Back To The Well: Woman Caught In Adultery

"Back To The Well: Woman Caught In Adultery"

John 7:53-8:11 back to the well sermon series
July 25, 2010

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. 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.”

We’re wrapping our series on Jesus’ encounters with women in the Gospels, a series I’
ve taken directly from a book by Frances Taylor Gench, Back To the Well, and we’re
wrapping up the series with a page from Jesus’ life that has been hard to place in our
sacred texts. The story we just heard, the story of the woman caught in adultery, is
famous because it is considered a homeless story—that is, the story is not found in our
earliest Greek manuscripts of the Gospel of John, and when it does finally show up, it is
placed in different parts of the Gospel, in a different parts of John 7, sometimes in John
21, and it even finds a place in one manuscript in the Gospel of Luke. No one can
seem to find where it’s supposed to reside, though where it is currently, in John 7 and
the early part of chapter 8, is as good as guess as any. What is fascinating to me and
certainly people smarter than me is why this story was excluded from our most ancient
compilations of stories about Jesus, and why it kept showing back up, as if, despite the
best efforts of some reluctant editor or editors, it just kept popping up again and again,
finding its way back into those stories about Jesus that members of the early church
wanted to hear, over and over again. And yet it is also clear that it was also a story
that some in the church didn’t want to hear, and yet, others, others couldn’t keep away
from it, believing somehow that it had something to say about what it meant to follow
after the way of Jesus, and what it meant to be forgiven by God. And, let’s face it: one
can’t ignore the sex in the text, and, for that matter, how “dangerous” sexuality and the
female gender have often been conflated, much to the detriment of women, and to a
healthy, Christian understanding of sexuality.

We’ll get to some of those big issues later, but let’s look at the story a bit closer, so that
we can sense why this text had such a hard time getting into the Christian canon. You
have a story of Jesus being brought a woman who had been accused of adultery—that
is, having sex with someone who was not her husband. Now, we don’t know where the
man is, who would have been punishable by stoning as well, as proscribed in Leviticus
20 and Deuteronomy 22, but the reality is that this story highlights the double standard
we still have in our culture, one that is rooted deeply in our patriarchal, male-centered
culture, and that is that women are often far more burdened with the shame associated
with sex outside of marriage than are men. In our culture, even today, we have a
double standard when it comes to how sexual activity is judged—if a woman is sexually
active, she is often judged to be promiscuous, but a man who is active sexually is often
judged to be a stud, or at least very lucky, for the very same activity. A woman once
told me about her unwed sister becoming pregnant, sometime in the early sixties, and
how shameful she felt, both for her sister and for her—she told me about a moment
when she happened to be in tallest building in that town, looking out the window,
around the time the family found out, and how she had to repress her desire to throw
herself out the window, because of the shame associated with such a thing during that
era. In all honesty, I was stunned by that story, that it would cause her such shame to
have her sister be an unwed mother—or, frankly, that her sister had been sexually
active, that she would consider killing herself. And yet, I doubt that there wasn’t the
same level of shame, if any at all, for the young man involved—it was the woman’s
shame to carry, and it was the woman’s burden to take care of.

That is the kind of double standard that is probably being played out here, though we
cannot know for sure—perhaps the man was a Roman citizen, and thus untouchable to
Jews trying to enforce Jewish law.   But, more than likely, it was the double standard
being played out again, as it usually does. One need look no further than something
like the 200,000 Korean woman who were commandeered into sexual slavery, used as
“comfort women” during World War II. Rarely have been men been called into account,
while women either remained silent about what had happened to them, or were simply
dismissed as now unsalvageable, polluted because of the sexual crime that had
perpetrated against them. Again, there was no corresponding shame and social
punishment for the men involved in this horrific situation.

But back to our story: the woman is brought before him by some religious leaders, and
they ask him how to handle the matter—should they follow Jewish law and stone her to
death? Now, one needs to know something about the ones asking the questions, the
Pharisees, and that is, interestingly enough, they were not particularly conservative in
their readings of the Jewish Law, despite the reputation we Christians have given
them. In fact, the historical evidence shows that they rarely, rarely called for the death
penalty, even when it was prescribed by the Jewish Law. If that is the case, why would
they do this to Jesus? Why would they try to test him, knowing that, in fact, they would
never actually carry out the deed themselves, the death penalty for this woman?
Indeed, the Pharisees were known to be innovative in their interpretation of Jewish
Law—from them came the oral tradition, the Mishnah, that would later serve Judaism so
well the following two thousand years. Some have argued that perhaps they were
testing Jesus on something that he said earlier, whether or not he would back down
from his more conservative reading of the law around divorce—you see, Moses and
Jewish Law allowed for divorce, but Jesus did not, and he seemed to believe that if one
divorced, and remarried, one was an adulterer. Is the woman before him a divorcee,
and are the Pharisees trying to seek if Jesus will now condemn her as an adulterous?
The scholar Alan ???? thinks so (150). It never says that she was divorcee, but
perhaps, like many things past orally in ancient cultures, that detail was left out, as
anyone who has played a game of telephone can attest to—sometimes things get
garbled and left out in the retelling.

Now, we don’t know for sure, but it does explain the absence of a fellow male adulterer,
it does explain why there was no trial, and no list of at least two witnesses, as would
have also been prescribed by Jewish Law, and why Jesus seems to accept her as guilty
of adultery, despite the lack of those things. For the Pharisees, no adultery had taken
place, since they believed that divorce was permissible by God. And, as a side note,
many scholars have argued that the reason why Jesus disallowed divorce was to
actually protect women, since men were the only ones who could begin the divorce
proceedings, leaving their ex-wives and children impoverished and unable to return to
their parent’s household, because of the shame involved in such a thing—again, the
woman bears the shame.

Again, we don’t know for sure, but what is interesting is Jesus’ reaction to their
question: silence, and then a bending down, almost as if he was disengaging from
these people, these religious leaders, these Pharisees. His hands begin to write
something in the dirt, something lost to time, but the content of which has fascinated
scholars for two thousand years—what did he write, and did the woman’s accusers see
what it was? This moment, this act of writing is the only time in the Gospels when Jesus
is said to have written something—yes, he read aloud a few times, in the synagogues,
but this is the only moment when he said to have written something down, even though
it was impermanent, wiped out by the wind and the strangers who would walk over it,
erasing it forever. Even if one does not take this story to be historical, the addition of
this little touch, this moment of Jesus writing in the sand, is such a fascinating little
detail, as if it was meant to mean something, though “what” it was supposed to mean is
now lost forever.

Now, because they were not getting an answer, because he was still scribbling in the
sand, the Pharisees and scribes kept pushing him on the question, and finally Jesus
straightens up, stands up, and says those words that most of know immediately:   “Let
anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” That must
have stunned the crowd, to hear that challenge, a challenge not only to their presumed
innocence when it came to sin, or perhaps, even sexual matters, but to the Law itself,
though, of course, most of them had the same kind of lenient view of the death penalty
as Jesus did, if we are to believe the evidence we have from first century Judaism.
Perhaps they wanted to test how inflexible Jesus would be on this matter—would he be
as flexible as they had been on many other matters, or would he end up being like the
zealots you find in every religion, the ones ready to take everything literally, and to
apply all the punishments listed in their Scriptures on a literal basis? Well, they got
their answer—he was no fundamentalist, just like they were not, but he does something
so interesting, so powerful, and which is really the crux of the story: he reminds them
here the real sin in that moment is not this woman’s supposed adultery, but the
judgmentalism found in their stance, their menacing stance around that woman, a
woman already made vulnerable by a double standard that she has had to carry.

You see, this encounter with Jesus, which was set up to be a referendum on whether or
not Jesus was going to be literal in his reading of the Jewish Law, or maybe whether he
was going to be as hard-nosed about his ban on divorce, gets turned into a moment of
self-examination for his questioners. To their credit, each of those men walked away,
doing exactly what Jesus had asked them to do, which was to look inside, and ask the
question of whether or not they had the morally clean hands needed to pick up that first
stone. They knew better, like we all do, and so they walked away, leaving only Jesus
and this woman alone, with him saying these words: 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.” Jesus encounter with this
woman was so memorable, was so ingrained in the early church, that despite the efforts
of some to suppress the story, it kept popping up over and over again. I suspect it was
because it was a lesson that needs to be learned over and over again, especially in
Christianity, where judgmentalism is rampant, as it was when this story was being cut
out of the New Testament.

You see, I think that some people, especially the people in charge, were scared that if
this story really occurred, somehow it would lead to all sorts of sexual immorality, sex
being, of course, a sick obsession of the early church, almost from second century on.
Over and over again, you see interpreters, even people like John Calvin, want to make
sure we don’t think Jesus is letting this woman off the hook—they keep pointing that
out, as if they are fearful we readers of this text will immediately start planning our
adulterous affairs because Jesus showed great mercy and compassion to this woman,
so many thousands of years ago. If you look at the earliest penitential codes in the
early church, it was the punishments around sex that were the harshest, the most
severe—and, so almost from the beginning, we Christians have never been able to get
beyond our dysfunctional relationship with the body, especially the sexual body. The
reasons for that—they are complicated and books and books have been written on the
topic, and we need to end this service sometime today, so I won’t go there, but just
know that these issues around body and sex have haunted the church for too long, and
so often have been painfully expressed in the ways the church has dealt with women’s
sexuality. You see, in the second and third centuries this story gets being excluded
from some manuscripts because of who it includes, which is this woman, this sexual
other, this woman whom some believed Jesus should have condemned more harshly.
This attempt to cut it out of the Gospels shows how anxious we are about sex, and
sexuality, and especially female sexuality. Better to cut it out of the Gospels than let
others think that this might be an excuse to go out there and sin—pretty sad. We like
the story about not being judgmental, but some, some are uncomfortable with how
good Jesus is to this woman, even when it seems to possibly contradict something he
said earlier, and maybe the sexual codes of Jewish Law, and so we hedge our bets,
and make sure that people understand that this is not and excuse to go out there and
sin sexually.

But this amazing story of Jesus encounter with this woman, yet another sadly unnamed
woman, is not about sexual sin; it’s not about immorality—no, really, it’s about souls,
and the constant vigilance it takes not to judge another human being, to become judge
and jury, ready to pronounce judgment, ready to exclude from the family of God
someone we think is now no longer included by God.   I know I am guilty of that, way too
many times, and, certainly, that is ironic, since I know well that I have been on the other
side of that judgment, with people more than willing to exclude me. We are all guilty of
that, one way or another, and this story is meant to address us, you and me, in those
moments, when we feel a bit better than the one who has stumbled, the one before, on
the ground. It is a reminder that we all stumble, and that God does not condemn us for
our stumbles, but, if anything, for our unwillingness to get up and get back on our feet.
Even then, there is always more mercy and forgiveness from God than we can ever
imagine, because, frankly, we have so rarely experienced that kind of grace and mercy
in this life from fiends and family, and certainly within the church.   That is sad, that is
sad, but there is hope, you know: I did my clergy internship at a church in Atlanta that
had gone through some conflict, and some moments of bitterness and disappointment
and judgmentalism between the members. One Sunday, Pastor Glenna preached on
the issue that was tearing the church up, and the judgmentalism that had overtaken the
place, and to illustrate her point, she took a rock and lifted it up, and asked the
congregation the same question that Jesus asked the Pharisees and scribes: “Let
anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone.” She then put it on
the altar, ready for anyone to go up and get it, and use it. The good news, I believe, is
that the stone is still on that altar and has never been picked up after all these years, a
reminder that we are not each other’s judge, but only fellow travelers, companions,
stumbling along, and hopefully helping each other back up when we fall, knowing that
our time on the ground may be coming up ahead, only a few yards away. Amen.