rather not go down. And it’s because, when I have gone down it before, it has always provoked a strong negative reaction from some of the men among us. And yet, in the end, I have no option but address the issue which has surfaced this week, the issue of how women in every age have been denied basic rights and treated as virtual slaves.

Today’s Gospel, of course, is a classic example of what lies at the root of this. Clearly this woman who is brought before Jesus had not committed adultery on her own. In a male-dominated society, however, she gets all the blame. And so it has been since the beginning. We see it in the Genesis story of the Fall where the man’s defence is that the woman had made him do it. We see it in the way women, throughout history, have been portrayed as the temptress, leading the poor helpless man astray, an attitude we still meet today when victims of rape are blamed for what happened because of the way they were dressed or because they invited a man into their home. We see it, too, in the pathetic excuse offered by wife-beaters everywhere; ‘She made me do it’ a close relative of that other terrible saying; ‘If there were nae bad women there would be nae bad men.’ And only a few months ago I quoted those words of Tammy Wynette; ‘If you love him, you’ll forgive him, for, after all, he’s just a man.’ a truly pathetic sentiment.

So how did all this start? Where does it all come from? Well, the people who have the answer to that are the anthropologists who study the origins of human society and explore why we do what we do. And what they tell us is that these attitudes lie in a way of thinking about the world that the creation myth in the first chapter of Genesis specifically sets out to reject. And it is called ‘dualism,’ the view almost universally held by primitive religions that life is a struggle between two equal forces, one good and the other evil. The spiritual was good and the material evil, an idea we have never completely let go of despite the fact that it is totally incompatible with christian belief. And here’s the point: from the beginning, for reasons we understand today, masculinity was associated with the rational or spiritual; good, and feminity with the material or physical; evil. This is not the time or the place to explore in detail why all this happened – essentially it was about the sheer messiness and physicality of giving birth and, in particular about our primitive ancestors’ attitudes to blood and women’s monthly cycle – but the end result was a society which was deeply fearful of the feminine and so deeply prejudiced against women, a state of affairs from which we have not yet escaped and which those who write about these things call patriarchy. The Oxford English Dictionary defines patriarchy as a system of society or government in which men hold the power and women are largely excluded from it, and that is what Jesus was confronted with that day when the Scribes and Pharisees dragged the woman forward and made her stand there in full view of everyone; such a powerful phrase don’t you think?. So what was he to do?

Well, he wasn’t exactly starting from scratch. The whole notion of dualism had already been rejected by the book of Genesis. And the reason was simple. Paganism had many gods, but for Judaism there was only one God who had created everything that existed and there was nothing evil in it. Adam, too, had looked at Eve and exclaimed: This at last is bone from my bone and flesh from my flesh, a powerful proclamation of the fundamental equality of men and women against all the thinking that dominated the world at that time. And so when Jesus refuses to go along with the patriarchy that is condemning and blaming this woman because she is a woman, it is possible to hear him speaking, not just to this woman, but to women in every age. As her accusers slink away, Jesus is left alone with the woman who remains standing there. They face each other as equals. Jesus does not look down on her. He is not afraid of her femininity and his masculinity is not a threat to her either. It is a powerful picture of how men and women are meant to relate to each other and I invite you to contemplate it today.

The trouble with patriarchy, of course, is that the deeper we are immersed in it the less we can see it. Just as a fish is not aware that it lives in water, so many of us today cannot see the ideas, values and prejudices which we have inherited without thinking and which enslave us. So on this important anniversary of the Act which officially abolished slavery in Britain, let’s ask God to free us from the slavery to patriarchy rejected by Jesus in that story.
BIDDING PRAYERS

We are all enslaved by ways of thinking which we have inherited from the past or have taken on without even realising that we have done so. For years they can go unquestioned, trapping us in their own very limited and narrow ways of seeing the world. They are the root of our prejudices and influence everything we do and say. And so we ask God to open our eyes to see these ways of thinking for what they are, as a first step towards becoming free of them…………………………….Lord hear us

One of the signs of God at work in the world today is the fact that women are finally seeing the need to break free of the many inbuilt injustices they have suffered from for so long in a society dominated by men and by masculine ways of thinking and being. And so we pray for all those involved in this struggle, that God will guide them and give them the courage they need to continue in the face of the many obstacles society still places in their way………………………………....Lord hear us

Slavery continues to be a reality in the world today, especially among women. In the developing world most of the physical work is done by women and millions have no future except years of drudgery. In the West, many women above a certain age are still so dependent on their husbands or partners that their capacity to make free choices about how they live their lives is severely limited. Others, abandonned by the father of their children, are trapped in poverty from which there is no escape. And so we pray for these women everywhere…………..Lord hear us

One of the worst aspects of Patriarchy is the notion that women are there to serve men and attend to their needs. It is especially strong in the developing world where, as we said a moment ago, most of the hard physical work is done by women. But it also exists here among us and we pray for the wisdom we need to see it for the lie that it is so that all of us, men and women, may escape from it………………..Lord hear us

Fundamental to the problem we are reflecting on today is the age-old issue of prostitution. The sex-trade is alive and well in Britain today as women and girls are brought in from poorer countries in Eastern Europe and elsewhere to meets the demands of the market here in Britain. And so we pray for all who are trapped in this dark, evil business, many through no choice of their own, that, as a country, we will finally see it for what it is and put and end to it…………………………..Lord hear us

One of the things SCIAF does in many parts of the world is to work with women, empowering them to take more control of their own lives and so escape from the slavery in which they are held. And so we pray for the success of this work and that the people of Scotland will be generous, even lavish, in the way we give to the Annual Appeal taken up today after Communion…..Lord hear us