DAILY BYTE
It all starts when Jesus is interrupted by some angry men - scribes and Pharisees - who were dragging along with them the object of their wrath, a woman that we are told was ‘caught in the act of adultery.’
It is important to realise just how vulnerable this woman must have felt, for as she was dragged before Jesus, she was in all likelihood half-naked at the very least. We also need to know that she was just being used by these men, a pawn in their attempt to catch Jesus out. For Jesus, the ‘friend of sinners,’ either had to condemn her or risk breaking Mosaic law.
You know, like this story suggests, we love making sinners ‘stand in front of us.’ In public. How else could their sins take away attention from our own? And we haven’t changed much from people in those days because we still like to make sexual sins the major one, the ‘hot’ sins.
In ‘Mere Christianity,’ C.S. Lewis wrote that if we consider sexual sins to be the supreme vice then we are quite wrong. He went onto say:
“The sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all the sins. All the worst pleasures are purely spiritual. The pleasure of putting other people in the wrong, of bossing and patronising and spoiling sport and backbiting; the pleasures of power, of hatred.”
What Jesus does through the course of this story is invert our ‘hierarchies of sin’ – to say there is something worse than what this woman did – it is what you are doing to her! Self-righteousness, gossip, verbal violence, scapegoating, hyprocrisy – these are all far worse. Why? Because they are rooted in self-deception and in them we are blind to our own weaknesses and failings, and to our own need for God.
There is nothing worse than that.
We learn from this story that the greatest sin is to pick up a stone and throw it at another.
It is a terrible mistake to read this story and refuse to find something of ourselves within these Pharisees. We more naturally identify with the woman because we feel comfortable playing the victim – it’s always others who judge and struggle with self-deception, not us! But really, who of us has never picked up a stone or blamed someone else for our issues? Who of us have never engaged in peer-pressured gossip – mob induced verbal violence - about another?
There are no sinless ones, and therefore, no one can cast the first stone.
Holding others in their sin while holding yourself innocent is delusionary and only perpetuates the cycle of sin for everyone.
PRAY AS YOU GO
Loving Lord, open my eyes to see what I may be hiding, and open my heart so that I may confess it, own it, and entrust you with it. Amen.
FOCUS VERSE
John 8. 1-5 NRSV
Then each of them went home, while Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. Early in the morning he came again to the temple. All the people came to him and he sat down and began to each them. The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery; and making her stand before all of them, they said to him, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery. Now in the law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?”
