Fifth Sunday in Lent
“Justice, Mercy, and Faithfulness” — Rev. Brent Gundlah
First Gospel Reading (John 8:2-11/NRSVUE)
Second Gospel Reading (Matthew 23:23/NRSVUE)
Today’s first reading from John’s Gospel is a really good story in and of itself, but there’s more to it than that. In a theological sense, it provides us with valuable insight into who Jesus was and what he stood for. As an added bonus, it contains a great quotation: the one about the person without sin casting the first stone. And on top of all that, the way that this passage found it’s way into the Bible, and thus into our collective consciousness, is also worth considering. I guess what I’m saying is that there’s a lot going on here.
If you look in your pew Bible you might notice something interesting about these verses — they appear in brackets. And they appear in brackets because most scholars believe that they weren’t originally part of John’s Gospel (or any other Gospel for that matter). This is a story about Jesus that was likely told amongst the earliest Christians, but one that Mark, Matthew, Luke and John didn’t, for whatever reason, see fit to include in their respective accounts of his life.
It is, in fact, nowhere to be found in most early manuscripts of the New Testament. But in some it appears in at the end of Luke 21 (where it actually kinda fits into the narrative), while in others it shows up either in various places in chapter seven of John or tacked on to the very end of John. In the version of the Bible we here use today, it’s located at the end of chapter seven because that was where it just so happened to be in the manuscript that Saint Jerome used to translate the Bible into Latin way back in the fourth century and it’s been stuck there ever since.
But, like I said earlier, it’s a really good story — one that gives us a unique glimpse into Jesus’s life and ministry — and the fact that early compilers of the Bible went through so much trouble trying to find a place to put it should inspire us to spend a little bit of time thinking about how it might speak to us today.
Right before it begins, Jesus has just managed to elude the Pharisees who are trying really hard to get rid of him once and for all. They sent the temple police to arrest Jesus for going around teaching and healing and telling people that he’s the Messiah, but the police — like the enthusiastic crowds that have been listening to Jesus — were so taken aback by what he had to say that they refused to do it.
The Pharisees are not happy about this because Jesus is constantly challenging and undermining their authority, and they just want him gone. They lash out in frustration at the people in the crowd and the temple police for their lack of understanding of the law (really, for not agreeing with the Pharisees’ particular interpretation of the law).
Then, one of the Pharisees, a man named Nicodemus (who appears earlier in John’s Gospel to engage with Jesus in a debate about what it means to be “born again”), steps up and points out something important to his fellow Pharisees; he reminds them that: “Our law does not judge people without first giving them a hearing to find out what they are doing, does it?”
The Pharisees can’t really argue with that because Nicodemus is right, and so their only response is to demand once again that Jesus be arrested and to belittle him because he’s from Galilee. Apparently, the idea of the powers-that-be denying people their rights under the law and judging them purely on the basis of where they come from is nothing new.
The Pharisees go home with their tails between their legs to figure out their next move and Jesus heads to the Mount of Olives to pray (he often goes off by himself to pray in Luke’s Gospel, which is why some folks thought this story fit in better there). The next morning, Jesus returns to the temple in order to teach his growing band of followers, and the Pharisees (now joined by the scribes — who have devised a new plan to get rid of Jesus) meet him there to implement it. This is the one and only time the “scribes” are mentioned in John’s Gospel, lending further credibility to the theory that this passage was not originally part of the Fourth Gospel. And this is where our story for today begins.
The scribes and Pharisees have brought with them a woman who has been caught in adultery (which was a violation of the law) and make her stand before them to be judged. But this isn’t really about this woman and her alleged sin; it’s a ruse they’ve devised in order to trap Jesus.
They begin by asking Jesus, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery. Now in the law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?” And we know that this is a trap — a way for the scribes and Pharisees to come up with an actual charge to lay on Jesus — because who ever wrote this story tells us so. What transpires next is a courtroom drama that reads like a first century episode of Law and Order.
From a purely logical point of view, you really have to give these scribes and Pharisees credit for the trap they’ve set (even though it’s really devious) because there is no answer that Jesus can give to their question that won’t get him in trouble, that won’t give them a charge they can finally ring him up on.
If Jesus were to declare that the woman should be stoned, he’d be thumbing his nose at Roman law, which prohibited execution for adultery. And if Jesus were to say that she shouldn’t be stoned, he’d be contravening the law God gave to the Israelites through Moses, which said that she should be. But the legal conundrum Jesus faces here is actually even more complicated than that.
If he says anything at all here — if he participates in this sham trial in any way, shape or form — he’d also be violating the law. Deuteronomy 22 states that, “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,” and the man who engaged in this alleged adultery is nowhere to be found here.
In addition, Deuteronomy 20 clearly states that, “A single witness shall not suffice to convict a person of any crime or wrongdoing in connection with any offense that may be committed. Only on the evidence of two or three witness shall a charge be sustained.” And as far as I can tell from the story, there’s not even one witness to be found here, let alone the required two or three.
And so what does Jesus choose do? Well, for starters he leans down and writes with his finger on the ground — which is admittedly a strange thing to do. What did he write? I have no idea, but that’s irrelevant. You see, what he’s really doing here is challenging the very legitimacy of this trial by refusing to take part in it at all.
But the scribes and Pharisees don’t seem inclined to let this one go; they keep questioning Jesus, trying to trip him up; they’re so consumed by their hatred for him that they can’t see the folly in what they’re doing. And Jesus is having none of it. He gets up off the ground and points the proverbial finger right back at them, reciting his famous line about the one without sin casting the first stone.
His point, of course, is that the scribes and the Pharisees are certainly not without sin — not only for concocting this whole illicit scheme to entrap Jesus, but also for all of the other things they’ve done to violate the letter and the spirit of God’s law. And after these scribes and Pharisees have once again retreated (because they know that what Jesus is saying is true), Jesus turns all of his attention (and thus ours) to the exploited victim in this whole situation: the woman who was put on “trial.”
I use the term “trial” in the loosest possible sense here because, as I mentioned earlier, this wasn’t much of a trial; it was all for show. The law wasn’t followed, there was no due process, there were no witnesses, the co-defendant is nowhere to be found, and the accuser isn’t even present.
This poor woman is used by the scribes and Pharisees as a pawn in their ongoing quest to silence Jesus, and their ongoing quest to silence Jesus is, at it’s essence, a way of deflecting attention away from themselves in order to preserve their own power and dominance. Focus on this woman’s alleged sins, focus on Jesus’s alleged sins and, in so doing, hopefully ignore ours.
But “She’s an adulteress!” and “He’s a blasphemer — and on top of that he’s one of ‘those people’ from Galilee; he’s not one of us!” Let’s talk about that stuff some more and hopefully you’ll become so fixated on it that you won’t notice what we’re doing — namely, violating your rights and robbing you blind. It’s one of the oldest tricks in the book.
Many if not most readings of this story jump right over all of the courtroom drama and head for the finish line — namely, Jesus’s forgiveness of the woman that takes place at the very end. Looking around for the accusers who have since scurried away like rats, he turns to her and asks, “‘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 again.’” It’s a poignant end to the story, and it’s classic Jesus — the Jesus we see over and over again throughout the gospels — which kinda makes you wonder why the scribes (the ones who assembled the Bible, not the scribes in the story) went through so much trouble to find a place for it.
Maybe it’s because forgiveness, important as it is to Jesus (important as it is in general), isn’t the main point of this story. And maybe the woman’s alleged adultery isn’t the point of the story either.
Maybe the abuse of the system by the scribes and Pharisees, the abuse of the law they were charged with upholding, the abuse of people they and the law and the system were supposed to protect, is the point of the story — and it’s a point they definitely don’t want us to see.
And so when we choose to focus on this woman’s alleged sin, or on Jesus’s forgiveness of it (which kinda just seems like a way of focusing on it from a different direction), perhaps we fall into the trap here.
Don’t you see? It’s not about what Jesus did or what this woman did; it’s about what the scribes and Pharisees did; it’s about how they used people; it’s about how they pitted people against one another to accomplish their own nefarious goals.
Because, let’s face it — if you can cut through all the… stuff, if you can focus your attention on who is being exploited and how, it’s generally not hard to understand who’s doing the exploiting and why.
This was true back in Jesus’s place and time and, sadly, it remains all too true in ours. And so the question for us, I suppose, is this: Once we’ve figured all that out what, if anything, are we actually going to do to change it?