Fallen women?

A fallen woman. If you’ve seen the film Philomena, you may have heard that horrible term. In the film, a journalist (Steve Coogan) helps Philomena (Judi Dench) track down the son who had been cruelly taken from her at the age of three. In the words of the nuns who separated her from her child, Philomena was a ‘fallen woman’. By that, they meant a woman whose child had been born out of wedlock. 

The misogyny is obvious. Where are the fallen men? Only one woman has ever given birth without the involvement of a man, and the nuns certainly wouldn’t have treated Mary in the way they treated Philomena. Yet it is the women who were labelled as fallen.  While mothers were punished for having a child out of wedlock, the fathers were left to carry on with their lives.  Despite being women themselves, the nuns judged other women by stricter moral standards than they judged men.

But the whole idea of labelling some people as ‘fallen’ is flawed in a deeper sense. In the Bible, the word ‘fallen’ has nothing to do with sex outside of marriage. It’s not even used to describe individuals. When Christians talk about a fallen world, they’re talking about the introduction of death, suffering and imperfection into this world as a result of humanity’s rejection of God. We disobey God’s law on a daily basis and we deny His authority over our lives. That is what sin is. And because Christians sin as well, they are still fallen.

Yes, those women were fallen. But so were the nuns. And they are just as fallen as me or you. So it was hypocritical for the nuns to treat so-called ‘fallen women’ as more sinful than themselves. And it would be just as hypocritical to look at the sins of the nuns and think ourselves better than them.

Taken from https://www.crossroadsinitiative.com/media/articles/the-adulterous-woman/. (N.B I haven't read it. I'm using the painting rather than endorsing what it says)

Jesus was once faced with someone who could be described as ‘a fallen woman’.  Some priests brought a man and woman caught in the act of adultery to Jesus and asked if they should stone her. For reasons I don’t fully understand, that was the punishment for having sex outside of marriage in the Old Testament. (Unless it was not consensual, in which case only the man would be punished.) Jesus replied that ‘any one of you that has not sinned should throw the first stone.’ One by one, everyone walked away. Jesus, the only one who had never sinned, was left alone with her. He let her go, telling her to ‘sin no more.’

Some people get very excited about this and start saying all sort of wild things about this. One sign I saw recently claimed that ‘Jesus was the first to decriminalise prostitution’. But Jesus’ last words are important- ‘sin no more’. According to Him, the woman had committed a sin. Jesus wasn’t saying that we can’t make moral judgements about someone else’s behaviour. Instead, he was telling us that we have no right to think that we are better than them.

Um, no, he wasn't...

We all reject God’s authority every day, even if we do it in different ways. And when you consider that Jesus broadened the definition of adultery to include looking with lust at another person, it’s clear that almost everyone is guilty of it in one form or another. No one is less innocent than anyone else. Only Jesus, the Son of God, was truly innocent. And all of us, nuns and ‘fallen’ women, are lost without the forgiveness that He offers. 

https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/23362491797135382/