[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?
Now … I have to make this disclaimer. I didn’t write these laws but it is important for us to understand the context or the understanding of sexual relationships in Jesus’ day and why they saw adultery as a capital offense deserving of the death penalty. Jewish society was very patriarchal. Period. Now … property was controlled and passed on by the ”paterfamilias” … the “father” or head of the family. His property or assets would be passed on to his oldest son. “In a labor-intensive agricultural society such as Israel’s, the birth of children was crucial for survival. … The wife’s primary contribution to the household was to bear legitimate sons to carry on the family name in order to keep limited commodities such as land and other resources within the family” (The New Interpreter’s Bible. Volume 7. Nashville: Abingdon Press; 1996; p. 207).
Adultery was a disruption to the patriarchal system because it violated the trust and sanctity of the marriage covenant and it could cast doubt as to the lineage of the children. Sounds outlandish at first blush but there are many, many men … even today … especially with the advent of DNA testing … who have found out that a child or children that they thought were theirs were, well, someone else’s. Not only are their hearts shattered by their spouse’s infidelity but they have been emotionally and financially invested in raising offspring of another man who is not bearing any of the burden … financially or emotionally … of raising the child that they brought into the world. This is far more common that you might think.
I don’t want to go too much farther into this. My point is that adultery is, as the Bible describes it, an evil in our midst. Yes … the man that this woman had an affair with is just as guilty as the woman … but that’s not the issue that I wish to highlight today, okay? The point is that she was guilty. John even makes the point that she was “caught in the act” (John 8:3). Period. And the law was very clear … she had committed a capital offense and the punishment for her adultery was death.
So let me draw your attention back to the rock in your hand. Picture yourself holding a rock like this [hold up big rock] and let me ask you this … could you do it? Could you throw a rock like this at someone knowing the pain that it could cause? The injury? That your rock could possibly be the final blow that ends a person’s life? And even if it wasn’t your particular stone that killed the person, you know that you contributed to this person’s suffering before they died. Even if you didn’t pick up a stone, could you just stand there and watch as someone gets beaten to death? Even if they deserved it?
I would suspect that most of us would say ‘no way,’ am I right? But before we start throwing stones at the religious leaders, before we can judge the people picking up stones, we probably ought to take a look at ourselves first, amen? We may not execute people for having affairs but we do, in fact, have the death penalty, right? Again, this is not about whether the death penalty is right or wrong. The fact is that we have some behaviors that we deem worthy of the death penalty. The difference is that we have sanitized it and removed it from public view … perhaps as a way of assuaging our guilt … washing our hands of their blood … or to avoid the horror of it. We do executions today for the same reason that they did them in Jesus’ day … to maintain the order of society … to purge the evil from among us … only now we do it with lethal injections or electricity … or we literally toss them in jail, throw away the key, and let them rot. We may tell ourselves that these methods are more humane than bashing someone to death with a rock but the end result is the same, amen?
I think that public executions served two purposes. One … it made a very public statement about the consequences of breaking certain laws and served as a persuasive deterrent … all though … no matter how tough we get on certain crimes … like murder … people seem to keep committing them. I think public executions satisfy our need for justice … you know, an eye for an eye … though the execution of an offender doesn’t usually bring the satisfaction to the injured party that we think it does and it only creates more pain for the family of the criminal whose been executed. But two, I also think that public executions have another effect … one that we lose by removing them from the public eye. If we were to witness a public execution, no matter how righteous we felt in participating in it, it would have to be a pretty horrible thing to see, to be part of it … which, I think, would make us very reluctant to rush into executing someone. To me, I think our politicians would be a whole lot more reluctant to rush into war, for example, if they were the ones having to pick up a gun and actually go to war and risk being shot or having to shoot someone, amen?
It may be tough to be on a jury that has to deliver a guilty verdict in a death penalty trial but it would be horrible to have to sit there and watch as that sentence was being carried out … however it’s done, amen? It still has to be witnessed by the state and some members of the court but I’d hate to be one of them who has to do that, wouldn’t you? And if I did, I’d have to be one hundred percent convinced that that person was guilty and that the death penalty was the only suitable punishment for the crime, amen?
According to the law, this woman was guilty … despite the intentions of the religious leaders … despite the fact that she had a partner in crime. She was caught in the act and under the eyes of the law, she was guilty of adultery and the prescribed punishment for adultery was death. Period. That’s the facts of the case. The religious leaders had Jesus right where they wanted Him. He had no choice but to pronounce her guilty and run afoul of the Roman law. Uphold one law, Jewish law, and get condemned by another law, Roman law. And it is this legal bind, this legal trap that Jesus uses to make a truly amazing point: If you live by the law you better be prepared to die by the law.
Think about it. There are two sets of laws here and the religious leaders are actually, quite cleverly, pitting two legal systems against each other. Okay, follow me here. Under Jewish law, the woman was guilty of breaking one of the Ten Commandments … adultery … but the religious leaders are also guilty of breaking another commandment … the Ninth Commandment that prohibits anyone from bearing false witness against their neighbor (Exodus 20:16).
Now, on the surface, the Nineth Commandment seems like a prohibition against lying in court or lying in a legal dispute … well, any dispute actually. But here’s the thing … the courts could be used as a weapon, amen? The law in Jesus’ day said that you needed two witnesses to establish whether something was true or not. What if I wanted to take someone’s vineyard, for example, and I were say, a king named Ahab who was married to a very clever and scheming queen, named, say, Jezebel, wouldn’t be possible for me to, say, bribe a few low-lifes or pressure someone in my employ to lie for me in court and “legally” achieve my aims and then claim my innocence because everything was, shall we say, “legal”? This kind of thing has been going on for centuries and still goes on today, amen?
Now … the religious leaders were lying or bearing false witness against this woman … not because she was caught in the act … not because they weren’t so interested in justice, because if they were they would have made an effort to find her partner in crime and bring Him before Jesus too. Nope … they had what they needed and their goal was not justice but to use the law to trap Jesus and possibly get Him arrested or executed … which is a form of deception and manipulation to hide their intentions … hence bearing false witness as to their true motives.
The problem with using the law as a weapon is that the law can one day be used against you. I hate “cancel culture.” I hate it … but I love watching the advocates of cancel culture get canceled themselves by cancel culture. Love it. I absolutely love it when the rules of cancel culture are used against those who make the rules or are the loudest advocates for the cancel culture. “’Mr. Bean’ actor Rowan Atkinson compared cancel culture to a ‘medieval mob looking for someone to burn’” (Sadler, K. Top 10 Recent Examples of Cancel Culture. The Washington Post, February 16, 2021). Kelly Sadler, a reporter for The Washington Post, gives a pretty good description of ‘cancel culture.’ “No one is immune to woke politics,” she wrote in The Washington Post. “It doesn’t matter how long ago a person made their irredeemably offensive comments, or how passionate their apologies are —the social media mob takes no prisoners” (Sadler, ibid.). She goes on in her article to say that cancel culture “cuts one way” (Sadler, ibid.) but not so. Some of you may know the name of J.K. Rowling, the famous author of the Harry Potter series. She is an active and vocal supporter and defender of women’s right. She recently was canceled because she came out and expressed her concern that transgender rights will ultimately endanger women’s rights. “She’s since defended her comments on her website and joined 150 authors and academics denouncing ‘cancel culture.’ These actions have only further infuriated her critics, who called for a boycott of her books and for her publisher to stop paying royalties” (Sadler, ibid.). Case and point … the recent controversy over University of Pennsylvania’ swimmer “Lia Thomas” who used be a male swimmer by the name of “Will Thomas.” We have a transgender female, a former male Olympic track and field gold medal winner, Caitlan Jenner, who says that “Lia Thomas’ recent NCAA victories aren’t fair” (MSN.com; March 19, 2022) and former tennis star Martina Navratilova says that Lia Thomas’ records should have an asterisk beside them. Feminist groups like “Save Women’s Sports” have been protesting outside the swim meets where Lia Thomas has been competing. “The group believes in sex-based rights and doesn’t agree with many moves made by Democrats to include biological males into women’s activities” (MSN.com; March 19, 2022). My point is not political here although I’m briefly highlighting a very highly charged political and social issue. My point here is to simply raise the question of who gets to cancel whom? The transgender and LGBTQ people feel that the feminist should support transgender women like Lia Thomas because, in their opinion, Lia Thomas is a women and for feminists to oppose or criticism someone like Lia Thomas is “transphobic.” Remember … if you live by the rules, you may die by the rules or find yourself trapped in a quandary by the very rules that you try to impose on others … which may be the point that Jesus was trying to make when He knelt down and began writing in the sand.
Again, a lot has been written about what Jesus may or may not have written in the sand. There are a number of theories and thoughts. Some hold that Jesus wrote down the name of every man holding a stone, going from the oldest to the youngest. Others believe that Jesus wrote down the sins of the men who were holding the stones. We don’t know. The theory or explanation that appeals to me is that Jesus was writing down the words to Jeremiah 17:3 which literally reads:
“Oh YHVH, the hope of Israel, all those who leave Your way (law) shall be put to shame through public humiliation/embarrassment, and will have their names written in the dust (sand) and blotted out, for they have departed from YHVH, the fountain of living waters” (Verri, L. Saltradioministries.com, February 16, 2007).
Whenever a person was accused of a crime, such as adultery, the accuser, the accused, and at least two witnesses were required to go to the priest, who would bend down and write the person’s crime, along with the names of the persons accusing them, in the dirt or dust of the Temple floor. Actually, the priest “could write the names and violation anywhere in the Temple so long as it was not permanent” (Verri, ibid.). Writing it in the dust or dirt signified that the person’s crime could be literally “swept” or wipe away.
Do you remember what your first stone represented? It represented the stone tablets on which God wrote the Ten Commandments with His finger … signifying His strength and the permanence of the Law. Jesus Himself proclaimed that He did not come to abolish the law but to fulfill them (Matthew 5:17). In fact, He even goes on to say that “unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:20). The question here is not the law but how the law was being applied. The religious leaders were right. The woman did violate the law and the punishment was death but the spirit of their intentions, perhaps that was what Jesus was calling into question. But again, we don’t know what He wrote in the sand that caused the religious leaders and the men in the crowd to drop their stones and go home.
Do you remember what the second stone represents? Our hearts of stone. The law can be right but it can be used cruelly. The religious leaders were so determined, their hearts were so hardened against Jesus that they had no concern, no feelings for the woman who was just a pawn in their game to catch Jesus. Remember, the point of the law against adultery was to remove evil from among the people and they saw Jesus as so threatening or so evil that they were willing to use the law in an evil way … a way in which it was never intended to be used. It was designed to protect us, to help us co-exist, to live in safety and relative harmony, to help us deal with the disruptive forces in an evil, fallen world … not to hurt someone … not to be used as a weapon to destroy someone … and certainly not to treat people as expendable pawns in their quest to destroy Jesus. Their hearts were so hardened against Jesus that they didn’t stop until they had accomplished their mission.
But some hearts of stone were broken. Whatever Jesus wrote in the sand, when the people saw it, they dropped their anger, they dropped their self-righteousness, they dropped their stones, and went home. [Hold up picture.] I found this picture on the internet. [Describe the picture.] I know that it’s hard to see from where you’re sitting so I’ll leave it over by the cross so you can get a closer look at it.
As Jesus was writing in the sand, the religious leaders and some in the crowd kept demanding a verdict from Him. Jesus stands up and faces the woman’s accusers and in an ingenious way, accuses them. “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her” (John 8:7). In fact, in Leviticus, one of the Old Testament books outlining and defining the law, God cautions us to be very judicious when it comes to using the law and passing judgment on people.
“You shall not render an unjust judgment; you shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great; with justice you shall judge your neighbor. You shall not go around as a slanderer among your people, and you shall not profit by the blood of your neighbor: I am the LORD. You shall not hate in your heart anyone of your kin; you shall reprove your neighbor, or you will incur guilt yourself. You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the LORD” (Leviticus 19:15-18).
When we judge, we are not to show favor to the poor or the rich … but to judge all fairly. We are to reprove our neighbor. In the case of this woman, we’re not called to stone her to death but to do like Jesus and encourage her to repent, to go and sin no more. Our judgment comes from love, a desire to see her change her ways … ways that were destroying her relationship with her family, possibly destroying the family of her lover, certainly destroying her own heart and soul because the wages of sin is death … a soul-crushing, spiritual death. Jesus doesn’t say that her sins are forgiven, you notice that? She is a sinner dead-to-right. Period. What He does say is that He doesn’t condemn her. “Now go your way and” … pay close attention … “go your own way and do not sin again” (John 8:11).
If a police officer pulls me over for speeding and lets me off with a warning, I’m still guilty of breaking the law but the officer has shown me mercy be letting me off with a warning in the hopes that I will be grateful for his mercy and slow down. If the officer catches me speeding the next day, however, is he likely to send me off with another warning? Or is he going to lay the full weight of the law on me because he gave me a second chance? Imagine this woman going off and having another illicit affair after this? She may have … we don’t know. For her sake, I certainly hope not. You’d think she’d be crazy to do something like that, but I know people … too many people … who have been given break after break, whom God has gotten out of scrape after scrape … and that, like dogs, return to their vomit again and again and again … as the Apostle Paul puts it … or they are like sows, pigs, that have been washed only to return to the mud again and again and again.
As I mentioned earlier, the religious authorities tried many times to use the law to trick Jesus into condemning Himself … and they finally succeed. When Jesus is brought before the Sanhedrin, they brought forth witnesses … false witness in violation of the law prohibiting giving false testimony … to testify that Jesus had threatened to destroy the Temple and rebuild another one not made by human hands (Mark 14:58). The problem was that the false witnesses couldn’t keep their stories straight, so the religious leaders plowed on, determined to find some kind of legal means of silencing and ending Jesus’ ministry. The High Priest pulls out all the stops and throws out his ace-in-the-hole, his ‘Hail Mary’ legal maneuver: “Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One?” Jesus can’t lie. Unlike the Sanhedrin and their paid witnesses, Jesus cannot and will not bear false witness. “I am; and ‘you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of the Power’ and ‘coming with the clouds of heaven’” (Mark 14:62).
The High Priest explodes. Tearing his clothes in rage and disgust, he shouts: “Why do we still need witnesses? You have heard his blasphemy!” Like the woman caught in adultery, legally, he has Jesus. The laws against blasphemy … especially blasphemy at this level … were severe. “Anyone who curses God shall bear the sin. One who blasphemes the name of the LORD shall be put to death; the whole congregation shall stone the blasphemer. Aliens as well as citizens, when they blaspheme the Name, shall be put to death” (Leviticus 24:16). Even Jesus Himself said that the only sin deserving eternal damnation was … blaspheming the Holy Spirit. It wasn’t the fact that Jesus claimed to be the Messiah … it was the fact that He claimed to be the “Son of the Blessed One” … a standard way of referring to God without using the name of God because, well, the High Priest wouldn’t want to break any rules, amen? After all, he was the poster person for religious piety, amen?
Jesus is led outside the city. Instead of picking up stones and throwing them at Jesus … they threw the law at Him. In the minds of the religious authorities, they were in keeping with God’s command to remove the evil from their midst. In the eyes of the Romans, it was to disgrace Him and to place a troublemaker, a rebel on display as a message of what happens to people who try to defy the power of Rome.
I stand before you this morning a condemned man … every bit as guilty as that poor woman caught in the act of adultery. I don’t know whether or not Jesus wrote their sins in the sand but He certainly knows my many sins and I do know that my sins were swept away that day on the cross. [Walk down to the cross with the two big rocks.] This rock represents the rock with my name on it. It represents the sin in my life that condemns me. And this rock represents the rock of entitlement … the one that I feel justified throwing at other people for their many sins … real and imagined. I lay it at the feet of the only One … with a capital “O” … qualified to judge the heart and soul of another. As the Apostle Paul reminds us:
“Why do you pass judgement on your bother or sister? Or you, why do you despise your brother or sister? For we will all stand before the judgment seat of God. For it is written, ‘As I live,’ says the Lord, ‘every knee shall bow to me, and every tongue shall give praise to God.’ So then, each of us will be accountable to God” (Romans 14:10-11).
I invite you now to come and lay your rock … be it the rock with your name on it or the rock that you’ve written some else’s name on … or both … and lay it here where it belongs … at the feet of Jesus, amen?
