Monday, May 28, 2018
Stone number one
John 8:10,11
When Jesus had raised Himself up and saw no one but the woman, He said to her, “Woman, where are those accusers of yours? Has no one condemned you?” She said, “No one, Lord.” And Jesus said to her, “Neither do I condemn you; go and sin no more.”
We live in a time of challenging social and moral issues. The matters of sexual orientation and preference that were previously kept in the closet are now on open display. In country after country, the matter of the rights of persons who don’t fit traditional definitions of sex, marriage, and family is being debated and voted on with predictable results. People are no longer coming out because they were never in.
I am no specialist in this area, but I believe that there is a domino effect in the matter of rights for those who are marginalised or discriminated against in our societies and cultures. Once we address the matter of rights for one group we become progressive and gradually take on the case of the next group and then the next.
Progressive activity often starts with the effort to address ethnic or racial minorities, or more popularly the place of women and children. These are all laudable and noble efforts and deserved to be addressed then, and where women, children, or minorities are being abused today the world needs to ensure that it stops. However, success in these areas then take the progressives into the next battle.
Just this week Ireland voted to repeal the Eighth Amendment of its constitution, paving the way for the lifting of one of the strictest abortion laws in the world. The moment that critical vote succeeded everyone had another matter, social or political, to put to voters. Sinn Fein, a political group that was formally a rebel movement, has called for a referendum on a united Ireland following the abortion poll. The group’s Deputy leader Michelle O’Neill said “constitutional issues had gained renewed prominence following Friday’s Yes vote on changing the Irish constitution.”
The landslide result on the abortion legislation even surpassed the margin of victory in the Irish equal marriage referendum in 2015, by a vote of 62.07 percent to 37.93 percent. A leading Northern Ireland figure, Stephen Fry had this to say on Twitter, “Ireland has voted for change! Again! Now the campaign for marriage equality in Northern Ireland needs and deserves our support.”
In our text today, John 8:1-11, Jesus was confronted by the Jewish leaders of His time with a testing and thorny problem. They brought to Him a woman, who they said was caught in the very act of adultery. Well what a thing, the woman alone was caught red-handed! I guess that the bigots were so determined to trap Jesus that they didn’t think through the plan properly. So, if this woman was having sex with a man who wasn’t her husband, or who was someone else’s husband, the brother was allowed to get away scot-free.
Sex is always an exciting problem to bring to religious leaders. And since the laws of the land always have something to say about who could have sex with whom, it is made all the more exciting as existing laws, religious teaching, and social views clash. There was no better way to trap Jesus with His particular and sometimes peculiar views.
Jesus was being backed into a vortex that had a mix of Jewish law and tradition being combined with the existing Roman law that governed the state at the time. The Pharisees were twisting the law a bit because the law required that the woman had to be a betrothed virgin to qualify for the death penalty, and in any case, both parties had to be stoned not just the woman.
In addition, they knew that the Romans had taken away from them the power of the death penalty, they faced this even when they tried to have Jesus killed, “Pilate said to them, “You take Him and judge Him according to your law.” Therefore the Jews said to him, “It is not lawful for us to put anyone to death,” John 18:31.
By their calculation, Jesus had two possible answers to give. He could agree with the stoning and run afoul of the Roman law and be arrested, or He could not agree and run afoul of the Jewish community as a fake because He didn’t keep the law of Moses.
Jesus never fell into a trap. Jesus attacked their vulnerability, sin. He ignored the challenged posed by the Roman law and went to the core of God’s law. The woman, guilty if she was, must be punished by the innocent. Adultery was not criminally wrong, it was morally wrong, and the moral police needed to be morally pure to effect their judgement on the accused.
Jesus then does the bizarre thing of writing on the ground. We have no idea what He wrote and so many speculate. Some think he might have written the commandments and others think that He might have started to write out the list of sins of those who accused the woman while being themselves guilty of moral failings.
One of the saddest things recently, especially in America, is to see preachers and politicians caught in the act of the very things that they so vehemently condemn from the podium. So many of them have been caught in adultery, or caught with their same-sex partners having condemned the LGBTQ+ community. It causes us all to hang our heads in shame.
Jesus did not condone the woman’s sin, He charged her to go and sin no more. Maybe we Christians need to bring compassion to the sinners of our day and not condemnation, especially if we examine our own moral failings.
The woman got out of the stoning because no one qualified to pick up stone number one.
Think on these things:
- Do you have any relatives or friends in the LGBTQ+ community?
- Does your relationship with any members of the LGBTQ+ community that you know open up the way to share the gospel and discuss sin?
- If we were to stone people today who broke the moral law, would you be able to pick up the first stone?
Prayer focus:
Let us pray today that we would learn to minister to sinners in the love of God without condemnation.
In His Grace
Pastor Alex