Sherlock Holmes. Gregory House. Endeavour Morse. Such heroes move us when, by brilliant deductive reasoning, they see a situation as no one else has seen it and bring an outcome no one has expected. Like a first-century Arthur Conan Doyle, the apostle John loves to place Jesus in a seemingly impossible situation and watch as he finds the secret door. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the encounter with the woman caught in adultery.
It goes without saying that John, whose record of the encounter is the only reason we know about it, is aware of the deep irony of the situation. For a woman to be caught in adultery alone is nonsense; by definition, there is a man somewhere. This doesn’t matter to the accusers because the confrontation isn’t actually about adultery at all. It’s about power and gender and the keeping of a code that overlooks the sins of an in-crowd while loudly denouncing the supposed sins of outsiders.
It’s a trap!
In verse six, John confirms our hunch that this is a set-up. It is Jesus these violent men are hoping to trap: to flush out the would-be Messiah they resort to a cruel set piece in which they threaten the very life of a chosen victim - a sinner and therefore expendable. She is mere bait to them. The bigger fish they want to catch is Jesus. Surrounded by armed men ready for an execution, the electricity of their pent-up rage held on a hair trigger: it is Jesus who must decide the woman’s fate. The trapsetting challenge is stark – join us or defy us – but in a plot twist worthy of Doctor Who Jesus does neither. Instead, he drops out of sight to write in the dust on the ground. In one balletic movement Jesus disassociates himself from their plan for violence, and by implication from the whole male heritage of his tribe. At the same time he breaks the intensity of their sightline, locked as it was on the woman. He gives her a moment to breathe, delaying for a few seconds the throwing of that first, vital stone.
Love, not guilt, will fuel the new engine of faith Jesus has designed
Having drawn their attention on himself, Jesus proposes a way forward for the stoning operation. They all want to stone the woman – there is a mob mentality at work – but they all know that someone has to go first. The decision to move from accusation to execution will be taken by the man who is first to let loose his rock. Who should that be? The oldest? The youngest? The most pious? The angriest? Who will have the courage to shift the baying pack from bark to bite: from the threat of harm to its delivery? ‘Since your scenario is supposed to be about sin and judgement,’ Jesus suggests, ‘how about this – let the one among us who has never sinned be the one to start the party.’
The sidestep
Something in Jesus’ question, in his nonviolence, in his refusal to be ruled by the mob, gets through. One by one the men leave, subtly dropping their stones as they go. Jesus stoops down to the ground again to let them leave quietly, affording them the dignity of a peaceful withdrawal, leaving him alone with the woman who is, by John’s implication, fully guilty of the crime with which she is charged. She has not so much been accused of adultery as caught in the very act. So what is Jesus to do? Already she has seen that he is not like other men, who take their pleasure in private but publicly denounce those they take it with. This is a different kind of man; a whole new definition of manhood. What will Jesus say to her now?
‘Go and sin no more.’
This phrase is the heart of the dramatic encounter and is hugely important to John’s understanding of the ministry of Jesus. Preachers looking to retrofit a judgemental outlook onto the radical grace of Jesus often cite this phrase in evidence. Here, surely, is the confrontation with sin to balance the earlier refusal to condemn. What a relief to find that our saviour isn’t soft on immorality after all. He didn’t stone this woman for her adultery, but nor did he turn a blind eye to it. Like a silencer fitted on the barrel of an assassin’s gun, this last-minute return to judgement mitigates the earlier display of mercy, leaving our insider-outsider religious worldview intact.
Religion empowers us to discover what God asks of us
Such a reading sadly misses the entire meaning of the narrative, and the lesson John is asking us to learn. Far from representing a last-ditch return to judgement, the phrase ‘go and sin no more’ has the very opposite function: it tells us just how radical and countercultural the grace of Jesus truly is. In urging this woman to deal fully with the sin in her life, Jesus is affording her the dignity of deciding for herself what that sin is. Unlike the disbanded lynch mob, he will not tell her what, in his opinion, her sin consists of. He doesn’t say, ‘Go and repent of your adultery’. Rather he says, ‘Whatever in your life is sin, do no more’. He empowers her to be the activist in her own transformation and redemption; to come to her own understanding of what her sin is, and to deal with it accordingly.
A new approach
This is a hinge moment in John’s account of the incarnation. The coming of Jesus represents a movement that is both consistent with and radically different from the Hebrew approach to faith. Religion, in Jesus, will no longer consist of telling others the ways in which they have failed to reach God’s mark. It will consist of empowering them to discover for themselves what God asks of them, and to draw close because they want to. Love, not guilt, will fuel the new engine of faith Jesus has designed.
Speaking later of the promised Holy Spirit, Jesus says, ‘He will convict the world of its sin, and of God’s righteousness and of the coming judgement’ (John 16:8). It won’t be the job of the Church or its leaders to point out to people their sin, but of the Holy Spirit. Why? Because repentance that is a response to the condemnation of others rarely holds. When my sins are helpfully listed for me by others I may feign penitence but it will rarely go deep. The sins I come to see for myself, on the other hand, I am highly motivated to be rid of. Like the Lost Son, it is when I ‘come to my senses’ that my conviction is deep enough to drive me home.
The prophet Ezekiel spoke of a day when God would remove the stubborn, stony heart of his people and give them a tender and responsive heart (Ezekiel 36:26). Jeremiah prophesied a time when no one would need to ask another how to please God, because the laws of God would be written on their hearts (Jeremiah 31:33). The same sentiment is echoed throughout the New Testament (2 Corinthians 3:3, Hebrews 10:16). ‘Don’t let the voices of religion tell you what your sins are,’ Jesus is saying to this woman. ‘Look into your own heart, where the laws of God are written. Let the Holy Spirit show you where you are broken. Then and only then will you find healing.’ So, how can we take our place in this grace revolution?
- In our own lives, we can seek to shed false guilt and in its place find conviction, inviting the Holy Spirit to work in our hearts so that we respond, not to the condemnation of others, but to the voice of God’s love.
- We can distance ourselves from the harsh voices that insist on telling outsiders exactly how it is that they have sinned. Addicted though we may be to it, we have to break the habit of judging others.
- In working with young people, we can introduce them early to the radical grace of Jesus, protecting them from voices of condemnation and praying that the Holy Spirit will so fully take up residence in their lives that they will choose, step by step, to surrender their brokenness.
- Only by a commitment to such radical grace, and by a wholesale rejection of our inherited desire to stone people, will we be empowered to fully walk in the way of Jesus.
