Hey everybody, thanks for joining us as we finish out this Thanksgiving week
and hope you and yours are doing well and in whatever way you're celebrating.
Holiday, thanks for joining us.
We are halfway through a story.
We try not to break stories in the middle when we can,
but this is an interesting one.
And with the week, we thought it worked well to handle it in kind of two sections.
This is out of John chapter eight.
The woman caught in adultery.
If you missed yesterday or the session
before this, it might be helpful,
to go back and pick that up because there is some background
and some interesting stuff about this text itself.
But in terms of the story, just a quick recap of yesterday's
the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, the scribes.
They've brought Jesus, a woman who they say was caught in adultery.
In fact, it says in the very act of adultery.
And they have tried to trap Jesus by saying, what should we do?
The law says, stoned her.
What do you say if Jesus says, stone her, he's sideways with Roman law.
If he says, don't stone her, he's sideways with Jewish law.
They think they have him.
And then Jesus responds
by bending to write on the ground, which is a very interesting detail.
That's where we picked up the story.
Jesus has been writing on the ground
and we jump back in here.
What would that be? Verse.
Looks like verse seven.
So when they kept on questioning him,
he straightened up and he said to them,
let any one among you without sin
be the first to throw the stone at her.
And once again he bent down
and began to write on the ground.
When they heard it, they went away
one by one, beginning with the oldest.
And Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him.
Jesus straightened up
and said to her, woman, where are they?
Has no one condemned you?
She said, no one, sir.
And Jesus said, the neither do I condemn you.
Go on your way.
And from now on do not sin again.
So this is one of those moments.
We see it in the gospel whenever someone thinks
they have Jesus cornered, they don't.
That that's especially true.
I think in the Gospel of John, Jesus is writing on the ground and they press him.
Jesus, give us an answer that we mentioned yesterday.
That may be Jesus way of withdrawing and saying, look,
I'm not interested in this game you're playing.
You don't really care about my answer.
I know this is a trap, but they say, come on, Jesus answer, give us your answer.
So he he says this rather well known and I suppose famous line
let anyone without sin cast the first stone.
And, I think it's very interesting, like, or how Jesus has now
flipped the script and it's the Pharisees and,
scribes
who now find themselves sort of the ones being trapped.
This is not the only story of this genre in the Gospels.
There are often these moments, like Solomon's wisdom, where
this seemingly impossible problem is brought to Jesus,
and he cuts between both of these impossible polarities.
And, you know, we find a new way.
But, Clint, I do think that this story, because of how relatable it is,
or at least we can imagine it, even if it's not relatable to our specific
life experience.
We can imagine being in a socially vulnerable,
a moment, an experience of being outed
for our deepest sinfulness, that this is the stuff of nightmares.
And here, when we see Jesus reaching down whatever he's writing,
we I think it's wise to go back to that previous conversation.
Let's not get fixated on what the writing is.
Let's get so fixated here.
Jesus is it is disconnected
from the kind of risk that is at play for him.
Right?
Because the tension here is the Pharisees, the scribes,
they're coming to trap Jesus using this woman as a pawn.
But Jesus doesn't view the woman as a pawn.
He doesn't see her as a means to an end.
So he sees her in her full humanity.
His compassion is for her, and it leads him down
the path that the leaders had not even considered.
They thought it was trapping Jesus between
Roman rule and law and the law of Moses.
Whereas Jesus sees God's beloved
care for his daughter for for someone who God knows by name.
And that's the kind of turn and the story
which has something to teach us, yes, about Jesus's wisdom and his ability
to disarm his opponents, though in John we're not surprised by that.
At this point.
It also has something to teach us about how Jesus views the world
radically different in its power structure
than the people who are the religious leaders coming against him.
The reason that they are so rattled and so threatened is because Jesus represents
something other than the common sense that everyone knew had to be the case.
Jesus saw the kingdom.
Jesus revealed the kingdom.
Jesus initiated the kingdom in a way that none of these leaders
could have anticipated.
Then I just think these words let anyone among you who's without sin
be the first to throw a stone at her has a way of both humanizing this woman,
but interestingly, also humanizing these men,
because where they might have been taking the law as an excuse for their own
inherent sinfulness here, Jesus also has a deftly pointed out
the hypocrisy of that position that they, too, are sinners
who stand in need of grace.
And so it's that moment, I think, where Jesus is both revealing a different way.
He's disarming the powers that be.
He he's showing us
what God looks like when he encounters the brokenness of humanity.
And it's both for the one who claims the law and the one
who stands in judgment of the law, and Christ is the Christ.
For both of them.
So I love this part of the story.
You know, these men bring this woman to Jesus.
She's a sinner.
She's unrighteous.
The law says that we who are righteous are to punish her by death.
And Jesus says, yeah, okay.
If that's if that's what you want to do, then
whoever's
without sin, you get it started, right?
You go first and then he bends down again like,
okay, yeah, don't do what you're going to do.
And he he again sort of detaches himself from it.
And now he's put them in a bind,
because anyone who would do that
first throwing of the stone
would therefore be making the claim that they are without sin.
So, so they would be sinning in their pride,
in their hubris, in their self-righteousness.
And and so Jesus disarms what they can do.
He he, he upholds the law.
He doesn't get sideways with Rome.
And he reframes the issue from person to theirs.
Yeah, she's a sinner.
What about you? Any of you then, aren't you?
Throw the rock and then there's this beautiful line, Michael, that
they went away one by one, beginning with the elders or the oldest.
We don't know
exactly what to do with that, but it probably means
that those who had been around longer knew that they were had, that they gave up.
You know, when you're young and stubborn,
maybe you hang in there longer thinking, we can't believe he got us.
The older man.
They seem to know we've lost this round.
And then one by one, they go away.
Which is a very interesting place that John takes us in the story,
that eventually it's Jesus and the woman left alone.
And then Jesus says, well, where, where are they?
Have are is there no one here to condemn you?
And of course, the answer is
am I going or the real question, am I going to condemn you?
And Jesus says no.
And then, because grace is always followed with responsibility,
go. And from now don't sin again.
In other words, rethink your life.
Reevaluate your choices. Try to do better.
I mean, this is a woman who, by all claims
at least, was committing adultery, are involved in adultery.
And so Jesus calls her to something better.
It's really, really interesting way that John weaves
this story together and delivers us to the conclusion.
I think you're exactly right to point out to us, and to direct our attention
to the fact that when Jesus asked, has anyone condemned you?
The ultimate answer to his own question is his statement.
Neither do I condemn you that there's a kind of implicit
rounding out of this entire story in that comment.
I also want to point out, though, that now we see how the bending down to the dirt
provides another kind of bookend towards a similar vein.
In the first point, he gets down with her in the second.
In the Gospel of John.
Of all of the Gospels, we know that Jesus Christ is perfect.
He's sinless.
He has nothing to confess. Right?
And so when Jesus says, let anyone
who is without sin to be the first to throw a stone at her,
he reaches down to the very place he would pick up a stone.
And there he continues to simply write.
In other words, Jesus Christ stands as the one who is the just judge.
In that moment, he could have been the one to throw that first stone
because of the Gospel of John, Jesus Christ is thoroughly and unendingly
and perfectly sinless, and here his choice to just go back to the writing
that he was doing ultimately seals the fate of these religious leaders
who come after him.
And I think one of the really fascinating ways
that the text ends is exactly how you pointed out
how at the end of all of this, neither do I condemn you.
Then he says, go your way, and from now on
do not sin again, that once again
Jesus has violated the kind of polarities,
the kind of opposites that the Pharisees and scribes tried to create.
Because if this story was only grace, if it was only compassion, it was only
you should be nice to other people, because you have times in your life
when you would like it if people were nice to you.
If that's all that this was, it would still be an amazingly deep
spiritual teaching, but not at the level that this is because
Jesus here, who is the resurrection and the life, who is the judge,
and also the one who's given as the as the judgment.
He is the one
who sends this woman out and says, May your life be turned upside down.
It live differently.
May this moment cause a new kind of holiness,
a new kind of encounter in the kingdom that's being proclaimed.
It's not just grace, it's also a new life,
new opportunity, new moral, new ethic.
There's a whole kind of transformation here,
not just even in the Pharisees and the scribes.
We see Jesus sees the world larger
than even the kind of polarities that it was presented to him.
There's a kind of beautiful wrap up teaching at the end of the story
that I just really appreciate.
John is showing us that Jesus is grace, but also truth.
Jesus is love, but that love sometimes
takes us to very difficult places and hard choices.
And Jesus wants what's best for this woman,
and he wants her to not just be alive in body.
At the end of this ordeal.
He wants her to be alive in spirit, to live in abundant life.
And he invites her onto that path after she's seen who he is.
I agree completely, Michael.
This is a beautifully crafted ending
where Jesus and the woman are together.
You know, when you when you cut through all of the stuff, the, the trap,
the test, the self-righteousness, the let's get him
when all of that confronts Jesus and loses, it goes away.
And then this woman who is guilty in the context of the story,
is left alone with the only one
who could throw the first stone.
He is the only one able and worthy
to cast judgment and carry out sentence on her sin.
And instead he says, neither do I condemn you.
And from that moment of grace calls her to a different way of living.
And that's such a beautiful summary
of the Christian experience in some way.
What every Christian goes through,
maybe with sins, we'd like to think less serious than hers.
But still, there is that moment where each of us encounters
the one who could condemn us for our
failures, but instead chooses
to be gracious to us
and set us on a better path, or call us to a better way of living.
This.
This is almost this comes very close
to leaving the realm of story for me and becoming sermon.
I just think it is that well crafted in that well-told
that it holds together so perfectly and delivers us to that moment.
At the end is I.
This is an incredibly well-written passage.
I really cannot help but reiterate that that's literally where I was going.
I was going to make the case that I think
admitting the bias, that there's two people who
who preach, and that's a part of our identity and service in the church.
But when you look at this story,
it is all inclusive in a powerful way.
It it transcends teaching morality like we think of in a classroom
context where we say, you should do this or you should not do this.
What this story does is it turns to narrative
to display the truth of who all of us are at the core,
and then to reveal to us what Jesus's response to that sin is.
And I think a way that you could imagine this story in light of that,
is to ask the question, who is faithful to the faith less
in this story
that the scribes and Pharisees are interested in using the faith less one
towards their own ends, and in doing so they reached their own
kind of faithlessness.
But there's one who is got to stick with it for this woman.
Jesus Christ cares nothing about advancement,
and it really this story is not even about him
winning in the sense that he doesn't take away points from the crowd.
There's no reference that Jesus is hailed as a wise teacher.
Now, there's a kind of simple,
and by simple I don't mean deep.
There is a understandable turn in this story where we can, for a moment,
if we're but willing to hear it, a kind of sermon that invites us
to turn our own faithlessness over to the one who is faithful.
And yes, this is a devotional way of reading the text, but
whether or not this should be included, as you know,
not being in those first manuscripts, what he wrote in The Dirt,
you know, all these kind of technical details
we've talked about in the previous study in and glossed over today.
Clint, I, I think in spades.
This story encapsulates the story of who Jesus Christ is
and does so in a way that moves not just minds, but hearts.
And I think it resonates today in this gospel with the Jesus portrayed
as perfect, as wise, as discerning, and as an all loving and.
And Jesus here provides for this
woman and inflects in reflection point in her life.
And the text invites us, therefore, to consider
our own inflection points that we find in Jesus Christ.
Yeah, I, I think that this is one of many reminders
that we see in the gospel, not just John, but we see it clearly in John that
Jesus only
seems to judge those who judge others,
and Jesus only seems
to warn condemnation
for those who won't admit their own sin.
And you know, Jesus stands here as the one who could condemn
but chooses not to, except for these self-righteous men
who whose actions and hearts condemn themselves.
And again, not a new theme in John.
Certainly not, a new theme in the gospel,
but seen clearly in this story.
Well, friends, this is a powerful story.
If it's been encouraging to you, if it's been challenging to you,
if it's revealed the truth of your own faithlessness us and invited you to meet
the one who is faithful,
give it a like, certainly subscribe so you can stick with us on studies
like this, the only thing we want to add is because it's Thanksgiving.
At the time of us studying this, we will not be back until next week,
probably Wednesday.
You'll hear more on Sunday about that, but we look forward to continuing the study
next week.
Subscribe so you can stick with us as we go.
Have a blessed celebration and we look forward to seeing you soon.
Thanks, everybody.