Introduction
Some people have said that religion is the development of myths and stories to provide moral principles to control human behavior…to create moral rules in order to control social behavior. There are certainly some destructive tendencies that social groups would want to contain. I believe that there is certainly truth to such a perspective.
> However today, as we continue our series, A Journey with Jesus through the Gospel of John….. we are reminded that it is exactly in this way that Jesus transcends any such religion or religious ideas. He has engaged us in the very intersection of human history… and what he brings to bear is that which confronts the mere human use of rules to control people… he transcends religious rules for the sake of a deeper spiritual need.
John 8:1-11 (NIV)
1 But Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. 2 At dawn he appeared again in the temple courts, where all the people gathered around him, and he sat down to teach them. 3 The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before the group 4 and said to Jesus, "Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. 5 In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?" 6 They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him. But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger. 7 When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, "If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her." 8 Again he stooped down and wrote on the ground. 9 At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the woman still standing there. 10 Jesus straightened up and asked her, "Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?" 11 "No one, sir," she said. "Then neither do I condemn you," Jesus declared. "Go now and leave your life of sin."
I find this to be one of the most defining moments not only in the life and ministry of Jesus… but a defining moment for us all, as it speaks to the very essence of our lives.
It’s an encounter that we may play more than one role in… we may fear the stones that could be raised at us… and if we are honest, we have probably held some stones ourselves. We would never think of actually throwing stones at other people but our culture makes throwing verbal stones an art. We may be as quick to judge the religious leaders as they were to judge this woman.
At the heart of this encounter lies a power that is at work in every one involved.. the power of shame… and how it is dealt with.
The feelings begins with those dramatic words… ‘caught in the act of adultery.’
As Max Lucado describes…
"Caught in the act of adultery." The words alone are enough to make you blush. Doors slammed open. Covers jerked back. "In the act." In the arms. In the moment. In the embrace. "Caught." In an instant she is yanked from private passion to public spectacle. Heads poke out of windows as the posse pushes her through the streets. Dogs bark. Neighbors turn. The city sees. Clutching a thin robe around her shoulders, she hides her nakedness. But nothing can hide her shame.
Shame. We all feel the sense of exposure that’s at hand… and exposure that reflects her shame.
Shame is described as the sense that we have failed to live up to acceptability. We stand exposed, bound and condemned.
Shame alien¬ates us from those at hand, makes us acutely aware of ourselves as ‘deficiency incarnate.’ When we are ashamed, we bow our heads - not to pray but to hide. Letting someone look us in the eye is especially painful because their gaze seems to pierce to the soul - the deepest and real self now fears to be seen.
(Adapted from Rodney Clapp, Christianity Today, March 11,1991)
Sometimes our shame is private… we know someone treated us in impure ways… or we have been rather impure with what we have looked at or seen. Private viewing… private cheating.. private thoughts. Even on this Father’s Day some may feel they really failed as a father… or some may feel that as children they failed their fathers. No one else knows. But you know. And that’s enough.
Sometimes our shame is public. An untimely pregnancy that speaks for itself.. Branded by a divorce you never imagined.
Whether private or public, shame is always painful.
We can all feel some level of deficiency and doubt that alienates us.
Jesus knows it’s the condition we are all born with… Genesis… in the Garden… when they disobeyed God… they felt naked and ashamed and tried to hide.
And it is to just this condition that Jesus becomes so profound and powerful.
The Scriptures predicted that the Messiah would perfectly combine Compassion and Justice (Matthew 12:18-20.) Here we see how these two traits don’t fight in him they unite in him.
He comes in all the power and authority of the Creator’s perfection…as well as the gentleness that only such a God of love could offer. He meets our shame with the power of grace and forgiveness…. a profound forgiveness.
So the first thing I am reminded of here is that…
1. Jesus’ forgiveness reflects his care for me as an individual… standing with me even in my shame.
If you’ve ever played chess or been around anyone who has, then you know that the board is filled with different characters each having different abilities. Some of the more powerful pieces are the rooks and the knights. The most valuable player on the board is the queen. She can move in any direction as many places as are vacant. Most chess players would sacrifice any other player before they would sacrifice the queen. On the other end of the scale, the first row of players on both sides of the board are called “pawns”. They are not very valued players because of the fact that they are very limited in what they can do. They can only move one space at a time, but you had to get them out of the way in order for the big guys to have space to work. Their only real value was in drawing the other guy’s players out so that you could get them in a trap. No one minded very much when one of your pawns got killed. It was no great loss.
Look at verse 6 of this passage. It describes how they were…
“using this question as a trap”
They were using this whole process as a TRAP.
If Jesus set aside the requirements of the law, they would be able to refute that he was the Messiah… or even arrest him for blasphemy and turn the people against Him. If He went along with their plan and stoned the woman, then they could get Him in trouble with the Romans. At that time, the Romans were the only ones who had the right to carry out the death penalty. Jesus was between a rock and a hard place.
These leaders were pretending to be such defenders of the law but it was nothing but a trap.
It doesn’t take much thought to realize that this had nothing to do with the law… it was just a set up.
According to the law, adultery was punishable by death, but only if two people witnessed the act. What are the chances of two people stumbling upon an early morning flurry of forbidden embraces? Unlikely. But if you do, odds are it’s not a coincidence.
And what of the man? Adultery requires two participants. What happened to him? Where did the man go?
Before we even consider how Jesus pierces this deception… we shouldn’t miss what his says about the way each saw people.
They certainly didn’t care about her. In fact, some have suggested that she was set-up. They may have planned the whole situation and sent in a man to coax her to sleep with him just so that these Pharisees could have the opportunity that was now before them. Their purpose their was to destroy Jesus, and the only way they could do that was by destroying that woman.
As Lucado describes,
“To these men…… she’s immaterial. Merely a pawn in their game. She is a necessary; yet dispensable, part of their plan. Imagine the fear she felt… the intensity by which she stared down at the ground….. She knows she’s been set up. No need to look up. She’ll find no kindness. She can see the stones in their hands. She thinks of running. But where? She could claim mistreatment. But to whom? She could beg for mercy, but these men offer none. The woman has nowhere to turn. > “What the woman did was shameful, but what the Pharisees did is despicable.”
Now contrast Jesus’ attitude toward her with the attitude of her accusers. Think of what Jesus had to lose by his attitude toward this woman. He had already been accused of being a drunkard and a friend to prostitute and tax-collectors. The only thing that He had to gain by forgiving that woman was her love.
> She was a pawn to the Pharisees, but to Jesus, she was a queen – worth defending and worth sacrificing everything in order to protect.
Jesus didn’t see an adulteress… or a prostitute… he say a daughter… an omage bearer of God.
My son – graduation – I wanted to cheer for him… and leave no doubt I was with him.
Do you know how valuable you are to Jesus? Do you know how much He loves you?
He loves you so much that He was and still is willing to sacrifice everything for you. You are not a pawn on His chess-board or a star in His crown or a notch on His gun. You are special and treasured by Him. He made you. He died for you.
Towards that end, Jesus must set something straight…
2. Jesus’ forgiveness pierces the illusion of moral innocence that alienates us from others.
One life is thrown into the center for all to focus on. Their stones rise like an interrogator’s light… that exposes another while it hides the identity of oneself. In the same way… they had created a great separation. They had created the separation we all can create… between good and bad… sinners and righteous. The problem is … it’s an illusion. Jesus knows that from this arrangement, they were free to project their stones… but that they were not just projecting their stones… they were projecting their own guilt and shame… projecting it upon her.
Jesus was not engaging those who were sincerely concerned about her… or those simply confronting her with love (as later he did)… but rather… he confronts the power that is driving them… which is not love but guilt being projected. They were doing what we often do when we don’t know how to deal with our own sin… they were projecting it. They could not handle a savior who embraced that all are sinners in need of grace…. it threatened their self righteousness…and this was the prefect plot to settle their special place.
They appear to be reflecting a tendency I sense in some of us… which is the unconscious idea that if we are more serious about punishing some public sin… then we think it proves that we are more serious about being good.
> But show me someone who is really judgmental of others… and I’ll show you someone who hasn’t found grace for themselves.
> The drama made her so much the focus… the real sinner… and certainly adultery was understood as among the greatest of offenses… because it violated the deepest of bonds… the marriage vow. But in fact… we are all adulterers… all fundamentally unfaithful to the lover of our souls. We have all prostituted ourselves in different ways… selling our dignity to others.
Romans 3:23 (NLT)
For everyone has sinned; we all fall short of God’s glorious standard.
“All” doesn’t mean me and not you. And “all” doesn’t mean you and not me. “All” means everyone.
Jesus pierces the illusion of moral innocence….. but even this he does with care for all in mind.
He simply declares: “If any one of you is without sin…”
He simply invites them to think again about whether they are qualified. In essence, he lets them tear down the wall with their own choice to walk away.
They may have worried what would come next. He could tear it down himself…. by naming some things… in fact many speculate that what he was writing n the ground, was perhaps the whole of the ten commandments…. just to broaden the scope of righteousness… or perhaps some very specific sins of their own. In any case, he could have left every one of them as naked as this woman. He could leave every one of us as naked as this woman…. cowering… unable to easily look into the eyes of one another. So he says to the crowd… and to us… lets just set this right… there is no moral innocence. … lets just get this right.
> The reason Jesus seeks to dismantle the wall… is because there really are not two characters in this story… the innocent and the guilty…the judges and the judged… that is the false wall itself.
And so, the young look to the old. The old look in their hearts. They are the first to drop their stones. “They began to go one by one, beginning with the older ones first.” Why the older first? Perhaps it’s simply because life has a way of sobering us. Many of us have a lot of great ideals when we are twenty…. including ideals about ourselves. But as the years go by… we have a way of getting humbled…the oldest simply have no pretense left about being without sin. And as they turn to leave the younger don’t feel so strong… and follow as well. Voices become quiet… and are replaced by the sound of rocks going thud of the ground… and the shuffle of feet.
Whatever age we are…we all live between the ideal self (denial) and real self (despair)… and Jesus knows we ALL need forgiveness… reconciliation.
This scene reveals a third basic truth about such forgiveness…
3. Jesus’ forgiveness is the only thing that stands between me and death.
Perhaps the most striking word in this text… is that one word… ‘stone.’
It’s hard for us to grasp the depth of what this woman was feeling without considering what was really at hand. They were calling for her to be stoned. Needless to say ‘getting stoned’ didn’t imply the same thing it does in our modern western culture.
She was getting ready to face death by stoning. In verse 7, Jesus talks about casting the first stone. There was a particular way that stoning happened in biblical days. The persons who were the witnesses that sealed the fate of the accused would be the ones who would use the first stone against the condemned. They would take a large stone [pick up a stone from off the platform] and use it to crush some vital portion of the person’s body – the chest cavity or the head. If the victim survived, then the rest of the crowd would join in with smaller stones until the person was dead.
Imagine the horror…your body being crushed piece by piece…. not by an accident… but by the very judgment of your own community…. the very hands of your own community.
That woman had no one standing with her on that day. The law was against her because of her crime. The crowd was against her because they wanted to destroy Jesus. There was not one thing that that woman could do to escape the consequences she was about to face. There was only one person, and the only way, was Jesus. He was the only thing that stood between her and death.
There was no one to stand between this woman and death – no one except Jesus.
The Bible records in Romans 6:23 that “the wages (or our just reward) for sin is death”
> What we deserve because of our sin is the same thing that that woman deserved because of her sin. We deserve death.
Do you understand that this is true for you and for me as well?
• Your parents don’t stand between you and death.
• Your spouse doesn’t stand between you and death.
• Your money doesn’t stand between you and death.
• Your relative or comparable goodness doesn’t stand between you and death.
The only thing that stands between you and eternal separation from the God of life is Jesus Christ and the forgiveness that He provides through His death on the cross.
We really miss the reality here if we think Jesus was just a nicer guy… and was minimizing sin.
Jesus never excuses sin… never implies, ‘as long as you feel bad we’ll just pretend it never happened’… why?… because he cannot. Justice is real. We have done a remarkable job trying to remove any trace of personal responsibility from our nature…. but it is the greatest deception ever formed.
We’ve exchanged the power of forgiveness for the biggest lie of all… that nothing really matters… that it’s all relative. Minimize dismiss
The forgiveness that Jesus offers to us is not ignorant of our guilt and it’s consequences… . rather he forgives us because he has the power to resolve our guilt in Himself.
He isn’t playing down our sin … he is paying for our sin.
1 Peter 2:24 (GW)
“Christ carried our sins in his body on the cross so that freed from our sins, we could live a life that has God's approval.”
In less than a year after this woman’s encounter with Jesus, Jesus was crucified. One of the sins that He paid for as He hung there was this woman’s act of adultery.
When Jesus offers forgiveness to us, the only reason that He can do so is because the penalty that we owed has already been paid.
Similarly…
4. Jesus’ forgiveness bears the only authority that can ultimately condemn me.
As we already noted… Jesus allows anyone to throw the first stone if they are ‘without sin’… because only they are qualified. All of her accusers left because they were not qualified to condemn her.
The only one left? The only one left is the only one who bears the authority to condemn… and that is Jesus. Only Jesus was declared to have been “without sin.” (Hebrews 4:15)
Hebrews 4:15 (NIV)
“…one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are--yet was without sin.”
He is the only one that can ultimately condemn us… and he is the one who steps in between… and stands up for us…. and takes the condemnation himself…. And then declares that we can be free.
You are going to have to make a choice in life… to be condemned by all who may judge you… to be defined by all who may not approve of you… whether parents, spouses, friends, or enemies…. Or whether you are going to recognize only one voice that bears the authority to define you at all… and that is your Creator represented in Christ.
When he has silenced the condemnation… and you have heard his voice of forgiveness… you need to hear the power of freedom.
5. Jesus’ forgiveness of my sin bears the responsibility to choose a life of freedom from sin.
What Jesus offers this woman is not some cheap form of grace that just says ‘go on… back to the life you had.’ No… after silencing the voices of condemnation, he says… go and
“leave your life of sin”
He told her to stop doing what she had been doing that got her in this mess in the first place. Jesus wasn’t talking about sinless perfection. He was talking about repentance. “Stop making sin the habit of your life.
We often have compassion that relativizes morality, or morality that crushes people.
If I really hear the truth of his forgiveness, I will hear the power of freedom from sin.
There is a story about a man came back to work in a place where he had been fired several months previously. His work was superior. A fellow worker remembered how inconsistent he had been in the past and asked, "What happened to make such a difference in you?" The man told this story: When I was in college I was part of a fraternity initiation committee. We placed the new members in the middle of a long stretch of a country road. I was to drive my car at as great a speed as possible straight at them. The challenge was for them to stand firm until a signal was given to jump out of the way. It was a dark night. I had reached one hundred miles an hour and saw their looks of terror in the headlights. The signal was given and everyone jumped clear -- except one boy. I left college after that. I later married and have two children. The look on that boy's face as I passed over him at a hundred miles an hour stayed in my mind all the time. I became hopelessly inconsistent, moody, and finally became a problem drinker. My wife had to work to bring in the only income we had. I was drinking at home one morning when someone rang the doorbelll. I opened to find myself facing a woman who seemed strangely familiar. She sat down in our living room and told me she was the mother of the boy I had killed years before. She said that she had hated me and spent agonizing nights rehearsing ways to get revenge. I then listened as she told me of the love and forgiveness that had come when she gave her heart to Christ. She said, "I have come to let you know that I forgive you and I want you to forgive me." I looked into her eyes that morning and I saw deep in her eyes the permission to be the kind of man I might have been had I never killed that boy. That forgiveness changed my whole life.
I believe that women saw deep in his eyes of Jesus the permission to be the kind of woman she might have been had she never lived the kind of life I had lived.
He invites her to walk in the light of forgiveness and freedom.
Whenever Christ gives word of grace comes a word of direction… growth and obedience. We aren’t required to be sinless before we can be forgiven. But once we have been forgiven, we are called to turn and change the direction of our lives… to follow in the way of love for the one who gave so much for us.
Her response is unstated …perhaps because it’s our story too…and waits for our response.
CONCLUSION
The teachers of the law and the Pharisees were right about two things on that day.
The payment for sin only comes through a death. Either you can pay for your sins with your own eternal death … or you can accept the death of Jesus as payment for your sins. The second thing that they were right about is when someone is trapped in sin, the only good thing that you can do is to take them to Jesus.
What had to come from outside of religious rules was the power of forgiveness… the freedom of forgiveness.
How can we respond?
First, If you are here this morning, and you have already accepted Jesus as your savior and received his forgiveness, let it be a reminder of what you have been forgiven. When we forget what we have been forgiven, we either fall back into it, or we lose our love for the One who forgave us.
Second, let it be an example for the kind of forgiveness that we are supposed to give to one another and to those that are a part of our everyday life. Are there some stones that you’ve raised… to condemn another? Hear the words of Jesus afresh… ‘he who is without sin’ is the only one qualified to condemn another. Let them run deep… until you know what to do wit your stones.
Finally, if you have never received Jesus’ forgiveness this is an invitation for you to receive forgiveness for your sin and cleansing from your guilt. No sin is too great to be forgiven, and no sin is to small to need forgiving.
We are here before a God of second chances.
If you would allow me to borrow from the words of Max Lucado again:
If you have ever wondered how God reacts when you fail, frame these words “neither do I condemn you’ and hang them on the wall. Read them. Ponder them. Drink from them. Stand below them and let them wash over your soul. Or better still take him with you to your canyon of shame. Let him stand beside you as you retell the events of the darkest nights of your soul.
And then listen. Listen carefully. He’s leaving a message. Not in the sand, but on a cross.
Not with his hand, but with his blood.
His message has two words; “Not guilty.’
Resources: I am grateful for the great thoughts of those I may draw from. I will usually study the text and form my own shape and points. In the process I may insert various ideas and statements from others (commentaries and messages related to the same text) which are related to the points I have developed. I do not use these notes as a manuscript that is either memorized or read… but rather as a guide for the thoughts I offer. If I actually read or quote another I will refer publicly to the source. This message drew thoughts from Max Lucado (from ‘He Still Moves Stones’ and at maxlucado.com), Chris Talton, Dale Harlow, and Tim Keller.
