Reflections for King’s-Edgehill School Cadet Church Parade, 2023
What is written? Reflections for the Church Parade, April 19th, 2023
What is written? And where? And how do we read? These are all questions that come to us through what is written. The word ‘scripture’ simply means what is written. What is written is an essential feature of the religions of the world.
There are the writings of Confucius in the Analects along with Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching of Taoism in China. There are the writings that belong to the Hindu tradition in the Vedas, the Upanishads and other writings such as the Bhagavad Gita in India. There are the many writings within Buddhism, both in classical or Theravada Buddhism, and Mahayana Buddhism, and Tibetan Buddhism. There are the writings of the Hebrews in the TANAKH, an acronym for the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings. There are the writings of the Christian New Testament. There are the writings of the Recitation of Allah to Mohammed in the Qur’an for the cultures and people of Islam. Ramadan celebrates the giving of the Qur’an and ends with Eid al Fitr beginning on April 20th or 21st depending on the sighting of the crescent moon. Not to mention the many writings of the philosophers of antiquity who have contributed to the shaping of the ethical and spiritual imaginary that has been such a major part of our world, past and present.
What is written in the dust? Levi read the story about Jesus and the woman taken in adultery. It is the only time that Jesus is said to have written something. We hear about what he said as written down by others and even what he read as written in the Jewish scriptures, but what he wrote in the dust we do not know. Yet the image of him writing in the dust looks back to creation, to God breathing his spirit into the dust of our humanity such that we become living and thinking beings.
Here Jesus is the target of attack. His accusers set before him a woman accused of adultery to test him about his relation to the Law in its literal sense. He bends down and writes in the dust. What he wrote we do not know. We only know what he said. “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.” And all the accusers fade away convicted in their own consciences. To the woman he says, simply and gently, “Has no one condemned you? Neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more.” These are powerful and moving words of life in the face of animosity and division. They are words of resurrection and forgiveness written in the dust.
Socrates, too, wrote nothing. But in Plato’s dialogue, The Meno, Socrates, not unlike Jesus, writes in the dust, or at least draws a diagram in the dust, to show that Meno’s slave boy who has never been to school nonetheless knows the Pythagorean theorem, meaning that it can be drawn out of him. It is a powerful scene about learning through a kind of remembering or discovering what is actually in us as spiritual and intellectual beings. These writings in the dust recall us to creation and speak to us about redemption and about who we are.
