Jesus & the Adulteress

Jesus and his religious rivals
couldn't have been
more different!

{ John 8: 2--11 }

[ The Scriptures are set apart by the color maroon and indentation.]

Early in the morning he came again to the temple. All the people came to him and he sat down and began to teach 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?" They said this to test him, so that they might have some charge to bring against him.
What an amazing chapter this is. It's packed full of worthwhile lessons:
First, if there's one behavior that Jesus couldn't abide, it was sinners playing down their own sins while playing up someone else's. In this instance, the sin of one party (the adulteress) was being used by a second party (the even more sinful religious right hypocrites), to bring harm on a guilt-free third party (Jesus himself).
Then, there's a point so obvious that Jesus may not have felt it even necessary to emphasize. But, as the father of seven daughters, I wish Jesus had asked these sanctimonious male accusers explicitly, "Was this woman ALONE at the time of this adultery?"
And finally, there's the magnificent way in which Jesus turns the table on the hypocrites doing the accusing, and puts the judges themselves on trial :
Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, "Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her." And once again he bent down and wrote on the ground. When they heard it, they went away, one by one, beginning with the elders; 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, "Neither do I condemn you. Go your way, and from now on do not sin again."
Some people found fault with Larry Flynt's recent effort to expose the Republican party leadership for its astounding hypocrisy. Rather than condemn their own friends, whose closets are bulging with a whole brothel full of worse adulterers than Democratic President Clinton ever dreamed of being, they insist on condemning the messenger. How interesting that the mainstream media, after racing to publish everything salacious about the Democratic president that they could lay their hands on, including the whole of Kenneth Starr's pornographic report, has made no effort to expose Republican immorality and hypocrisy! Could it be that, just as Jesus published the sins of the hypocrites of his day by writing them in the dirt at his feet, God has had a hand in publicizing the sins of today's hypocrites in a "dirty magazine"? (Actually, this report was not nearly as pornographic as many of the women's magazines in our supermarkets.)

Web discoveries