The Adulteress, the Adulterers, and the Love of Jesus

by Pr. Gelson Piber, pastor of MCC in Niterói, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Metropolitan Community Church in Brazil (www.icmbrasil.org)

Translated from the Portuguese by Geraldine Wright

John 7:53 - 8:11

The Scribes and Pharisees had decided to find some accusation with which they could discredit Jesus. With this case of the adulterous woman they believed they had found something with which to put Jesus "between the cross and the sword". In Jesus' time, when some case arose which was difficult to solve, it was the custom to bring it before a rabbi so that he could make a decision. And so the Scribes and Pharisees approached Jesus as if he were a rabbi, bringing a woman caught in the act of adultery. In Judaic law, as put forth in the Bible, adultery was a very serious crime. The rabbis said, "Every Jew who commits idolatry, adultery or murder must die." Adultery was one of the 3 most serious crimes/sins and the Bible was very clear on this point, only varying in the way in which the execution should be carried out. Leviticus 20:10 says “If a man commits adultery with another man’s wife—with the wife of his neighbor—both the adulterer and the adulteress must be put to death.", but it does not talk about the way in which they should be executed. Deuteronomy 22:23-24 establishes the punishment in the case of a married woman. In this case, the man and the woman are to be taken outside the city gates and the people are to "stone them to death". But the Mishna (the non-Biblical Judaic law) established that the penalty for adultery would be strangulation for the man and stoning for the woman...In other words, the woman brought before Jesus must be executed because she was an adulteress. So said the Law.

The Scribes and Pharisees intended to trip up Jesus with the following dilemma. If He said that they should stone the woman, 2 things would happen: He would lose the renown he had won for his love of the weak his mercy towards sinners, and he also would come into conflict with the Roman law, which had taken away from the Jews the right to condemn someone to death. In this way Jesus would both lose the adoration of the common folk and would become a criminal in the eyes of the Roman Empire. But if Jesus said that she should not die, it would immediately be declared that He taught disobedience to the Law of Moses and that He advocated and encouraged people to commit adultery...This was the mess into which the maliciousness of the Pharisees wanted Jesus to fall.

But Jesus began to write in the dirt. What did this mean? Why did Jesus do this? Maybe it was to gain time and avoid making a hasty decision, He could have been praying and presenting the issue before God. Maybe He intended for the Scribes and Pharisees to repeat the accusation, for some ancient translations of the text say that Jesus "wrote as if He hadn't heard them". Perhaps Jesus hoped that, upon repeating themselves, they would come to see the sadistic cruelty which they were hiding. So who knows, maybe he wanted to give them a chance to really think about what they were doing. Or it may be that the arrogant, lascivious, malicious expression of the Scribes and Pharisees, the curiosity of the multitude which was entertained by someone else's misfortune and the woman's shame had combined to fill Jesus' heart with suffering and mercy, so that He bent down to write, thus hiding His face. All of these are interesting suggestions, but there is another one in the Armenian version, one of the most ancient translations of the New Testament. It translates the passage as follows: "Bowing His head, He wrote in the dirt to make known the sins of these men and they themselves saw their various sins on the rocks". In other words, Jesus was writing on the rocks the sins of the men who were accusing the woman. The Greek word which is used for "write" is "grafein", but the one used here is "katagarfein" which can mean "write an accusation against" someone. It may be that Jesus was confronting these malicious sadists, so secure in themselves, with a list of their sins...

But no matter what He did, they insisted in receiving a response, and they got one, for Jesus said: "Very well. Stone her. But let the man who is without sin be the first to throw a stone." In this sentence it is interesting to note that the original Greek "anamartétos" doesn't just mean "without sin", but also "without a desire to sin". So, what Jesus said was the following: "Yes. You can stone her, but only if you yourselves have never wanted to do the same thing." This produced a silence and before long the accusers slowly began to leave.

And so Jesus and the woman were left by themselves. St. Augustine expressed it thus, in a sermon on this passage: "There was a great suffering, that of the woman, and great compassion, that of Jesus." Jesus asked the woman, "Has no one condemned you?" "No one, sir," she replied. "Go now and leave your life of sin", Jesus said to her.

The important thing we take away from this passage is the manner in which the distinct attitudes of the participants are shown. It shows us two attitudes of the Scribes and Pharisees: their conception of authority and their attitude toward people. They were the legal experts of the day. They were the ones who said, "the Bible says this", "the Bible says that". The sum total of their actions clearly demonstrates that, for them, authority was something which they used to condemn. It never occurred to them that authority could and should be based on understanding, that the objective of authority is to rehabilitate the criminal and sinner. They visualized its usage as something that gave them the right to raise themselves above others as fearsome guardians, the right to attend to every error or departure from the law with a savage and unmerciful punishment. They figured that its exercise gave them the right to exterminate the sinner. It never went through their heads that, who knows, maybe their authority imposed on them the obligation to cure the sinner. Among Christians, there still exist people who, because they are members of a Christian church, have faith in Jesus and have duties in the churches, believe that the position of authority gives them the right to condemn and the obligation to punish, to exclude, to reject. They conceive of the authority of faith as something which means nothing more than punishment and condemnation. They believe that the authority they possess gives them the right to be guard dogs, trained to destroy the sinner with humiliation and exclusion.

All authentic authority, that which comes from Jesus, is based on understanding. When we read in a newspaper about some convicted criminal, we ought to say, "It's only by the Grace of God that I am not in the same place he is." The first responsibility of an authority which claims to be Christian, independent of whether or not it operates out of a church, is to try to understand why the sinner behaved in this fashion, to try to understand the force of the temptations that impelled him to sin, to try to understand what were the circumstances that turned the sin into something so easy and attractive. No one can judge another without trying their hardest to understand what that person lived through, the conditions of his life, the options society gave him.

The second responsibility of a Christian's authority is to try to rehabilitate the one who behaved badly. Any authority which only concerns itself with punishment is an evil authority. Any Christian who, with the authority of faith, drives a sinner to discouragement or to a sad, bitter resentment is weak and his/her authority is not founded in the authority of Jesus Christ. The function of a Christian's authority is not to isolate the sinner from "decent society", excluding him. Even less is it to destroy him, saying. "The Bible says this." Its usage consists in accepting the sinful person and converting him into a good person, and watching out for themselves so as not to also fall into sin. The Christian in a position of authority ought to be like a wise doctor: his/her sole desire is to cure the sick person.

This passage in the Gospel clearly shows all the cruelty of the attitude of the Scribes and Pharisees toward the people. They didn't see the woman as a person. They weren't interested in her. They saw her merely as a thing, a tool with which they could accuse Jesus. They used her to attack Jesus and advance their diabolical intentions. In reality, Jesus was the victim they were really persecuting. For them, this woman had no name, no feelings, no emotions, no weaknesses, no difficulties...She was only a playing piece in the game with which they intended to destroy Jesus. It's highly unlikely that the Scribes and Pharisees even knew this woman's name. For them she was just a case of a woman caught in the act of adultery, and who had committed it unashamedly, seeing as how she allowed herself to be caught. After all, how many people had very cleverly committed adultery and never were, never would be discovered in order that they might be accused? She was someone whom they could use in order to carry out their plans to accuse Jesus. And in the moment that people turn into things, the spirit of Christianity dies. What takes its place is the dead law, not the Life of God's Holy Spirit.

God uses the Divine Authority to love men and women, in order to turn them into good people; for God, no one ever becomes a thing, never. As Christians who intend to be Jesus' followers, and therefore intend to exercise authority in His name, we have an obligation to try to cure, to guide, to accept and to help people who commit errors and sins. And we can't do this if we forget that every man and woman is a person, loved by God, independently of their sins. They are not things.

But this passage also tells us much about Jesus and His attitude toward sinful people.

Jesus said, as a fundamental principle, that only the person who was free of fault had the right to declare judgment over the faults of others. "Do not judge, or you too will be judged." (Matt. 7:1) He also said that the one who intends to judge his sister or brother is like someone who has a plank in the eye and tries to get a speck of dirt from the eye of another. (see Matt. 7: 3-5) Here is one of our most common errors: many of us demand that others adopt standards of behavior which we ourselves cannot comply with. Many of us condemn in others faults which are highly evident in our own lives. More than one member of the Church condemns in the other members faults of which he/she is just as guilty as his/her brothers and sisters.

The quality which allows us to judge is not knowledge of the Bible, of "New Testament Doctrine", of Old Testament verses. It's not something we possess. Rather, it is the act of putting kindness into action, that kindness which none of us can say that we possess, because only God is good. (see Matt 7:17, 19:17, Mark 10:18, Luke 18:19) This very reality of the human situation, affecting each and every one of us, means that God is the only one who has the right to judge, for the simple reason that there is no man or woman sufficiently good to judge another man or woman.

Jesus firmly stated as a guiding principle that our first attitude toward someone who has committed an error should be mercy. A Christian, following in the steps of Jesus, should at times cure, in general lighten the person's load, and always comfort. A true Christian is that person who asks him/herself, "What do I need I do to help this person? What should I do to bring this person back to the right path? What can I do to eliminate the consequences of this error or of this sin?" Briefly, we always ought to offer to others the same compassionate mercy which we hope would be offered to us if we found ourselves in a similar situation.

In Jesus, in the Gospels, we encounter a second chance, and another, and yet another. We also encounter the radical inclusiveness, that which Metropolitan Community Churches aims for, following in Jesus' steps and guided by the Holy Spirit in these steps. Jesus showed an intense interest, not only is what a person was, but also in what the person could become. He didn't say that what the person had done was unimportant: the broken Law and broken hearts were certainly important. But Jesus was convinced that men and women have both a past and a future. Jesus believed in and had confidence in the future of people, not in their past. Jesus is the Good News of the second chance.

Jesus' attitude toward the adulteress and toward the accusers also involved mercy. The fundamental difference between Jesus and the Scribes and Pharisees was that they wanted to condemn the woman, and above all, Jesus. But He wanted to forgive. If we read between the lines, we can see that the Scribes and Pharisees wanted to stone the woman and Jesus, and it would have brought them pleasure to do so. They were well acquainted with the excitement of exercising their power to condemn. Jesus was well acquainted with the emotion of having compassion for humiliated sinners such as this woman. Not so for those proud and arrogant sinners who judged that they had the right to condemn others, pretending that they had not sinned. Jesus looked at the sinner with compassion and mercy which emanated from His love. The Scribes and Pharisees looked at the sinner with a distaste that emanated from the prideful self-importance of thinking themselves better and more deserving than others.

Jesus simply did not condemn the woman. But He did challenge her. The challenge was that she have a life without sins, that she strive to live in holiness. Jesus didn't give her an easy pardon, but a challenge that, as she experienced the freedom that God's forgiveness gives, she take up a life of dignity before God, before others, and before herself. Jesus confronts a bad life, not with the exclusionary condemnation, which is always tempting for those who consider themselves pure and holy. Instead, he confronts it with the challenge of a good life.

Jesus gave the woman a choice: she could return to her sins, or she could embark on a life in the holiness of those liberated through God's grace. Jesus challenged her to have a new life in union with Him. The story is not finished, because no one's life finishes until that person stands before God.