When Misery and Mercy Meet: the Story that almost didn't make it ~ John 8:1-11

¹ but Jesus went to the Mount of Olives.

² At dawn he appeared again in the temple courts, where all the people gathered around him, and he sat down to teach them. ³ The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before the group ⁴ and said to Jesus, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. ⁵ In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?” ⁶ They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him.
But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger. ⁷ When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” ⁸ Again he stooped down and wrote on the ground.
⁹ At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the woman still standing there. ¹⁰ Jesus straightened up and asked her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”
¹¹ “No one, sir,” she said.
“Then neither do I condemn you,” Jesus declared. “Go now and sin no more.”

How should we as Christians address sin faithfully – in the way of Jesus?

To address sin faithfully we need to learn to draw in the dirt.

Most of us know this story fairly well. “What did Jesus write?,” is one of the most fancifully imagined details of any gospel story. I’m less concerned about it because if we needed to know we would know. I am more interested in the “why.” Why is a much more interesting question. Historically, “doodling” in the ancient world was used as a way to think carefully or to contain one’s feelings. Ironically, modern science supports this ancient practice: a recent study on doodling found that it provided the doodler a 29 percent increase in information retention. Contrary to popular belief, doodling seems to prevent people from losing focus by helping them pay attention. We doodle to focus. It gives learners who may otherwise mentally check out an opportunity to check back in. So Jesus is doodling to focus on God – silently and carefully. And if Jesus had to doodle to think carefully about how to respond to a sin? If Jesus learned to wait silently, patiently, even prayerfully before speaking? If Jesus’ first inclination was to focus on God in the face of sin, shouldn’t we?

Sin hides in the cracks and crevices. Our patience, our slowness is needed because sin is often much harder to see than we realize, more difficult to name and easily transferable. We need to wrestle with sins ambiguity, its immense power for deceit, its ability to fuel self-righteousness. We need to remember that faithful, Bible believing men and women have been blinded by it - opposing the abolition of slaves, working to undercut women’s equality, diminishing and exploiting others. Sin longs for us to bear witness of it rather than the gospel, to use it to teach a lesson, to make examples out of others and like the teachers of the law “make sinners stand before the group” in shame and disgrace. And nothing is more deadly to the powerless, the broken, than shame. In my opinion, this is the danger of social media –the new stoning ground where we no longer even address people face-to-face but can condemn them with angry rants from afar. There is something about this image of dirt that is worth pondering. 

Many of us don’t write in the dirt– silently pondering our own sin and praying for God’s mercy to be made manifest in us. Instead, we write with dirt smearing it on the walls for all to see. Never forget – whether intentional or not, you are God’s ambassador and therefore reflect the heart of God to others. So before you go about representing his interests maybe the first thing you should do is be silent before Him. Maybe, just maybe, such silent attention will be the sermon that disarms self-righteousness and challenges sin. Such careful and attentive silence acts as the protective gloves and mask that keep us from succumbing to sin’s self-righteous infections. Maybe it’s silence that will save you, that will save them.

To address sin faithfully we need to learn to take misery to heart. Notice how our story moves from “this woman” of the teachers of the law to the personal address by Jesus and the asking of a question, the invitation of response, the opportunity for dialogue. 

At the end of the story, there stood just the woman and Jesus. As St. Augustine put it. “There remained two, the one in misery and mercy.” At last someone speaks to the woman directly and engages her in conversation. It was a simple one: A polite address, “Woman, has anyone condemned you?” “No one, sir,” she said. “Neither do I condemn you. Go and from now on do not sin anymore.” She was not treated as an object but a subject of thoughts, choices, feelings and intentions. He did not call her “adulterous woman,” focus on the lurid details of her sin, or even demand an apology.

Allow me to play with the quote from St. Augustine, for he himself plays on words with misera and misericordia that we can’t see in English. In misericodia there are two words joined together: miseria and cor, misery and heart. Mercy, in other words, is taking person’s misery to heart. And so there remained two in conversation: the one in misery and the one who took her misery to heart, who treats her as a person beloved by God.

The space between not condemning and not condoning is wide - big enough to allow for human conversation, for the truth to be told, for soul-searching, even for confrontation - all the feelings and thoughts that would tumble into a person’s heart in a moment of crisis. But Jesus’ few words should give us pause even as we seek to name sin’s destructive power. The NIV translation has Jesus say, “Go now and leave your life of sin.” However, this is not what the text says – Jesus’ words are far simpler “go and sin nor more”. The NIV wants to make sin her life, Jesus’ actual words want to defuse sin’s destruction of her life. There’s no name calling, no sermon about unworthiness or the fires of hell, no guilt biting glee, and no labeling her entire life as sinful. In fact, Jesus’ offer of no condemnation occurs with no response on her part – no repentance, no verbal confession.

Always remember that sin loves for us to focus on it rather than the person. It wants us to ferret it out like exterminators who use a wrecking ball to get rid of rats in a house. I once heard a Vietnamese proverb that said, “What good is getting the thief out of your house by destroying the house.” We thwart sins power by listening to God in silence and realizing that to talk about sin is to talk about what destroys people. And to talk to people in love in all honesty is God’s gracious way of destroying sin.

To address sin faithfully we need to remember why this story almost didn’t make it into the Bible.

Many of you learned in the Preparing for Worship this week that this story is not found in our oldest biblical manuscripts allowing some commentaries to skip over this passages as if it did  not exist. But if this story was an ancient story about Jesus, as many scholars argue, why did it not immediately become part of the accepted Gospels? Why was it only inserted in John’s Gospel later? 

This is a delicate point because it’s an attempt to determine the intent and motives of people long gone and I know it's a bit of a stretch. But I think the historical reconstruction t is worth considering particularly as it engages our own current tendency to remove parts of Jesus’ words or actions that we don’t like. Many New Testament scholars argue that this true story about Jesus didn’t make it into our Gospels initially because of the ease with which Jesus forgave the women that was hard to reconcile with the early churches rigorous discipline of sexual sin and yet we know that the story existed in the second century. It’s true that in Paul’s discussion of sins, adultery and immorality appear repeatedly (1 Cor. 6:9ff; Gal. 5:18ff.; Eph. 5:3ff; Col. 3:5), and those warning are no doubt tied to the frightful immorality of the Roman Empire. But many early Church Fathers, particularly some of the more misogynistic ones, went even further to rank such sin among the very worst – it was often listed alongside homicide and apostasy and for others deemed a heinous act without forgiveness. 

Nothing gets people worked up into a self-righteous frenzy like sex. And I am not suggesting that we be cavalier about it either – this woman was NOT the only victim of her affair and sin destroys relationships, kills life. But we should be thankful for the effort of those within that early church who took extra effort to maintain and include this story in our Bible, who saw fit to challenge an over-indulgence fascination in the condemnation of others, particularly over sexual sin. We should read this story as a declaration by a faction of the church who rightly refused to let sin be fundamentally what our story is all about. 

Yet if this story was an independent story why did the church insert it here in John? Well, the best argument is that they sought to illustrate Jesus words in John 8:15-16, “You judge by human standards; I judge no one. Yet even if I do judge, my judgment is valid for it is not I alone who judge, but and the Father who sent me.” “Judgment is always for the sake of salvation, since it is a bringing to light of that which has lain destructively in the dark” (Robert Barron). So let this story be for you the judgment of God and bring your sin to the light.

Jesus never passes out stones, he passes out bread – his body broken for us, for our sin.

He doesn’t pass out condemnation, but offers us something to drink – his blood shed for us to express the love of God. The meal of communion is Jesus’ response to sin and it is his invitation to us to doodle in the dirt.