In chapter eight of John’s gospel there is told a tale often considered a tender, an almost romantic tale, of forgiveness and pardon. It is the story of a woman accused of adultery. She had been caught in flagrante delicto. Her accusers bring her to Jesus and ask what is to be done. To this point the narrative reads as two simple acts: being caught, being brought to Jesus. This is, however, an abbreviation of a complex series of acts and undisclosed intentions.
First, there is the adulterous act. One may question why someone engages in such behaviour. Is there some unresolved flaw in the individual psyche? Is there some unresolved flaw in the marriage? Marriage is not a solitary action, neither is adultery. Where is her co-conspirator in this betrayal?
Second, there is the being caught in flagrante delicto. One would tend to think the most likely party to make such a discovery is one of the offended spouses. Where is he or she? One may well understand the horror of betrayal and the concomitant anger, but the publication of this betrayal demands, under the existing law of this time and place, the death of the offender. We, saturated in the ethos of the modern West, need to take a step back and ponder the absolute gravity and immediacy of that attainder. Was this a trap set by an angry spouse? The Law required there be two witnesses, neither of whom could be the spouse. Who are they? How did they chance upon this act? Why did they interrupt the act to investigate? How did they know this was an adulterous coupling? There is at play here something more than the captious familiarity of parlous parochialism bred of proximity in a less than urbane culture.
Third, the publication having been made, and the evidence being patent, the penalty is a given. Yet, the scribes and Pharisees, learned men, the seemingly would-be dicasts of the situation, come to Jesus to consult him. Do they really consider him to be so naïf that he knows neither the Law nor their aspirations to entrap him in some decree to toss the Law? Is this a trap for both the woman and Jesus? Are they both pawns of the over-zealous and self-righteous questing to prove themselves, perhaps to rid themselves of two people they find offensive?
The scribes and Pharisees were stringently devoted to upholding the Law. Their faith, the faith Jesus shares, claims it is written in stone by the very finger of God. It is absolute and un-amendable. Jesus hears them out, then he crouches to the ground and begins to write in the dirt. That is his response to them. They persist and ask their question a second time. Jesus turns to them and tells them: staring with the man among you who is without sin, go, stone her. He crouches back down in silence and makes marks in the dust of the earth. Without explanation one by one they all leave.
Scholars have spent a good deal of time in speculation about what Jesus was doing. English translations of the story often say Jesus “wrote”, but the Greek verb thusly translated can denote something more akin to “making lines”. Some have speculated that Jesus was writing the sins of the woman’s accusers, but were this the case, why would they have stayed on to press their question a second time? Some have rather convincingly argued that he was writing from Exodus the prohibition against embrangling oneself in charges founded in maliciousness, and thereby revealing his awareness of a hidden agenda. From another perspective—and John is fond of telling stories that can be read on several levels–I think we may see in Jesus’ scribbling something akin to child’s play. Given also the Johannine fondness for contrast and irony, Jesus’ marks in the dirt might well be taken as the antipode of Judaism’s stone tablets. The Johannine community is always differentiating the freedom of Christ from the institutionalism of Judaism. Jesus here speaks no word against God’s Law; he, the Child of God, merely does that which God does, he makes his marks upon the earth, not upon the enduring persistence of stone, but upon the fugacious transience of dust.
When only the accused and the Child of God remain, he asks her: who accuses you? She replies: no one. Where are her accusers? Where is her husband? Where stands her conscience? Jesus accepts her position, and confirms it saying: neither do I. He tells her to go. Go where? Home? To husband? To family? To a neighbourhood buzzing with gossip? To the glare of the righteous and pious? Go? Jesus tells her: get on with your life and do this no more! To do this no more is here the easier task. How does one—in this woman’s world–recover from the ordeal of shame, scorn, condemnation, broken marriage? Some might well think stoning would have been the more kind resolution. What is the life of this morally disenfranchised woman going to be like in the society of her time and place, a society wherein women are possessions, divorce is common, and adultery, like blasphemy, can be fatal? Jesus frees her to a greater punishment than bludgeoning; he frees her to live with the consequences of her act.
This is not a happy ending for anyone involved. The scheming Pharisees get to see their plot dissipate in Jesus’ passivity. The cuckold husband is left to his own devises and a devastated marriage. And the church to whom this tale is preached is left to face the radical terrors of the limitations of both situational ethics and retributive justice.
This passage is not found in many of the earliest copies of the Gospel according to John. Some have opined that it is a misplaced piece of Lucan material, others argue it belongs to the traditions of the Johannine community, and so has a proper, if not ancient-most place, in John’s work. It is small wonder the tale is not in all ancient editions. It would not have sat well with the early church’s strict moral disciplines. In any age it sets an ominous stage for dealing with the real world. Is it viable in human society to claim, as Jesus has it, that the honour of enforcing the divine law belongs first and foremost to the one who is blameless before God? Is it fine to say no one judges you, go, and leave it at that? Who cleans up the upheaval this causes? We still today do not have proper answers. We still today cannot resolve the problem of helping them that offend against the social contract to amend their ways. We, with all our resources of training and conditioning, still are able as a society to offer little in the way of rehabilitative justice, and fall back upon punitive justice to accomplish, to hopefully accomplish, restoration, reformation, and reintegration. God may, with a sweep of his hand, allow all is forgiven. Such is something astonishing more complex for us as individuals and as societies. We are all strings-attached and baggage. We do not enjoy the freedom of being the creative God. More so than those scriptural passages wherein the extremes of moral excellence are enjoined upon us, passages we may take as upholding an ideal, this passage is an affront to humankind’s sense of law and justice, and to the church’s need to relate to the “real” world.
The Pharisees wanted to trick Jesus. The husband wanted revenge. The woman wanted something neither her own self nor her marriage could give her. Jesus serves it all back to them each and all, and to us, in a manner more challenging, more demanding, more painful than any consequence of following the Law could ever have provided. No, this is not a happy tale. It was not then. It is not now. Our sin may be forgiven by God, but—as our act–it is something woven into the very fabric of who and what and where we are, and its resolution must be lived out in the who and what and where we are. Sin has consequences. What it has not is eternality. Redemption never comes without a cross.
May we, through the mercy of one to another, bear the crosses of our sins more easily than they deserve.