Dust to Dust

Portsmouth Cathedral

Ash Wednesday 22nd February 2023

Dust to dust

Joel 2.1-2; 12-17; John 8.1-11

There’s a word which often crops up in the prophetic books of the Old Testament addressed to Israel – the word ‘Return’. Return to me, says the Lord, return to me with all your heart. The word in Hebrew is SHUB, and it always has the sense of retracing your steps, going back to the beginning, back to the Lord, and to our most basic, primitive, essential, relationship with God, which in the Bible is always one of absolute dependence. ‘Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return’. ‘Return, O man, to the dust’. Our very existence, our createdness, our humanity is not something we possess, or achieve. The fact that we exist at all is quite arbitrary, quite unnecessary. Apart from God’s will we might never have been. Apart from God’s love we might never have been. And in the end, when we pass out of this life, it is as it was in the beginning, we return to dust, to utter dependency on God’s will and God’s love. Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Return to me, says, the Lord, return with all your heart.

And then striking across these solemn reflections like a missile is this extraordinary Gospel of the woman taken in adultery. Here she is. Helpless, captive, made to stand in front of the crowd, shamed and exposed. And according to the law of Moses such women are to be stoned to death. What do you say? They said to Jesus. And he gives no answer, but instead bends down and writes with his finger on the ground. What on earth do you think he writes? And what do you think he meant by the gesture? Most contemporary comment on the passage brings out the woman’s vulnerability – assuming she was a female victim of a male system – and of course Jesus takes her side against the wicked and judgmental crowd and turns their judgment on themselves, refusing to condemn her. But just supposing. Let’s give her a name, supposing Hepzibah was a well-known marriage wrecker and she’d got Solomon into bed, and the crowd were up in arms because he had deserted Rachel and his twelve children for this worthless floozy - well what would Jesus make of that?

Jesus bent down and wrote on the ground. In the presence of all these outraged people he simply said, ‘Let anyone among you who is without sin throw a stone at her’ – let him who is without sin throw the first stone, refusing to make comment about anyone’s guilt or innocence. And then he bent down again and again traced in the dry dust with his finger, not so much a verdict as an inscription, more like God tracing the form of Adam in the dust, or crafting his rib to make Eve.

Return, return to the Lord. Return with all your heart. Those who have sinned and those who have been sinned against and those who condemn – all are dust in God’s eyes, fragile, passing, marked for death. David Ford in his recent commentary on John’s Gospel says, ‘There can be no us/them divide when it comes to sin, all are caught in it, and accusing others of it without recognising our solidarity in sin leads us deeper into it’.

This response speaks to me of how judgmental we are, how ready to shift our sins onto others, to accuse huge classes and conditions of people of historic or present day guilt. We live, alas, in a blame culture, where survival is like pass the parcel – don’t do anything that might attract blame or shame, always, deflect, always project guilt on to others. In the Gospel the woman taken in adultery, today Shamima Begum - that child who was led astray and is now not allowed to return to this country. Hospitals, churches, schools, governments, the police, the family, we all target groups and individuals we regard in some way as deplorable, while proclaiming our essential innocence and goodness.

But Jesus has none of this. He writes on the ground, reminding us, at the very least that we are but dust that whether we are right or wrong, whether our self-belief is justified or not, whether we are ashamed of ourselves or shamed by others; we all need to return to the source to that utter dependency on God from whom we come. I wonder whether you watched the terrible final climax of Happy Valley, when the police sergeant Catherine confronted the psychopath who had driven her daughter to suicide. And what we saw in that last scene was an extraordinary exchange, that came close to a moment of understanding, as the mass murderer felt the first stirrings of something like love and she felt the beginnings of release from the grief and anger which had pursued her. It didn’t make any difference to the outcome – the murderer set himself on fire as he had intended to do and Clare returned to a heroine’s welcome and farewell, but just in that moment both were strangely equal, returned to their most basic humanity, dust to dust and ashes to ashes.

Dust thou art and to dust shalt thou return. Return to the Lord with all your heart. This is the Gospel of today, the Gospel of the Lord. He knows who we are, that we are but dust and yet he inscribes us with his cross, he writes on our mortal dust, his name of everlasting love.

Angela Tilby, Canon of Honour