JMS: What are you doing to me? This is outrageous! You have no business putting me on trial! I didn’t do any more than anybody else did. Let me go! This is crazy!
HM: You know exactly why I’m putting you on trial. That woman was as guilty as sin, and so are you. You were with her. You participated in the whole mess.
JMS: Haven’t said I did, haven’t said I didn’t. But I did neither more nor less than anyone else, so why in the name of common sense have you come down on me?
Look, let me remind you what was going on, and maybe then you’ll come to your senses, if you think you could release your icy grip for a couple of minutes!
HM: Well. But don’t try to get away. I know where to look for you, and it will be much worse for you if you try to escape.
JMS: Agreed. No problem. In a way that you probably cannot understand, I very well know that I cannot escape. I cannot escape the consequences of what I have done. I cannot escape responsibility for what happened to that girl. And, most of all, I cannot escape remembering what my actions did to the Lord.
But, then again, I have already escaped. I have escaped a penalty more harsh than any prosecutor could ask for. I have escaped retribution more dire than whatever this jury will sentence me to. You just don’t know what I have escaped. But you can escape too.
HM: What kind of drivel is this? You have escaped? Forgive me, but it looks to me as though we have you in very definite custody. That rope is no shoestring, and there are guards at all the doors. You aren’t going anywhere.
And as for my escaping, well, I don’t have anything to escape from. I’m not on trial here; you are. My conduct is not in question; yours is. So let’s get on with this.
JMS: We’ll see who or what is in question. But may I make my statement to the jury?
HM: Not until I have read the formal charge against you. The jury must know precisely why you are here.
Elder Smith, you are charged with failure to enforce the law of God. This is a charge of negligence, namely that you witnessed a crime and were not diligent to carry out the penalty.
JMS: All right. Now what crime did I witness and what was I expected to do? Let’s be very specific, prosecutor.
HM: The statutes involved are these. From the law of God contained in the Book of Exodus, Chapter 20, Verse 14, to wit: "You shall not commit adultery". And then from that same law of God, revised statutes, the Book of Leviticus, Chapter 20, Verse 10, namely, "If a man commits adultery with the wife of his neighbor ... the adulteress shall be put to death." You are accused of failure to enforce these things. How do you plead? Guilty or not guilty?
JMS: I plead forgiven.
HM: You plead forgiven? What is that? Answer the question, just as I have put it. Guilty or not guilty?
JMS: Counselor, I cannot and will not answer the question just as you have put it. The whole problem lies with the way many of us put questions. We put lots of questions in ways that makes us sound blameless, and we are not. We are not blameless in this matter.
HM: Not blameless? I will take that to mean guilty.
And since you have pled guilty, I will lay out the evidence against you.
I intend to show that on the morning in question, you, Elder Smith, were in the company of a young woman, whose name we will not mention here in order to protect her husband’s reputation. I intend to show that you, sir, did see her in the very intimate company of a man not her husband, and that, instead of interrupting this illicit business, you took up a position of observation and did nothing. Exactly nothing. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I intend to show that this defendant, having a responsibility to exact the harshest of penalties on the aforementioned young woman, neglected to do so and therefore brought disgrace to the very name of our God!
The defendant may now speak on his own behalf, though I must recall the old saying that whoever acts as his own attorney has a fool for his client!
JMS: Indeed I will speak on my behalf, sir, and on behalf of a good many others, too, including yourself.
HM: I must insist that you stick to the matter at hand. I am not on trial; you are.
JMS: We will see; we will see.
Let me set the scene for the jury. The facts of the case, insofar as the prosecutor has stated them, are substantially correct. I have no quarrel with what he has told you.
HM: Aha! I told you that "not blameless" meant the same thing as "guilty". We may as well pronounce sentence and go home!
JMS: Not so fast, counselor. Not so fast. I have no quarrel with what you have told them, so far. But you have omitted a great deal. Let me set the scene more completely.
On the morning in question several of us had planned to go to the temple to hear the new preacher, Jesus. We were curious about what he was saying, because he had created quite a stir in the temple precincts. Not too long ago Jesus had interrupted Succoth, the festival of booths, by standing up in the temple grounds to talk about his interpretation of the law of Moses.
We were very curious, since our colleague, Nicodemus, had become enamored of this preacher and was defending him to the hilt. And to tell the truth, we were more than curious. We were bent on showing him up for the fraud we knew him to be. So many Messiahs, over so many years. So many claiming to be God’s anointed this, Israel’s chosen that. On and on, a bunch of frauds and felons that the foolish will follow, and then the Romans get wind of it and schedule another of their infamous crucifixions. Crucifixions are always followed with more soldiers in the garrison, which means more taxes to pay for the more soldiers. What a drag!
So, we thought we’d see if we could find some way to show up this Jesus as a phony and discourage the people from panting and puffing whenever he comes to Jerusalem. Eight or ten of us got together that morning; we didn’t have a precise plan, but we supposed we’d think of something on the way.
Well, you remember, counselor. We picked you up on the way. As I recall, you were pretty eager to be involved in the project, weren’t you? Said something about learning from your elders.
HM: May I remind you that I am not the one on trial here. You are. You will keep my name out of it.
JMS: Hmm. That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? Keeping your name unstained. We’ll see. We’ll see. Although there is good news for you too, you know.
HM: The only good news I want to hear is that this trial is over and you are declared guilty. Now get on with it!
JMS: All right. Well, as I have said, we were on our way to smoke out this Jesus and see if we could catch him in a trap. Our idea was that if we could show him up as a chronic lawbreaker, the people would abandon him. No good Jew wants to be associated for long with anybody who denies and disrespects the law of God as given through Moses.
I was walking a little ahead of the others; trying to move them along. And so I heard it first …what sounded like heavy breathing; the low moans and groans of something going on that shouldn’t have been going on, if you catch my drift!
Oh, wait, you don’t need to catch my drift. You were there. Just a few steps behind.
HM: I said, stick to the topic and leave me out of this.
JMS: Oh yes; kind of hard to remember to pretend you didn’t see all this for yourself, counselor! But let’s keep the charade going, shall we?
There in the entrance way of her own husband’s home was this woman, in, shall we just say, a compromising position! It was incredible that anybody would take her private business out into the streets like this! And practically under her husband’s nose, too!
Well, I stopped dead in my tracks and just stared for a couple of seconds. I was so startled. Awful! And then I got my wits about me, real fast. I saw that she hadn’t noticed me; too busy, I guess, if you catch my ... Oh, yes, you do.
I say I got my wits about me. I turned around and motioned all the others to stop. I whispered to all of you to hide, and, you remember, we all took positions in the shadows so that we could watch.
Wow! Whew! Kind of gets me heated up just thinking about it! But when it was all over, Nathan and I rushed in and grabbed her by the arms. We said, "Young lady, you’re coming with us!" She struggled a bit, but soon saw that it was no use. She couldn’t scream for fear of waking up her husband. And so, sniffling and snarling, she came along with us to the temple.
At the temple, we pushed her out in front of Jesus and popped the question. "Teacher, what do you say should be done to this woman?"
Now that’s it. That’s all I did. What is so wrong with that?
HM: What is wrong with that? Elder, it is not so much what you did as it is what you did not do. First, you do agree that she broke the law of Exodus 20:14, "You shall not commit adultery." You don’t dispute that?
JMS: Who else was there?
HM: What? I beg your pardon?
JMS: Who else was there? Did she do this act alone?
HM: Well, no one else is in question. We are just talking about the young woman. Or, to be accurate, what you didn’t do with the young woman. You did not carry out the Law of God as given through Moses. It says that a person like this should be put to death, and our custom is that she should have been struck with stones until dead. You didn’t do that. Why not?
JMS: Would you please repeat the citation? What is it the law says?
HM: Leviticus, Chapter 20, Verse 10: "If a man commits adultery with the wife of his neighbor ... the adulteress shall be put to death." And we have always understood that to mean that if you witness it, you throw the stones! Now!
JMS: Excuse me. I believe you quoted that from memory. I would prefer that you read it. The entire citation. Here; I have my copy of the Book of Leviticus with me. Please read, right here.
HM: "If a man commits adultery with the wife of his neighbor, then the adulterer and the adulteress shall be put to death."
JMS: Oh. Now, you see, you left part of that out before. The law applies to the man as well as to the woman. I think we all overlooked that little technicality that morning.
Sir, may I just go on and complete the story? The jury has heard only a part of what happened.
We brought the woman to Jesus at the temple. We asked him, as I have said, what should be done. His reaction was very strange.
He crouched down and made some marks in the dust, saying nothing. We couldn’t see the marks, and so we kept on asking him, "What are we to do?" "What should be done with this girl?" "Tell us, teacher."
He kept on marking in the dust. Somebody whispered, Jeremiah! Jeremiah! There is a passage in the prophecy of Jeremiah that says, "Those who turn away from you will be written in the dust, because they have forsaken the Lord, the spring of living water," But I don’t know even yet what he wrote.
Suddenly Jesus stood up straight. I think I have never seen so tall a man, so erect in stature, so commanding in bearing. He looked around at all of us, going around the circle at least twice. You remember, don’t you? I thought he looked particularly hard and long at you! They say he especially cares about young people like you.
HM: Must I remind you again? You may be looking at a contempt citation if you don’t leave my name out of this!
JMS: Contempt, huh? Good word. I feel some contempt all right.
Jesus stood up, he looked at us all, and he said, "Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her." Let me repeat that. "Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her."
I wasn’t, so I couldn’t. I wasn’t without sin, so I couldn’t throw the stone, and I didn’t.
HM: But the issue was not your sin, or, if you insist on recording my presence, my sin. We didn’t sin. We have kept the Law of Moses. The issue was her sin. Her sin. And what you were supposed to do about it.
JMS: The issue is sin, everybody’s sin. And what we are to do about that.
I thought of several important things, as we stood there and pondered what to do.
First, I thought about how it was when I was young. As young as she; why, you have to remember, she was probably only about twelve or thirteen years old. Old enough to get married in our society, but hardly ready to exercise good judgment all the time. I remembered some of the absolutely stupid things I did when I was that age, just thinking I wouldn’t get caught or that nobody would get hurt or that the law of God didn’t matter that much. I remembered how mindless you can be as a young person. I wondered where I’d be if no one had ever given me a second or a third chance to do right. I couldn’t throw that stone and take away her future.
Second, I thought about how the emotions of the moment had caused me to do things I knew were not right. I remembered business deals I had made, dishonest deals, just because I wanted something and I wanted it right now. I recalled how much I am just driven by wanting, wanting, wanting. And how often that has made me forget about everything else, just to pursue what I wanted, now. I know that in the heat of the moment we make reckless decisions, but that God wants us to grow and to mature and to become what He intended us to be. So, again, I couldn’t throw that stone; I couldn’t stunt her growth forever just because she made an emotional decision.
And then, finally, I thought about something else. I thought about how, before I got to be somebody in this community, people would force me to do things I didn’t really want to do. But it was their power, it was their authority over me, that made me do it. Sometimes we just feel cornered by people who have power over us. Why, I’ve had bosses tell me to falsify the records. When I was this girl’s age, I had an uncle to push me to shoplift some jewelry. I even remember that when r was very young my mother made me go to the door and tell the lady from across the street that she wasn’t home, just because she didn’t want to be disturbed. And when I asked my mother if it was all right to lie, she said, "It is if I say it is." So, you see, I can understand how you can get cornered by the powerful and can be made to do things you would rather not do. Pressure. We men do pressure women. I’ve been there too. No excuses. So, no, no stone for these hands.
I did what I had to do. I left. I was not about to stand there and play this game any longer. It’s awfully painful to remember that you’ve done so many stupid things; you repress the memories for a while, but that doesn’t really help. I needed to get away and think.
HM: Well, we noticed how quickly you left. No spine whatsoever, if you ask me.
JMS: Aha! Did you say, "We noticed ... "? Gotcha! You are finally admitting you were there! Just for the record, counselor, how long did you stay? I was the first one to leave, but a couple of my friends caught up with me a little later. We never did see you again.
HM: Now this is strictly off the record. Can we agree on that? Strictly off the record.
I stayed around and was the last one to leave. I heard every bit of it. I stayed around because all of the rest of you were my elders, and you should have taken the leadership. I am just a junior partner and didn’t feel I should do what the rest of you were too cowardly to do. I was waiting to see if anybody would take any leadership!
By the time every spineless coward had left, it was as if I didn’t matter. Jesus didn’t seem even to see me. He and the woman were essentially alone. Maybe you’d like to know what he said to her; I wrote it down to enter into the record of this court.
He said, "Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?" She said, "No one, sir." And Jesus said, "Neither do I condemn you. Go your way, and from now on do not sin."
Can you imagine! What a patsy! "I do not condemn you … go your way." Can’t even stand up to a little slip of a girl and tell her what’s what! I am disgusted at the whole business, from start to finish. It seems to me that rules are rules, laws are laws, and we get what we deserve, no more and no less.
Therefore my closing argument is, again, that you are guilty of negligence. You let yourself and your compassion get into the picture and you did not do what the rules call for! Guilty!
JMS: A series of questions, if I may, for my closing statement.
At the end of this incident, who felt clean and who felt dirty?
At the end of this incident, who was able to go on with her life and who got their lives all bound up in the relentless need to punish?
At the end of this incident, who felt forgiven and who felt guilty? Who felt peace and who felt anger? Who felt hope and who felt as though the very pillars of society were falling in?
Who was alone with Jesus, forgiven? And which of us had to slink away together, still in sin?
You say I’m guilty. Yes, I am. Guilty of a great many things. But I also say I found forgiveness, just as that young woman did. You say, the law says, I am to be bound. But I am freer now than ever before. I am alone with Jesus, hearing his word of compassion. You, sir, and all the others are together in sin.
But I invite you to let Jesus break your bonds, just as He broke mine. I invite you and all the members of this jury to search their hearts, confess their sins, and trust Jesus to say to them, "Now I do not condemn you. Go your way and from now on do not sin again."
