Mercy, Accountability, & the Grace of God | John 8:2-11 | 3.22.26

Grace and peace to you in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.

I am so grateful to be together today as we enter once again into the scriptures so that we might hear another aspect, another facet of the good news of Jesus Christ this Lent.

We have two brief gospel readings for today to help us reflect on the truth that the good news is rooted in mercy, faith, and justice.

And I want to say two things up front today.

First, my reflection today is heavily indebted to the thoughtful and beautiful writing of the author and theologian Sarah Bessie.

So if you want a more reading about this, let me know, and I'd be happy to send you her way.

And the second is just to note that our primary gospel reading today involves a woman who was publicly humiliated, who was set up, and who was put in fear for her life by men in a crowd.

And so for many women, one in four statistically in our country, that is not an ancient story.

And so odds are that some of us in this room, this story might resonate or rhyme with our story or the story of a loved one.

And so, if that's you, just know that you are welcome here exactly as you are, feeling whatever you feel.

And you are free of any judgment if you need to step out at any point.

And I promise my best to handle this text with the care that it deserves and the care you deserve.

And before we read our scripture for today, I want us to pray and ask God to speak to us anew from his word.

Will you pray with me?

Holy One, when you speak, we don't want to miss it.

When you bend down and write in the earth, when you move through the trees, when you wake with the dawn, when you tug on our hearts, when you whisper into our dreams, we don't want to miss it.

So today we pray for open ears and eyes and hearts.

We pray for all who carry wounds from public shaming or violence.

And we ask for tenderness and grace in this place.

We pray for fresh ears, clear minds, open up space in our hearts so that we can receive your word for us today.

In expectant hope we pray.

Amen.

Our first reading is just two verses from the 23rd chapter of Matthew's Gospel, verses 23 and 24.

Let those whose hearts are able hear the good news.

Jesus said to them, Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you tithe dill and cumin and mint, and yet you have neglected the weightier matters of the law, justice and mercy and faith.

It is these you ought to have practiced without neglecting the others.

You blind guides, you strain out a gnat, but swallow a camel.

This is the gospel of the Lord.

Thanks be to God.

And our second reading is from the Gospel of John, chapter 8, verses 2 through 11.

John 8:2–11

And I'll be reading a translation from the late Presbyterian minister, Eugene Peterson, the message.

Let's listen together for God's word to us this morning.

Then Jesus came back to the temple, and swarms of people came to him.

So he sat down and taught them.

The religion scholars and Pharisees led in a woman who had been caught in the act of adultery.

And they stood her in plain sight of everyone and said, Teacher, this woman was caught red-handed in the act of adultery.

Moses, in the law, says that we should stone such persons.

What do you say?

They were trying to trap him into saying something incriminating so that they could bring charges against him.

Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger in the dirt, and they kept at him, badgering him.

He straightened up and said, The sinless one among you, go first.

Throw the first stone.

Bending down again, he wrote some more in the dirt.

Hearing that, one at a time they walked away, one after another, beginning with the oldest, until the woman was left alone.

And Jesus stood up and spoke to her.

Woman, where are they?

Does no one condemn you?

No one, Master, she said.

Neither do I.

Jesus said.

Go on your way, and from now on, don't sin.

This is God's word for God's people.

Amen.

Richard Rohr has written something, has written about something that cultural anthropologists call uh honor-shame systems in history.

He argues that they're not just ancient history.

Most human cultures have had some form of public shame in order to take away someone's honor, and honor was sort of like your credit that you could spend in the community.

If you were enough of an honorable person, you could participate.

The way you took away that honor is a shame.

And this is woven actually into our biology, right?

This is just the way humans are.

It's our into our culture and the way most of us uh see the world around us every single day.

And the basic idea is this honor and shame are things we earn, and we don't come into the world with them.

So we spend our lives working for honor, building it, displaying it, protecting it, and we spend our lives hiding our shame.

Because our shame is like negative credits in our honor bank account.

And so we bury it somewhere, we hope no one will find it.

And what does that look like in practice?

Rohr puts it plainly.

He says we chase status through what we wear, through our job title, through how much money we have, what car we drive, who we hang out with, how much good we do in the world, even how much good we do can be to earn us honor.

And we're constantly running this internal calculation.

How am I doing?

How am I looking?

How do I stack up next to that person?

How do I stack up next to that person?

Did I add to my stock of dignity today, or did I lose it?

That, he says, and I agree, is a very fragile way to live life.

And as people of faith, we can't live our lives in fear and fragility.

And Rohr says that healthy religion exists largely to solve this problem, because what we need and what we rarely find in the world is what he calls a stable core.

That sense of dignity that doesn't depend on what we've achieved or what we've failed at or what someone else thinks about us.

And the good news, friends, the gospel news is that this is exactly the truth that God reminds us of in Christ.

That dignity actually is not something you earn.

It was something given to you freely from the very beginning.

Each of us is inherently and objectively and forever a child of God.

And no achievement or failure can touch that.

God, it turns out, does not participate in the honor and shame system.

That was us.

We made that up.

Yet despite what each of us, and even what I say I believe about grace and mercy and the dignity of folks, when people hurt us, when they break our hearts, when they lash out in our communities, we also need for people to be held accountable.

But the problem is that shame is a blunt instrument that doesn't just hold people accountable, it actually dehumanizes them.

It takes away their ability to grow and change.

It's not restorative, it's retributive.

And retribution might feel good in the moment, but it is not what God is about.

God is about restoration.

And so how can we, as people of faith, be about it too?

Luckily, there's a story about it.

Early in the morning, Jesus came again to the temple.

The text is almost ambivalent about it.

Just a man arriving early, sitting down, and people coming to him and teaching, him teaching them.

You could almost smell the dew on the stone steps.

Then the scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman.

They brought her.

She did not walk in freely.

She was led, carried, dragged, pushed through the gate by men who had been waiting for her.

And the question you have to ask, and the question that the text is too polite or afraid to ask, is how they knew where to find her.

How did they know this information that they had about her?

You do not stumble upon it by accident.

Someone knew, someone told, and the man, whoever he was, is conspicuously and deafeningly absent.

Where is the man?

And the man, whoever he was, was part of a trap that these men were laying for Jesus, but also of an older and crueler trap they were laying for her.

She had been set up.

She was not simply a sinner caught red-handed, she was a woman who had been handed over and betrayed by a man.

In this culture, alas, women did not have status.

Women could not own property.

And yet here she was, in the middle of a crowd, part of a different and more ancient and more terrible trap.

She had become the prop of someone's political game.

When she became the prop of their political game, she was in the middle of this crowd, but she was alone and she had been objectified.

She was a pawn they were trying to use to trap a king.

And they put her in the center and they explained the law to Jesus as if he had not read it, and they asked him what should be done.

It was, of course, a beautiful trap in their eyes.

If Jesus says yes and a stoning begins, well, the Roman guard did not allow public stoning because it caused riots and people destroyed property.

And so to participate in the actual stoning that Moses' law required would have cost Jesus a lot.

And yet, if he says no, well, maybe he doesn't actually believe in the law of Moses.

What kind of rabbi doesn't believe in Moses' law?

So either way, Jesus loses something he cannot afford to lose.

And the crowd was there, and the soldiers were probably not far away, keeping watch.

And a man can run out of good options very quickly in the temple courts in Jerusalem.

And so Jesus, caught between two dangers, does not respond quickly.

He doesn't play their game, because to play their game would have been to participate in their objectification.

And he doesn't see a pawn when he looks at her, he sees a human being, a person, one of God's own children.

And so he bends down and he writes with his finger on the ground in the dirt, God's hands in the dirt, remembering the beloved humanity he molded from that ancient clay.

What strikes me about this after all this time is not the mystery of what did he write, though there is that.

Much ink has been spilled about what Jesus might have been writing, but the sheer calm nerve of it to take a beat, to step back, to kneel down, take some deep breaths, and not to participate in the urgency of what was being demanded of him.

It was the Sabbath.

The learned men around him knew perfectly well that writing in ink or in stone on the Sabbath was a transgression of the law.

A small one, a misdemeanor, perhaps, but theirs to notice.

And here was Jesus slowly and deliberately writing in any way, on the Sabbath, but ink-free, which obliged every legal mind in that courtyard to watch his hand and think about the law rather than the woman.

And the longer he wrote, the more the hot, bright edge of the moment cooled.

Perhaps he was just buying time by playing in the sand, but he was also playing with fire.

It was either the most reckless or the most brilliant thing a man in his position could have done, and then he stood and delivered the most famous line Let the one who is without sin cast the first stone.

And then without waiting for a response, he just bends right back down and writes again.

A mob is an organism.

It has its own logic, its own immune system, and its own profound discomfort with being asked to stop and become a person again.

What Jesus did was to perform a kind of dissolution.

He took every man in that crowd and made him singular again, made him himself.

He was no longer one of this riot of men looking to exact some punishment.

He was standing alone again.

Not we, but you.

Are you the one to throw the first stone?

And so they began to go away one by one.

The oldest first.

Each one with his own private history pressing down on him from inside.

There is something unbearably human about that detail that the oldest went first, because often the oldest have the longest memory.

A crowd dissolved into individuals until it was just two of them.

Jesus straightened up and looked at her.

And this, I think, is the center of the whole thing.

Not a clever escape from the trap, not the brilliant one-liner that scattered the mob, but this.

A moment when a man looked at a woman who had just been used as a weapon by other men, and looked at her the way you look at a person, and not the way you look at a problem.

Jesus, eye to eye with her, fully present.

And whatever she was expecting in that moment, she must have been expecting something terrible.

But what she got instead was a question.

Has anyone condemned you?

No one, Lord, she said.

Neither do I condemn you.

I've been reading the Bible for most of my life, and I'm still not sure what to do with grace when it arrives that plainly and frankly.

There is no hedging.

I do not condemn you either.

No asterisk, no conditions.

Which, when you consider where she stood in the temple and who was saying it, is about as complete a sentence as the language is capable of producing.

And then go and sin no more.

We tend to read that as the footnote, the qualifying clause, grace with a catch.

But in John's Greek, it carries the same force as something practical and urgent that he had said a few chapters earlier in chapter five.

Jesus used that same phrase elsewhere with a sick man who was newly healed.

And what it sounds like to me is not a moral injunction.

Nobody reads it in chapter five as a scolding when a sick man is healed.

It sounds to me more like a word of warning from someone who knows how the world works.

Now that this has happened, you are no longer invisible to them anymore.

Be careful out there.

A caution, not an accusation, because sin brings within it its own punishments.

It is grace finishing the job it started.

Not a door opened and then narrowed, but a door opened and then a path laid before her.

And so that with eyes opened by grace, she could see the world that she was walking back into.

Friends, we serve a God who desires our accountability, but never our objectification.

Never our dehumanization.

Nothing that has happened to you, nothing you have done will ever make God love you any less.

And no life lived out of gratitude and good deeds will ever earn you any more of God's love.

God will not love you anymore.

Because you are not God's employee, you are God's child.

And may we never let the mercy of that escape our hearts.

Because without operating from that place of deep grace, we become part of the mob.

We become people who are all convinced of our own rightness and other people's wrongness, and we're all outraged, and we're all angry, and we're all finding the next person that we are going to throw our stones at.

And if we lose sight of that, we will be quick again to pick up our weapons of public shaming, to celebrate the punishment and downfall of our enemies rather than their restoration and healing, and to try and hold up our moral goodness by hating all the right people instead of trying to love the world back together.

In Christ, we are reminded again of the good news that it turns out God does not participate in the honor and shame system.

And I know for me personally, I've been shamed a lot, but I've never been shamed into being a better version of myself.

Any strides it might seem that shame has made were just plastic coverings over the same broken patterns in my life.

I've only ever been loved into being a better version of myself.

And I suspect that for you, your biggest moments of personal and lasting transformation were not because someone reminded you of the worst thing you've ever done.

They were probably because someone loved you well.

So, friends, we've got to stop seeing other people as objects, uh as tools to advance our own uh political and personal agendas.

Other people are not pawns in our games.

We must never use shame where love is the better treatment.

There are lots of Christians who think it's okay to celebrate the death of their enemies.

To celebrate when people who they already think are bad do more awful stuff.

That's not Jesus.

And so my prayer for not just us, obviously this is bigger than us, right, but for us too, is that we don't ever return back out of those doors and into the world to cast judgment.

If God did not, I didn't write this.

If God did not send Jesus into the world to condemn the world, I doubt he sent us either.

We return to God's world to restore life, to love, to heal, to serve, to restore what has been objectified and broken.

And first with us, first in our own hearts, and then to our neighbors, and then to the world.

May God's healing grace ever be top of mind.

So that God's love may flow to and through us, finishing the work that grace started.

May it be so.

Amen.