Saugatuck Congregational Church, UCC
©Michael Hendricks
March 6, 2016
For those of you who don’t know, for the last 18 years, we’ve been writing plays based on Bible stories with the 7th and 8th grade class that we perform with the entire Church School. This year it will be on May 22. Mark your calendars.
Putting Bible stories in a dramatic form forces us to put ourselves in the shoes of each of the participants – and not just the good ones whose actions we hope to emulate.
With that in mind, today we will use a Story Tent approach to address a story that that gets at something about love and compassion that few other Bible stories can match: The story of Jesus and the adulterous woman.
Please pray with me.
Holy One, in this season of Lent, help us to acknowledge our own shortcomings and then to use them as a means to understand and forgive the shortcomings of those around us. Amen.
To write the adulterous woman as a Story Tent, we first need to identify the characters. In this case, there are four named participants. The woman. Jesus. The crowd. And the teachers of the Law. There are also two implied participants. The woman’s husband and the man she was with. It is interesting that neither appears in this story.
To find our hero, it is tempting to choose the woman’s perspective. Her situation is horrifying – and very dramatic. She is about to face one of the most gruesome deaths imaginable. Not only is stoning extremely painful, it’s also a total rejection.
It isn’t just one person throwing stones. This is everybody we know, our whole world, stepping forward individually to shun us in the most vicious way imaginable.
Now, an argument could be raised, that yes, it is horrible, but she knew what the punishment was. So why on earth did she put herself in such a vulnerable position? I believe the modern saying is, don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time.
But it isn’t that easy. Especially for back when girls were married at around the age of this year’s confirmation class in marriages arranged by their fathers. No, this is not a simple story of love gone wrong.
Even so, I’m not sure this is really the woman’s story. We never know how she feels about her situation. We assume she’s afraid because we would be afraid. And we assume that she doesn’t feel like she deserves death, because we wouldn’t want to be punished so harshly for the wrong things we have done. But the Bible itself doesn’t address what she thinks. Her only line is, “No, Lord,” her answer when Jesus asks if even one of her accusers remained to condemn her. All we know is that she recognizes that she has been shown mercy. She recognizes also that Jesus is Lord. That is a lot, but is it enough to make her the star of the story?
So, what about the teachers of the Law – the people whose actions set the story in motion? They have a goal. They want to show the crowd that Jesus violates the Law of Moses, thereby opposing Israel’s covenantal relationship with God that defines Israel as a people. They find a woman who’d violated the law. And if I were casting this story, as they surely did, I would make her the sweetest woman on the planet. I would want to make it as hard for Jesus as possible to agree with following the Law.
Now, one lesson I’ve learned from Story Tent, it’s always easy to judge bad guys. But I think it’s helpful to recognize what they wanted, what were they trying to hold on to. Only what they had been raised from birth to believe was good and scriptural and godly.
And of course they were right.
Have you ever been right?
I’m not talking about two plus two equals four right.
I’m talking about that sense of I know this to be true right. That feeling in the car when everybody else is lost, but I know this is the way.
That sense of we are doing this wrong, so we must turn around and start doing it differently.
That sense that everybody needs to stop thinking from their own limited vantage points and why can’t they listen to what I’m trying to say.
Maybe even that sense that there is a way God wants things to be, and, at this time, in this situation, I know what God wants.
It would be at this point that our atheist critics of religion would observe that I am at my most dangerous.
And what stops the teachers of the law? What stops us? In this story, shame. Self-knowledge. That thing that happens when Jesus says let the person who has never sinned throw the first stone. And what happens next? The Bible says that one by one, starting with the oldest, they put down their stones and walked away.
But that’s probably not true. Before that, something came in their mind. A memory. A moment. Something in their life that filled them with regret, something that revealed their self-centeredness and hard-heartedness, even if only to them. The reason the oldest put down their stones first was because they’d been living with that shame the longest. And if we want to feel compassion for them, all we have to do is close our eyes and think of our own shameful moments. We wouldn’t all be thinking of the same moments. But rest assured we could each of us think of something.
But the teachers of the law are not our lead character. They are the antagonist. The villain.
To find our protagonist, we have to look a little further.
I want to put Jesus forward as this story’s hero and, in reality, he probably is. He’s right when everybody else is wrong. He stands up for the oppressed. And he has the courage to be the one against the many. Sounds like a movie, doesn’t it?
Plus, he has one of the greatest lines ever written. “Let the person who has never sinned throw the first stone.” In the world of competitive rapping with which I am of course familiar, when you utter the line that can’t be beat and you definitively win, you drop the microphone. That’s called a mic drop. Jesus has a mic drop moment here if ever there was one.
But that great line is not all that Jesus does. There’s this strange thing Jesus does that I usually forget about when I recall this story. He squats down and writes something in the dirt with his finger. Then, in case you didn’t think it was important, he does it again.
Cool. A mystery. So, what did he write? The Bible deliberately withholds that answer.
And maybe that’s the point.
Not the what, but the where.
Just like we sometimes do, the teachers of the Law want definitive answers and rules on how to live. They want right and wrong. And Jesus seems to answer that it may not be that easy. Yesterday’s right may be tomorrow’s wrong and holding on too long to yesterday might actually be working against God’s plan to restore us to the loving people we were created to be.
And that might be what Jesus is saying when he chooses to write in dust. Whatever purpose the harsh adultery punishment may have served in an earlier day maybe Jesus is implying that that dust has blown away. Maybe mercy now outweighs whatever order was being propped up. Don’t use God’s words, Jesus seems to say, to prevent God from moving us further forward.
And maybe it’s even more than that. Do you remember the line we hear on Ash Wednesday and at funerals? Dust you are and to dust you shall return. Maybe that’s the where Jesus points us to. Ourselves, our hearts. Maybe Jesus is saying that if God’s command to love is written on our hearts, in the dust that is us –to love God with all our heart and our neighbor as ourselves – we will never pick up the stone in the first place. No matter what.
So, yes, Jesus makes sense as the protagonist. The problem for me is that Jesus is … well, Jesus. Of course, he knows the right things to do and say at the exact right moment. But that doesn’t mean that we do or will. And while in one way, it is right to set Jesus as the bar we should try to measure up to, on the other hand, we know beforehand that we just won’t pull that off.
Jesus is exemplary in one way, but I mean … come on.
So if we’re going to identify with anyone, who does that leave? The only one I can figure is the crowd.
In my memory, I thought it was the crowd who was going to stone the woman. And when Jesus asks the woman, “Does no one condemn you,” I pictured them alone in a now empty public square. But, at least in the translation we read, that’s not how the story goes.
The crowd was there to hear Jesus before the woman and the teachers of the Law ever showed up. It was to separate the crowd from Jesus that the teachers of the Law presented this troubling problem. Here you go. Kill this woman in front of the crowd or tell the crowd that God’s Law doesn’t matter, just because you say so. Go ahead, Jesus. Have at it.
But it is the crowd that chooses to remain with Jesus at the end that may be the role of you and me in the story. With the Pharisees we can accept that God gave us the Law to extend order into a world when it was in short supply. But, now, with the Law Jesus asks us to write into our hearts, we can no longer limit God’s love to only what we are used to or comfortable with.
Maybe, just maybe, you and I are the protagonist of this story.
Which brings us to the end of the story. Almost.
Because then, Jesus says to the woman the strangest thing of all. “Go and sin no more.”
And why is this strange? For one, he doesn’t say what it feels like he is saying. “Go and don’t do that adultery thing again.” I think that’s how I’ve always read the story. Like Jesus gave her a free pass. But don’t do it again, because next time, you’re on your own.
But adultery is not what Jesus says she should not do again. And if he wanted to say that, that’s exactly what he would have said.
I think Jesus is going after something bigger– living in a right relationship with God and our neighbor, however that might manifest itself.
Only that doesn’t stop what Jesus says from being strange. Because as the words are coming out of his mouth, Jesus must know that those seemingly simple words are way beyond our ability to obey.
Because we all sin. We all put ourselves before God and neighbor. Over and over again.
So what? Is Jesus saying, here’s the test. You all fail. Now face the consequences.
Or maybe it’s something else altogether. Maybe it is our falling short, each of us in our own ways, me succumbing to this, you succumbing to something else, that allows us to live together in the love we were created for.
Because I’m going to guess that that woman and every single person in that crowd who made the decision to stay with Jesus, if not that very afternoon, then very soon thereafter, did or thought or said something that separated them from God’s love.
Only if they listened to Jesus, they would have known it. So when their sister or brother fell short sometime later, they wouldn’t see them as an “other” who needed to be punished or eliminated, but as a fellow traveler who needed a way back.
And maybe that’s the greatest miracle of this story.
Better than water into wine, Jesus takes our sins, that which keeps us from living in God’s love, and transforms them into a bridge of compassion and mercy that makes it possible, no, that demands that we share God’s love with those who need it most.
Amen.