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October 22, 2006
Jesus and the Adulteress
Leviticus 20: 1-10
John 8: 1-11
October 22nd, 2006
Probably this story of Jesus ranks up there with His feeding the five thousand as best known. Jesus and the adulteress! It has all the elements of great drama. The righteous Son of God on one side of the triangle. The woman, caught in the very act of adultery on another. Her accusers on the third side with stones in hand. They wait to accuse Jesus who has already shown Himself apparently soft on Sabbath keeping in the company of a woman caught red-handed in violation of an offense that merits the death penalty.
They remind Jesus what He already knows. “The law of Moses commanded us to stone such.” But they only said half what the law of Moses says. We just read the law in Leviticus; both of those involved in the adultery were condemned. Where is the man now?
We read this story from afar, two thousand years later. We look on uneasily. Adultery is not uncommon today even among Christians. It is one of a number of loose attitudes we have about sex. Among those who read this story are those who know where they fit into the picture. Sex has come to be treated as a strictly biological and social function for many today. It is not a moral matter; it is more like eating and drinking, just a natural appetite to be enjoyed.
But we’re uneasy with this because we know how infidelity shatters homes still, despite how loose thinking about sex has become. And we have guilty consciences as we realize that pornography has stolen the purity of many a Christian heart. Many Christian homes have become dens of iniquity as we participate vicariously in private in the vilest of acts. MSNBC has caught on film and shown to the world respectable members of society in the act of preying on children sexually. How surprised we are at some of the offenders. Him?
We realize that adultery is now viewed “seriously” from two sides. On the one hand when it is others who are involved in it we recognize how wrong it is. How can she just dump her husband with her kids looking on? What is she saying to them about the importance of faithfulness in marriage?
On the other hand if it is we who are involved in an adulterous affair it does not seem like a wrong. “How could something that feels so right be wrong?” a man thinks who feels those soaring passions of longing and desire for someone else’s wife. It feels just like the days before marriage when he was dating. Only now there is the complication that there was a day he stood in the front of a church with this now no-longer beloved woman and promised to be faithful to her until death.
I can’t forget being told many years ago by a friend that sleeping with her husband now felt like adultery because she loved another man. We go with our feelings an awful lot these days. But we reveal our sense of what is really right and wrong as we feel feelings of condemnation when we see others offending.
We look hard at this story hoping to find some justification for our looser attitude toward adultery. Jesus didn’t stand with her accusers, agreeing that she deserved death. When Jesus heard the accusation of this woman He bent down and started doodling in the dust. Or was He doodling? What was He writing? The woman’s accusers looked at what He wrote and something caught their attention.
It has been suggested that he wrote in the dust the words of the seventh commandment, “You shall not commit adultery.” It is just two words in Hebrew. In Hebrew the verb is masculine. Lo tinaf. The you is masculine as it always was when making a general rule. But we wonder if one after another of her accusers read that “you” and saw a finger pointed at him. They knew what that law meant.
Rabbinic law was already being developed according to the principle we read in the Mishna. It was a pious Jew’s duty to guard the Torah against violation by building a fence around each command. Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount was in keeping with this principle. The command that says “Don’t murder” means not only “don’t take the physical life of someone but also don’t destroy him emotionally.” “Don’t say, ‘You fool,’ or be angry at him so that you crush his spirit.”
The law that says, “Don’t commit adultery” means “Don’t look lustfully on a woman too.” The Pharisees who saw Jesus doodling in the dust may well have understood how they all offended against the law in spirit. Standing in the presence of a Man whom they knew to be pure however offensive he was to them, their consciences rose up against them. So that when Jesus stood to answer their question, “Let him who is without [this] sin among you cast the first stone,” they melted away, one after the other. Only Jesus and the woman remained.
Jesus asked her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” The last time in John’s Gospel that He addressed a woman with the word “Woman,” it was His mother. Do you remember at the wedding in Cana Jesus’ mother had mentioned to Him, “They have no wine.” Jesus seems rude in saying to her, “Woman, what have you to do with me?” I proposed when I spoke of this moment in Jesus’ life that when He called His mother, “woman,” He used the word the first man, Adam, said when he saw the glorious creature God created from his rib. He called her ishah, woman. She was first ishah the mother of the human race before she was called Eve (havah), a name that is very like the word for life in Hebrew. Mary, Jesus’ mother, has played a mother role to many in the Church. Now this woman joins the list of “mothers,” the first in the Gospels to receive the good news of the mercy of God.
Did she deserve mercy? When we read the law in Leviticus that those caught in adultery should be killed it does not say that the ones who would execute the guilty had to be without sin. It seems that the issue was only if you were caught in the act. Yet even back then there must have been a feeling that something wasn’t quite right that the guilty ones who have not been caught should condemn and execute those who have been caught. Unfairness hovered over the whole judicial system then as it does now.
F.W. Robertson said in a sermon he preached before judges in Brighton, England many years ago that justice without mercy is not justice. Because every judge knows in her own heart that she offends. Every judge knows that he does not stand as a righteous person sincerely defending the majesty of the law. Because if he was so concerned about the majesty of the law he would step forward and admit publicly, mea culpa. I am guilty. Power prevents perspective.
But now back to the story. The woman replied to Jesus’ questions, “Where are they? Has no one condemned you?” “No one, Lord.” And Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you; go and do not sin again.” Why did Jesus not condemn the woman? Was it because He didn’t think adultery was wrong or that the woman was guilty? No on both accounts. Jesus said not a jot or a tittle of the law would pass away till all were fulfilled. And the law did say that adultery should receive the death penalty. But the death penalty did not have the last word.
We began this morning’s worship service remembering the psalmist’s words, “Bless the Lord, O my soul, who forgives all your iniquities, who heals all your diseases.” “The Lord who forgives all your iniquities.” Paul wrote, “The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.”
The death that comes as the reward of sin comes naturally despite what comes to a person legally. All who are not caught in their offense legally will still suffer the consequence. Perhaps the consequence will be a ruined conscience, a lost sensitivity to sin so that gradually a person is dragged down into worse and worse behavior until he is a moral wreck. For some sins there comes physical death as the body is eaten away by the effects of the sin. For every sin there comes some consequence in this life.
But the God who created us, who knows that we are made of dust is greater than our sin. And here we see Jesus as the God who forgives all our iniquities. But it does not stop there.
Jesus said to the woman, “Go and do not sin again.” We need to hear this merciful guidance that we can follow after we have been forgiven. So long as we are condemned and feel it, what incentive do we have to mend our ways? What does it matter to a condemned person if he adds to the offenses? How can he be condemned over and over again? The silly justice that sentences a murderer to multiple life sentences for multiple offenses knows full well that a person only has one life to live, one death to die.
Behind human condemnation stands the justice of God who will render to us all according to what we have done. But the justice of God in rendering to us what we deserve reserves the right of showing mercy. “He knows our frame. He remembers that we are dust.” The reason why Jesus died for our sins was so that we would not need to suffer the penalty that we deserved for our sin. He died our death that we could live His life. It is a great mystery how this is so, but that the Bible teaches this is beyond doubt. God, the only righteous judge, is full of mercy to those who fear Him.
I wish we knew something of the trajectory of this woman’s life after Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you; go and sin no more.” Maybe she was the woman Luke describes who anointed Jesus’ feet with a mix of her tears and precious ointment. As this was happening Simon who had invited Jesus to dinner said under his breath, “If this man were a prophet, he would have known who and what sort of woman this is who is touching him.”
In response Jesus told a parable about a creditor who had two debtors. One owed a little bit, the other owed a lot. The creditor forgave them both. Jesus asked his host, “Now which will love him more?” Simon rightly answered, “The one, I suppose, whom he forgave more.”
We say, “I suppose” when we are reluctant to state the obvious. We rightly live as Christians only if we give up the tendency to say, “I suppose,” when we forthrightly apply the grace of God to our sin. “I suppose I need God’s grace,” is a sad way to be a Christian. I think we are so harsh with one another sometimes because we think, “I suppose” when we sing “Amazing Grace” with everyone else.
I hope that as we put ourselves into the picture of this story we may, like the men who accused the woman, quietly slink away when we hear Jesus say, “Let him who is without sin among you cast the first stone.” But then let us somehow also remain as the woman and hear Jesus say to us, “Neither do I condemn you; go and sin no more.” And perhaps if we have understood how unworthy we are to cast that first stone, and how we have heard Jesus’ mercy extended to us, we can take His mercy seriously so as to act on Jesus’ guidance, no His command, that we would love to obey out of gratitude, “Go and do not sin again.”
How do these things apply to you and me today? Whom are you condemning with stone in hand? Can you feel the pleasure of the woman who has enjoyed the mercy of God? Let us hear God speak to us and respond as we ought.
O Lord God, for your mercy that endures to every generation we give you thanks. Grant to us to live beneath your mercy with such gratitude that we sin less and less until the day when we see Jesus and sin no more. Amen.
Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at October 22, 2006 09:30 AM