53 Everyone else went home, 8:1 but Jesus walked out to the Mount of Olives. 2 Then early the next morning he went to the temple. The people came to him, and he sat down and started teaching them. 3 The Pharisees and the teachers of the Law of Moses brought in a woman who had been caught in bed with a man who wasn’t her husband. They made her stand in the middle of the crowd. 4 Then they said, “Teacher, this woman was caught sleeping with a man who isn’t her husband. 5 The Law of Moses teaches that a woman like this should be stoned to death! What do you say?”
6 They asked Jesus this question, because they wanted to test him and bring some charge against him. But Jesus simply bent over and started writing on the ground with his finger.
7 They kept on asking Jesus about the woman. Finally, he stood up and said, “If any of you have never sinned, then go ahead and throw the first stone at her!” 8 Once again he bent over and began writing on the ground. 9 The people left one by one, beginning with the oldest. Finally, Jesus and the woman were there alone.
10 Jesus stood up and asked her, “Where is everyone? Isn’t there anyone left to accuse you?”
11 “No sir,” the woman answered.
Then Jesus told her, “I am not going to accuse you either. You may go now, but don’t sin anymore.”
Read John 7:53-8:11 in context and/or in other translations on BibleGateway.com!
The passage we are going to look at in this entry is one of the most powerful, and it is also one that has had a challenging past. In most modern translations, this story from John’s gospel carries with it the note that not all ancient manuscripts include it. This tells me that there are some that either really wanted this story to not survive, or some who really wanted this legend to persist.
Whether or not this event actually happened as described here, for the purposes of our discussion we’ll assume that it did, if for no other reason than that this encounter, and what Jesus chooses to do, falls very much in line with His character.
As I studied this passage and story, using several different translations, an interesting shift of wording occurred, and this shift of wording has implications for how we can understand this event. In the more traditional “word-for-word” translations state Jesus’ response in verse 7 as “He who is without sin among you, let . . .”, however some of the more thought-for-thought based and paraphrased translations say, “Has any one of you not sinned? Then . . .”
This distinction is interesting, because when we turn our lives over to God, confess our sins and repent of them, we can move forward in life knowing that God doesn’t count these sins against us. In a sense, at that point we can be “without sin”, moving forward and “sinning no more”. However, we will still have sin staining our past, even if we don’t need to worry about it.
With the traditional translations of these verses, and the Pharisees response, we could easily say that Jesus was writing current, unconfessed sins of these Pharisees. However, the other way would allow for any former sin to be brought up. In either case, the strongest sin to write would be the hidden (i.e. unconfessed) sin, since it would likely be the most embarrassing.
Was Jesus trying to embarrass these Pharisees? I don’t think so in my mind. If He was, He would have announced it or written it in a more “concrete” form than sand. Instead, Jesus picked sand so that only those closest in the crowd (being the eldest) of accusers would have been able to see. When no one was left, then a simple breeze would blow away the evidence.
Which leads us to the big idea for our journal entry: Jesus did not come to condemn, expose, or embarrass anyone. Instead He came to redeem us and draw us back to Him.
Sin breaks our connection with God, Jesus restores it.
This thought was inspired by studying the Walking With Jesus “Reflective Bible Study” package. To discover insights like this in your own study time, click here and give Reflective Bible Study a try today!
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