"Without Sin."

John 8:1-11.  (June 28, 2015)

I.

The Sukkoth holiday is winding down.  It is the morning of the last day, which started the evening before.  After walking into the city from the Mount of Olives, where he was staying, Jesus sits down to teach in the Temple.  As he is talking he hears a commotion approaching, as some religious authorities are forcibly dragging and pushing a woman through the crowd.  When they finally get to where he is they make her stand in front of him like a convict before a judge, and inform him, “This woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery.  Now in the Law, Moses commanded us to stone such a woman.  Now what do you say?”

We are told by the narrator that this is a test because they wanted to bring some new charge against him.  They expected him to let the woman off, thereby breaking the letter of the Law, thereby showing himself to be soft on crime, an excuser of immorality, going against the Bible, unpatriotic, and undermining the very foundation of the society: the family.  All things that Jesus and his followers have been accused of throughout history.

There is of course so much wrong with this picture that Jesus is probably rolling his eyes with frustration.  For instance, it takes two people to commit adultery, and if this woman really was caught “in the very act,” the other party must have been present at the arrest.  And yet he is not dragged here with her, even though the Law of Moses applied to him as well.  So right from the start we have this hypocritical, self-serving, unjust, selective enforcement of the Law.

The woman is a classic scapegoat.  She’s about to be basically lynched by an angry mob as a sacrifice for their sins.  She is going to be unconsciously used to unify the community, as everyone goes against her.  Then they can feel they have expunged some great evil and done God’s will, and thus feel good about themselves because they kept the rules of the Bible literally and preserved the nation from impurity.  They will focus their rage and fear on her with every rock they hurl at her, and they will go home justified and satisfied that their religion and nation and families have been saved.

This is the way that blind, fearful, shallow, and ignorant communities had kept the peace and constructed social unity for centuries.  To avoid the chaos of disorder and to preserve the fragile stability of the status quo, periodically some weak soul has to be almost randomly selected from the group, made into a common and public enemy, vilified, scorned, rejected, and slaughtered.  And this kind of thing still happens even in our hyper-civilized culture.

II.

One of the most amazing and powerful things about the Bible is the way it consistently speaks from the point of view of the victim.  The obvious example is Isaiah 53, the Suffering Servant passage.  Throughout the Psalms we hear these laments of people who have been basically ganged-up on, even by their friends.  Jesus knows that whatever sin this woman committed, at this point God is with her, the suffering one, not the angry mob and the smug authorities.

So the woman is standing in front of him, the crowd is jeering and calling for blood, the police and their bosses are watching, ready to make the arrest.  And Jesus starts writing on the ground, of all things.

We know from historical sources that when Roman judges delivered a sentence, they would first write it down, then they would read aloud what they had just written.  It is possible that Jesus is mocking the judicial system by pretending to pompously write down the sentence, apparently playing along with the self-righteous hypocrisy exploding all around him.

The authorities keep pestering him, badgering him, taunting him to render his opinion.  “O famous rabbi, expert on the Law, are you going to go along with what your ‘Father’ gave us in the Bible?  Or are you smarter than God?  Is your word more authoritative than your ‘Father’s’?  You who like to dismiss the Law by saying, ‘the Law says this but I say to you now…’?  Are you going to be faithful to Scripture or overturn it with your own opinion?  What’s it going to be, O great Messiah?”

They think they have Jesus in a no-win situation because if he rules in the woman’s favor he rejects the plain sense of the Bible, and if he rules against her he shows he is no better than they are, and in effect one of them.  If they don’t get to stone her, their religious freedom is infringed!  Either way he loses.

Jesus stands up.  Everyone goes quiet.  Then he says, “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.”  Then he goes back to writing on the ground.  The place remains silent as these words sink in.

It is as if he says, “Okay.  We all know the Law.  We all know what’s supposed to happen here.  We have to expunge the abomination from our midst.  Let the stoning begin!  But.  Let the first righteous administrator of divine justice be himself or herself pure and sinless.  For it would be hypocrisy, would it not, for someone to condemn this woman when they have done similar things themselves and avoided detection and punishment?  Adultery is certainly a sin.  It’s prohibited in one of the Ten Commandments.  I am assuming that anyone qualified to punish this sin, would also have kept those Commandments perfectly.  So, if you never took the Lord’s name in vain, never violated the Sabbath, never coveted something that didn’t belong to you, never stole, and so on, be my guest.  Grab a rock and get to work.  But if you were to punish this one when you have sins on your own head, would that not draw down God’s judgment on you even more?”

III.

“Are we alive because we have kept God’s Law so perfectly?  Is our life a reward for perfect obedience?  Or is it by God’s grace and forgiveness, God’s infinite patience and forbearance, God’s overlooking our sins, that we yet live?  If we carried out the Law to the letter, with the ruthlessness you wish to apply to this woman, which one of you would survive?”

“So by all means, go get a rock.  But remember that you are no less a sinner than this woman, and next time it could be you they’re ready to stone.”

And one by one, beginning with the older folks, the people remember that they have other things to do today, and wander away.  No one throws a single rock.  

The authorities would be fuming at this point.  Heck, what is this world coming to if only perfect people are qualified to enforce the laws?  It is a recipe for chaos!  Anarchy!  A total breakdown of the social order!  But not even they manage to toss a stone in the woman’s direction.  That would be beneath them anyway; if some of the blood got on them they’d have to go through this whole purification thing, with which they could not be bothered.…

The lynch mob quietly dissipates.  Jesus, who is still crouched or kneeling down, intently writing on the ground, is left alone with the woman, who remains standing there.  She still stands before her judge, who is this scruffy guy scribbling on the pavement.

Jesus stands up and looks around.  “Where’d everybody go?” he says. as if he didn’t know what was going on.  “Has no one condemned you?” he asks her.

She shakes her head.  “No one, Lord,” she says.

“Me neither,” says Jesus.  “Go on your way, and from now on don’t sin again.”  The Lord does not downplay or ignore her wrongdoing.  He doesn’t excuse or celebrate adultery, which is actually a very violent and destructive thing to the soul and to relationships.  He just knows that violence never works.  He knows that only grace and forgiveness heal violence and free people from sin.

I don’t think this woman did sin again.  For one thing, everyone else had left.  She is the only one who could tell the story.  Who knows that she didn’t tell it as a member of the early church?  Who knows that this incredible, miraculous grace and forgiveness does not completely transform her life?  There is a reason why the church cherishes this story so profoundly.  Too many of us have been there, rejected by others, standing with our crimes before the Judge, who then says, “Neither do I condemn you.  Go on your way.  And don’t sin again.”  Too many of us have been found and released by the saving love of God.

IV.

When Jesus says, “Don’t sin again,” he means turn away from the alienation and violence, the judgment and condemnation, the fear and the anger, that lead us into disastrous actions like adultery, or any of the other things rightly prohibited in the Commandments.  Jesus says that if we want to get rid of these bad practices that are killing us, the only way is through forgiveness, patience, acceptance, and love.

Is it a ruthless lowering of the boom on sinners that keeps society together?  That is the argument for harsh and selective enforcement of our laws today.  Violence and retribution are the only things those criminals understand! we say.  And when we apply such remedies we become just as much sinners ourselves.  Because violence and retribution are the only things any of us understand, when we are under the sway of evil.  

You know, people were lynched in this country until only about 50 years ago.  If you want to learn about the application of hell in human existence, read some accounts of lynchings.

We have not rid ourselves of this scapegoating impulse.  We have merely domesticated, systematized, and rationalized it.  Society still relies on terror, choosing some nearly at random to serve as human sacrifices, thereby assuaging our guilt, stoking our fear and anger, pumping up our self-righteousness, and manufacturing a counterfeit unity.

We do this through allowing any white male idiot to have a gun, and encouraging them with this idiotic and cowardly ideology of self-defense.  Thousands of Americans die from gun violence every year.  They are part of our human sacrifice.  

And we do it through locking up in prison a far higher percentage of our population than any other country in the world.  Most of the incarcerated have committed non-violent crimes, or no crime at all and were forced into a plea bargain, and the majority of them happen to come from minority communities.  

In these two ways and others we keep the blood of human sacrifice flowing.  This is how we affirm our worship of Baal and Moloch and whatever other evil demon we have decided to let rule in our consciousness.  This is what we choose to do with our religious freedom.  

V.

Jesus is saying that it doesn’t have to be this way.  It may be the way human societies have coped for 10,000 years.  But he comes to finally abolish human sacrifice, and all sacrifice, by himself becoming the final sacrifice, in which God’s live is given for the life of the world.  In this way he takes away sins and restores us to our true, created, blessed, and good relationship with God, each other, and ourselves.  For it is not by selecting one person or group to suffer our unified violence that human community is sustained, it is by our mutual, humble, grateful, and joyful acceptance together of God’s saving, forgiving, redeeming, and liberating grace.  It is by mutual confession of our own brokenness that we find ourselves healed together and bound to each other and to God.

That is what the gathering of disciples is supposed to be about.  It is the place where we tell each other what Jesus tells this woman:  “Neither do I condemn you.  Go on your way, and do not sin again.”  

In other words, God is not about condemnation, and neither are we.   None of us is sinless; we have done horrible things.  But we are forgiven together.  God has given us new life and a new future.  In Jesu Christ, God has shown us the way of peace and love.  Therefore, do not react out of fear or shame or anger anymore.  You are forgiven.  You are free.  You are loved.

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