Freedom to Choose and to Change
AM Psalm 38 • PM Psalm 119:25-48
Isa. 6:1-13 • 2 Thess. 1:1-12 • John 7:53-8:11
It’s hard to find a moral issue more Americans agree on than the immorality of adultery, yet only a quarter of people in 2013 believed divorce was a moral evil. It’s not difficult to parse the inverse relationship. We more easily extend grace to an adulterer who has no hope of leaving a miserable and possibly abusive marriage—entirely plausible for the woman brought to Jesus in today’s Gospel—than to someone with no-fault divorce at their service. “Knowing that we can lose [our partners],” therapist Esther Perel writes in The State Affairs, “[…] mandates an active engagement that long-term couples often lose.” Ursula K. Le Guin’s fictional anarchist Odo in The Dispossessed similarly insisted that in her marriage-less society, “freedom made the promise” between partners “meaningful. A promise is a direction taken, a self-limitation of choice.”
Theologian Robert Farrar Capon used an extramarital affair in his somewhat bizarre book Between Noon & Three as a parable for God’s Grace, which saves us whether or not we submit to the Law. (The last time I referenced this book I was musing about the library as a metaphor for Grace, so enjoy this glimpse into mine.) We are free to be unfaithful as often as we please, and God always uses our freedom to scrawl on the ground while our accusers shame us, and then, when they have all wandered away reflecting on their sins, extend Grace to us. Whether or not we use our freedom to “go and sin no more” doesn’t change a thing, and that’s more outrageous than the most salacious act of infidelity.
Written by Kathryn Haydon
Kathryn holds a doctorate in Plant Science from the University of Arkansas and currently lives in St. Louis where she works as a food and plant scientist and shares a book-filled home with Nathan, Ollie, and Adair. Lately she’s been re-reading her favorite novels, including The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin and Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov. A relevant quote from the latter: “There is no bound to the measure of grace which man may be able to receive.”