KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 18 May
The Lord heard her cry
In the Junior School Chapel and the Grade Ten Chapel this week we had the first part of the Parable of the Prodigal Son who, having wasted his inheritance, “came to himself” and remembers his father and the home which he had left to go into “a far country.” At Senior Chapel, we had the second installment of the story of Susanna and the Elders. At once powerful and disturbing, it, too, ends with a kind of awakening. Susanna’s cry to the Lord, we are told, was heard by the Lord. Just as she is being led off to be put to death on the strength of the false witness of the two wicked judges, Daniel is moved to protest, “I am innocent of the blood of this woman.” Pretty intense and quite telling. The judges accused her of what they themselves had intended. This story is part of the background to the Gospel story of the woman taken in adultery and to the problem of motives and hypocrisy. “Has no one condemned you,” Jesus said to the woman, “Neither do I, go and sin no more.” Here, however, Susanna is innocent.
But what was her cry? It is an insight into the nature of God who discerns what is secret, who is aware of all things, and thus knows that these men have borne false witness against her. The opening prayer of the liturgy of Holy Communion signals the same idea: “Almighty God, unto whom all hearts be open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid.” This kind of ethical understanding belongs to the story, the idea that God sees all and everything, the idea of a principle of justice and truth that is greater than us and our evil.
We might be tempted to read the story through a feminist lens seeing it as essentially about the victimization of women by men. There is something to that approach, to be sure. After all, the beauty of Susanna is emphasized. The judges lust after her. In the trial, she is literally unveiled so that the wicked men “might feast upon her beauty.” One cannot ignore the “male gaze”, the way in which she is viewed as an object. It might also be said that a male, Daniel, is seen as coming to the rescue of the damsel in distress, as if Susanna is simply weak and helpless. But the story is more than this.
