Drop It Series

[Pick up little stone.]

Yeah … there’s been a lot of jokes about the risk I’m taking by handing out stones before the sermon. Look at the stone in your hand. Yeah … getting hit by a rock this size could hurt … especially if it hit me in the head or hit me in the eye or something, amen? I guess it would hurt no matter where it hit me depending on how hard you threw it. But the stones that they used in the Bible … and still use in some parts of the world … weren’t little stones like these. They would use stones like this [pull out first stone … set it down with a thump] or stones like this [pull out the big stone … hold it up.] So imagine holding a stone like this in your hand and imagine that you’re about to throw it at someone … as hard as you can … to kill them. Whoa! Pretty sobering thought, amen? [Pause … then set rock down with an audible thud.]

Now … we’ve all heard a lot of sermons about this particular event in the Gospel of John but I’m going to ask you to look at it in a way that you may not have looked at it before. To begin with, we love to judge the Pharisees and the scribes who dragged this poor woman before Jesus and demand that He convict her of adultery. A lot has been said over the centuries about the intentions of the religious leaders. Did they set this up? Was this woman the victim of their scheme to trap Jesus? It wouldn’t be the first time. This situation is pretty close to the situation at the Temple when the religious leaders asked Jesus about paying taxes. If Jesus said that the Jews should pay their taxes, his credibility would be destroyed among the Jews, but if He tells them not to pay their taxes then they can report Him to the Romans and have Him arrested for inciting insurrection or disobedience. It appeared to be a win-win for the religious leaders. They seem to have put Jesus in a no-win situation here … only much more drastic in that the life of an actual human being hung in the balance at this particular moment. If Jesus says that the woman is guilty of adultery, the Mosaic law, as they were quick to point out, requires that the woman be put to death. If they stoned her to death, then Jesus was guilty of violating Roman law because only the Romans were allowed to carry out the death penalty … which is why the religious leaders had to drag Jesus before Pilate before they could have Him executed. If Jesus did not condemn this woman as the Mosaic Law required, then His credibility and standing as a rabbi was destroyed and His movement was effectively over.

Now … a lot has been said about the fact that this woman’s partner in crime was not brought before Jesus … after all, it takes two to tango … or, in this case, to commit adultery, right? This is a serious question but not one that I want to concentrate on today. As we shall see in a minute, there is no doubt that a double standard existed. What I do want to concentrate on, however, is the legal aspect of what happened. The bottom line is this … the woman was guilty … stone-cold guilty … caught-in-the-act guilty of a very serious crime. Period.

The laws that the religious leaders cited were Leviticus 20:10 and Deuteronomy 22:22.

Leviticus 20:10 reads:

“If a man commits adultery with the wife of his neighbor, both the adulterer and the adulteress shall be put to death.”

Deuteronomy 22:22 reads:

“If a man is caught lying with the wife of another man, both of them shall die, the man who lay with the woman as well as the woman.”

Well … that’s pretty clear, amen? Both laws are based on the Seventh Commandment: “You shall not commit adultery” (Exodus 20:14). The purpose of the Ten Commandments and the resulting 613 laws sprang from the same desire, which Jesus summed up perfectly. The first three commandments are about loving and serving the Lord with all your heart, with all your mind, with all your strength … and the remaining seven had to do with maintaining harmonious and peaceful relationships with our families, our friends, and our neighbors.

The purpose of the Ten Commandments, the purpose of the resulting 613 laws, the reason that any society has laws is so that we can, as it says in Deuteronomy 22:22, “purge the evil” from our midst, amen? Murder is evil, amen? It causes chaos and disrupts society. You can’t have people running around killing people. Murderers are removed from society so that they can’t commit any more murders or take any more lives. Stealing disrupts society. The break down of the family disrupts society, which is why God commands us to honor our mothers and fathers. Lying disrupts society. And adultery disrupts society … as anyone who has been cheated on or divorced can tell you, amen?