Sermon by Reverend Dr. John W. Mann | October 8, 2023

John 8:2-11

A friend once told me about a worship service he attended in the church where he grew up. It was a communion service. The elders of the church were passing out the communion bread. They went from pew to pew passing the plates among the people.

One elder paused at the aisle of a pew. Sitting in that pew were members of a family, members of the congregation, and of the community. The elder held the communion plate in his grip and said to the husband and father sitting in the pew: “You can’t have Communion. You are an adulterer.”

It seems that when a person breaks commandment number seven, it appears more serious than most of the rest. No one would say, “You can’t have communion. You are a liar. You can’t have communion: you didn’t honour your parents. You can’t have communion: you are a thief.” Certainly no one would say, “You can’t have communion. You are a coveter.”

Is the judgement ours to make? If the law has been broken, is it our place to uphold the law? What does the law say? In the Old Testament of the bible, it said anyone caught in adultery should be taken out and killed. Stone them. Crush out the sin from amongst the people. Why so severe a penalty?

There are two factors in play – One is the concept of loyalty. When the Hebrew people moved into the Promised Land, there were other people living there. These people had different religions and different cultural reference points.

For the Hebrew tribes the first and foremost commandment dealt with loyalty to God. There shall be no other gods before God. If the people were to be God’s people, then they must always know who their God is. Not Baal in whose temples one worshipped by engaging the services of a prostitute. Not Molech who demanded the sacrifice of the firstborn. A successful relationship with God demanded loyalty.

In a sense, a marriage relationship was a reflection of the relationship between God and God’s people. To succeed, both parties must be whole-heartedly for the other and whole-heartedly loyal to the other. As the people in a sense belonged to God, two people in a marriage belonged to each other.

The second factor is that the law was a reflection of the culture of the day. The thread of property rights weaves its way through the law. A woman belonged to her husband in the sense that she was his property. Adultery happened when a married woman was involved. Two unmarried people could engage in sex and it wasn’t called adultery. A married man could engage in sex with an unmarried woman and it wasn’t called adultery. But when a married woman did it, then it was breaking the law. Then it was a death sentence.

In matters of life and death, there could be no mistakes concerning guilt. No accusation or circumstantial evidence was enough to condemn the adulterer to death. Guilt must be without question.

What would Jesus do? A story from John’s portrait of his life tells us.

One day Jesus was in the Temple in Jerusalem. The seat of religious power and authority. He was sitting with a small group, engaged in conversation, more or less minding his own business.

In came a delegation of men – scribes and Pharisees. They were half dragging, half pushing a woman forward. They shoved her forward and she stood before them all. One of the Pharisees stepped forward and began to speak – “We caught her fair and square,” they said. “In the very act of adultery. Now you know what the law says, teacher. The law says that such ones are to be put to death. What do you say?”

They had Jesus in the perfect trap. This woman was caught. What would Jesus say?

He walked a dangerous path no matter what he said, for the stakes were high. A human life was at stake. Jesus, the man who preached the love of God had the very life of another human being resting on his choice of words. His own fate rested on the very same words. How would he answer? Stone her or let her go free? What would happen in either event?

We want the Jesus we know to say, “Oh come on you guys, show a little mercy on the poor girl. Let her go.” Maybe the Pharisees wanted him to say that too. If he did, then they could tell everyone, “Jesus recommended a course of action that was against the Law of Moses. He is a lawbreaker and he encourages others to do the same.” Someone who encouraged people to disregard the Law of Moses could be cast out of the Temple. Who would listen to a discredited prophet?

Perhaps they wanted him to enforce the law. Perhaps they wanted him to say, “You’re right. The law is clear on this point. I wish I could help you ma’am, but the law says you have to die. Take her out and stone her. But let her blood be on your head.”

Where would all his talk of love be then? Then they could say, “Some Messiah he turned out to be. He couldn’t even save the life of a poor misguided woman. He couldn’t stand up to the Pharisees.” Add to that the fact that Roman law held exclusive rights to all executions, religious or not. If the actions of a lynch mob could be traced back to something Jesus said, then the Romans might take drastic action. The Pharisees could say, “We told you he was a trouble-maker all along.”

And in the middle of it all, stood the woman. It looked as though she would pay a heavy price no matter what Jesus said. At first, he didn’t say anything. He just stooped down and started writing in the sand. Was he trying to stall? Did he need time to think? What was he writing?

No one knows what he wrote. That’s the storyteller’s way of challenging us to fill in the blanks. What would we write in the sand? I might think of something such as, “It takes two to tango. Where is the other party to this accusation?”

As guilty as the woman may have been, the Pharisees were using her to trap Jesus. If the law said that a man and woman caught in adultery should be put to death, and she was caught in the act, then where was the man?

Maybe he just stooped down and started a game of tic tac toe. By writing on the ground he showed his unwillingness to engage their loaded question and thus his unwillingness to allow them any control in the situation.

Then he stood up to speak. When Jesus does speak, he speaks to the situation of the Pharisees as well as to the woman –

‘Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.’

Now he turned a potential mob into a gathering of individuals. You can hide your actions in a mob. But an individual stands out. An individual willing to admit freedom from sin must step forward and throw the first stone. Even the Pharisees who prided themselves on their strict observance of the law paused at that condition. Who wants to go first?

Does this mesh with the rest of Jesus teaching? In another story he said, “If you even look at another person with lust in your heart, then you are guilty of adultery” (Matthew 5:27-28). This was not a radical teaching either. Even the teachers of the law were familiar with that interpretation. So those same teachers who put Jesus to the test were well aware of what true adultery was. Just because no one could catch the thoughts of their heart, did not mean they were any less guilty than the woman they had caught “in the act.”

So one by one they drifted away. The ones who were older and wiser saw the truth of the matter first. Perhaps there would be another day, another trap. But for this day, the trap had been sprung and those who set it became the quarry.

Jesus stood alone with the woman. He said to her, “Is there no one here to condemn you?”         

“No,” she said, “they all went away.” In that answer she tested the idea that Jesus would   not condemn her either and she was right. He did not condemn her, for to condemn her would be to sentence her to death.  He said to the woman, “Neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more.”

This is the part where people who still hand onto judgemental tendencies will say, “See, even Jesus recognized her sin. So we should love the sinner but hate the sin.”

On the surface, that sounds fairly reasonable. We do need moral standards after all. But to anyone who proclaims, “Love the sinner, but hate sin,” I will say, “Oh indeed. I do love you. Tell me about your sins so that I can have something about to hate; so that I can say, ‘I hate that about you.’”

The scribes and Pharisees treated a woman like an object; something to be manipulated for their own ends. Jesus saw people not as objects, but-as human beings of infinite worth to the Creator. He changed the rules by treating both the woman and her accusers as equals. He offered everyone in this story the opportunity to travel a way toward freedom, grace and mercy. 

“Go and sin no more” – embrace the life God makes possible for you.

The path was there – perhaps she took it. The path was also there for those who were willing to kill her over a point of law. But they would save their stones for another day. Both they and Jesus knew that his own death was just a stone’s throw away. Amen.