A Homily for the Fifth Sunday of Lent
Readings: Isaiah 43:16-21 Philippians 3:8-14 John 8:1-11
On a cold December morning in 1832, a New England farmer named John Durfee found the corpse of a young woman hanging from a stack pole on his farm. She was Sarah Maria Cornell, a 29-year-old mill worker.
The women who prepared Sarah’s body for burial discovered bruises on her body that would not have come from hanging alone. They also suspected, and an autopsy confirmed, that Sarah had been pregnant.
The case moved from suicide to a murder investigation when a note and other incriminating letters were found in Sarah’s personal belongings. The note read: “If I should be missing, enquire of the Rev. Mr. Avery of Bristol, he will know where I am.”
A deeper inquiry found that before her death, Sarah had consulted with her physician, indicating her desire to keep her baby. Dr. Thomas Wilbur told her to seek out the child’s father and demand financial support. Sarah had been briefly employed in the home of Rev. Ephraim Avery, a Methodist minister. She had met him one weekend at a summer outdoor revival, so typical of Methodist preaching at the time.
Ephraim Avery stood trial for the murder of Sarah Cornell. The case was perhaps the first—at least best recorded—example in American jurisprudence of defending the accused by impugning the credibility and morality of the victim. Indeed, it became the inspiration for Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter.
The crime writer Kate Winkler Dawson reopens the case in The Sinners All Bow: Two Authors, One Murder, and the Real Hester Prynne (2025). Absolute conclusions are not possible for historical questions, but Dawson locates the case in the stream of American life.
Standing against Sarah Cornell was her work in cotton mills. The Industrial Revolution was just beginning in America. Sarah would have been one of the first young women to seek employment outside the home. That fact alone made her suspect.
The case also involved competing religious interests. New England had been solidly Congregational. One went to church on Sundays and expected long, learned and reliably uninspiring sermons. At that time, American Methodism was a fiery newcomer. Its ministers were much less educated, and they often preached outdoors rather than in churches. Their sermons were expected to whip up strong, even frenzied, emotions.
The cotton mill owners were reliably Congregationalist. Rev. Avery’s conviction would have vindicated their industry and impugned the Methodists. The latter fought back with a savage attack on Sarah’s personal life. She had roamed all over New England. She had once shoplifted. She had been seen, admittedly over a long stretch of time, in the company of other men.
After a jury deliberation of 16 hours, Ephraim Avery was acquitted of the murder. The law sided with the preacher; society did not. Rev. Avery left the ministry, eventually moving his wife and family to Ohio, where he died in 1869.
Laws are supposed to promote our well-being, but they are only as good as their authors and their administrators. The church teaches that normally we should obey just laws, though even then there are exceptions. If he has no other options, a man can steal bread or cross a border to feed his starving family. And the church has always taught that unjust laws can and should be resisted, cautioning that the presumption of goodness lies with the lawmakers.
But the sad truth, verified in every year of human history, is that law, which should shield us from evil, can itself become a tool of evil.
The scribes and Pharisees who opposed Jesus had set the perfect trap. Theirs was a righteous cause. The Mosaic law forbad adultery under penalty of death. Jesus would be forced to choose between two of his own competing claims: He had come to fulfill, not to abolish, the law, and he came proclaiming mercy.
Our Lord knew that evil and goodness do not neatly align themselves on opposite sides of the law. Indeed, his opening proposition silenced her accusers.
“Let the one among you who is without sin
be the first to throw a stone at her” (Jn 8:7).
Jesus had no intention of debating the law. He had come, as St. Paul would later say, to undo the law. At its best, the law is a bulwark against evil, a way of curtailing it, hedging it in. But Christ came to assail, not merely curtail, evil.
Jesus draws in the dirt. Venerable Bede likened this to Israel’s God, inscribing the commandments on stone (Homilies on the Gospels 1.25). Christ is writing into the earth a new dispensation.
On Calvary, Jesus will hand himself over to the law. And by the light of the law, he will be legally and appropriately executed. Yet as he stretches his arms out on the cross, he calls into question all justice administered by violence, by restraint, by law itself. In him the good opens itself to evil, allows it to do its worst, confident that goodness alone, God’s goodness, will overcome its ancient foe.
No earthly government could survive under Christ’s new standard, and from the beginning, Christians have been divided by the competing demands of law and the Lord. That will never change.
Normally the laws of basically good governments should be our guide. Sometimes they cannot be. We must decide when to shield ourselves from evil and when we must confidently, even if tragically, confront it, confident in God’s goodness.
Sarah Cornell did not receive justice in court, though history—to the extent that it remembers—has championed her cause. And the woman caught in adultery did not receive justice from Christ. She found something greater: mercy.
At least her accusers knew they had been curtailed by Christ. They retreated in silence, leaving the woman alone with her Lord. St. Augustine called the two “the pitiful and Pity” (Tractates on the Gospel of John 33.5-6). Jesus says to her:
“Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” She replied, “No one, sir.” Then Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you. Go, and from now on do not sin any more” (Jn 8:10-11).
Christ did not condone evil. He overcame it with love.
