Jesus and the Woman Taken in Adultery

John 8:2-11

Jesus spent the night at the Mount of Olives. By dawn he returned to the temple courts, where all the people have been expecting him and he sat down to teach them. His voice cut through the noise of the sellers, of the crowd, of the animals to be sacrificed, and off the rough commands shouted by the Temple guards in an effort to bring some order to the chaos.

But the religious leaders of Israel, the teachers of the law and the Pharisees, wanted to make an example of him. They wanted to be sure the people knew that Jesus would not obey the law, that he was no devout Jew, and certainly not the son of the Most High God.

So into the temple courts the Pharisees dragged a woman. She was disheveled, her clothes were torn, her face twisted in a rictus of fear, for the law said that men and women guilty of adultery must be stoned to death. Stoning was a painful, humiliating way to die.

And under Roman law, state executions were illegal – officially. “Unofficially” was a different story. This depraved woman was not a Roman citizen. She was just a Jew and just a woman, and she had cheated on her lawful husband. If any Roman soldier witnessed the incident, they pretended not to see.

So viciously, illegally, in a cynical effort to trap Jesus into breaking Mosaic law, the Pharisees had her brought before him in the hundreds of people waiting to see what this Jesus would do.

Her captors roughly pulled her to her feet before Jesus and the crowd and said to him, “Rabbi, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. The Law of Moses, the very law all Jews are commanded to obey, commands us to stone women like this. Now, what do you have to say?”

They waited; the woman half-forgotten because she wasn’t the reason they were there. This upstart young rabbi who claimed to be the son of God, was.

Jesus, who had been teaching the crowds before the Pharisees dragging the prisoner, went silent. He bent down and started to write something on the ground with his finger.

They must have thought they had him, and he was merely delaying the inevitable charge of blasphemy. So they asked him again. And again.

In his own good time, he straightened up. The crowd went silent. The Pharisees waited for his guilty words. But all Jesus said was, “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” And instead of fixing each of them with a cold and powerful glare, he bent down again and wrote on the ground.

He didn’t look up. The angry, violent men who surrounded them with stones in their hands began to drift away. The older ones went first, remembering a lifetime of sins. The younger ones followed their elders. Finally, only the woman was standing there. For the second time Jesus straightened up and asked her, perhaps in some mild surprise, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”

 “No one, sir,” she said.

“Then I don’t either,” Jesus said. “Go — but leave your sinful life behind.”