Gems in the Gospel of John
Part 33 - John 8:7
Throwing stones
There are problems with the first 11 verses of chapter 8 indicated in most Bibles by using a different print. The experts reckon that it was not written by John, mainly because some of the words used are quite different from the rest of this Gospel, but common in the others, and many of the oldest manuscripts have put it somewhere else, either in this gospel or even one of the others.
But it has all the marks of being a genuine fragment about an episode in the life of Jesus, and it is part of the New Testament we have been given so we should treat it as scripture. It is one of the best known events in the life of Jesus. So much so that there are many popular sayings about ‘throwing the first stone’. Unfortunately most of the comments on it mistake the true focus of the account which is neither that sexual sin is not as important as many people think nor that the guardians of morality can be very hypocritical, and that the pursuit of a self-righteous judgement is wrong. The true focus is on Jesus – as usual in the Gospels – his attitudes, his actions and his words.
The local guardians of morality had set up the whole scene but there were several mistakes in what they did. The woman and her partner should have been warned that their action was wrong, not acceptable, and could lead to death sentences. We are not told that this had happened. There should have been witnesses, at least two of them, to verify that she had been caught in the act of intercourse. Circumstantial evidence, such as that she had been seen coming out of a small room with a man, was not enough. Also, perhaps most important, where was the man? Under the Judaic law both partners had to be produced and punished equally (Leviticus 20: 10).
The clear intention was to trap Jesus into doing or saying something that would enable them to accuse him of blasphemy. Even the fact that this what they were trying to do this way is interesting. Jesus must have had a reputation of being a ‘soft touch’ who would prefer to treat the woman lightly rather than apply the full rigor of the law to her.
The way that Jesus dealt with this very difficult situation is almost unbelievably clever. He said nothing. He wrote in the sand on the ground. What he wrote we have no way of knowing. There have been many guesses down through the ages but none of them are any more than that – guesses. Very possibly it was a significant act in their culture that was saying something like ‘I do not agree with your actions and I am deliberately not going to answer because what you have done is wrong’.
When they attempted to get him to say something he looks up and says the famous words “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” Then he stoops down again to write, perhaps so that the accusers knew he was not watching them and accusing them individually.
A new world had come, a new world had broken in, and the ways of this new world, the Kingdom of God, were crucially different. This new world was focused on people’s futures, not their pasts. Jesus does no more than recognize that she had been living a life of sin before saying the positive thing “go now and leave your life of sin”. That was his usual habit. He would acknowledge that someone had sinned – haven’t we all – but then move them on with a positive action or exhortation to live differently in the future. He did that for the woman at the well by telling her who he was, and that propelled her into a life of witness and a future we can only imagine. When Jesus met up again with the man he had cured by the pool of Bethesda he tells him to stop sinning so that his future would be brighter. Zacchaeus might seem to be the exception but he decided to make restitution, it was not anything Jesus told him to do.
Of course, when you stop and think about it this had to be the way it happened. Jesus brought a message of forgiveness and grace. What he offered was always free grace, wonderful grace, grace demanding only belief and consecration. So there was never any place for spending time working out, puzzling, agonizing, over what anyone, including you and me, have to do by way of restitution before entering the Kingdom. No, the past is the past. The Lord has forgiven and forgotten our pasts. We may find it hard to forget our own pasts. Even those of us with normally bad memories may find there are things in our pasts we cannot forget! But we are to try to do so.
We start the Christian life with a clean sheet of paper and a book with nothing written in it. That is the wonderful way of the Kingdom. We, with the help of the Holy Spirit, are given the responsibility to write only good things in our book of life. It is as if the old pages, recording what we did before we decided to follow Jesus, have been stuck together so no one can read them any more. Even when the Lord himself picks up the book of our life on the great final day those pages will be stuck together; he will only read the unstuck pages. Isn’t that wonderful!
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