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JOHN

WRETCHEDNESS AND PITY

John 7:53–8:11

And each of them went to his own house; but Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. Early in the morning he was again in the Temple precincts, and all the people came to him. He sat down and went on teaching them. The scribes and Pharisees brought a woman arrested for adultery. They set her in the midst and said to him: ‘Teacher, this woman was arrested as she was committing adultery – in the very act. In the law Moses enjoined us to stone women like this. What do you say about her?’ They were testing him when they said this, so that they might have some ground on which to accuse him. Jesus stooped down and wrote with his finger on the ground. When they went on asking him their question, he straightened himself and said to them: ‘Let the man among you who is without sin be the first to cast a stone at her.’ And again he bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. One by one those who had heard what he said went out, beginning from the eldest down to the youngest. So Jesus was left alone, and the woman was still there in the midst. Jesus straightened himself and said to her: ‘Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?’ She said: ‘No one, sir.’ Jesus said: ‘I am not going to pass judgment on you either. Go, and from now on, sin no more.’

[This incident is not included in all the ancient manuscripts and appears only in a footnote in the Revised Standard Version; see the Note on pp. 337–9.]

THE scribes and Pharisees were out to get some charge on which they could discredit Jesus; and here they thought they had impaled him inescapably on the horns of a dilemma. When a difficult legal question arose, the natural and routine thing was to take it to a Rabbi for a decision. So the scribes and Pharisees approached Jesus as a Rabbi to challenge him with the question of a woman taken in adultery.

In the eyes of the Jewish law, adultery was a serious crime. The Rabbis said: ‘Every Jew must die before he will commit idolatry, murder or adultery.’ Adultery was, in fact, one of the three gravest sins and was punishable by death, although there were certain differences in respect of the way in which the death penalty was to be carried out. Leviticus 20:10 lays it down: ‘If a man commits adultery with the wife of his neighbour, both the adulterer and the adulteress shall be put to death.’ There the method of death is not specified. Deuteronomy 22:13–24 lays down the penalty in the case of a girl who is already betrothed. In a case like that, she and the man who seduced her are to be brought to the city gates, ‘and you shall stone them to death’. The Mishnah, that is, the Jewish codified law, states that the penalty for adultery is strangulation, and even the method of strangulation is laid down. ‘The man is to be enclosed in dung up to his knees, and a soft towel set within a rough towel is to be placed around his neck (in order that no mark may be made, for the punishment is God’s punishment). Then one man draws in one direction and another in the other direction, until he be dead.’ The Mishnah reiterates that death by stoning is the penalty for a girl who is betrothed and who then commits adultery. From the purely legal point of view, the scribes and Pharisees were perfectly correct. This woman was liable to death by stoning.

The dilemma into which they sought to put Jesus was this. If he said that the woman ought to be stoned to death, two things followed. First, he would lose the name he had gained for love and for mercy and would never again be called the friend of sinners. Second, he would come into collision with the Roman law, for the Jews had no power to pass or carry out the death sentence on anyone. If he said that the woman should be pardoned, it could immediately be said that he was teaching people to break the law of Moses, and that he was condoning, and even encouraging them to commit, adultery. That was the trap into which the scribes and Pharisees sought to lure Jesus. But he turned their attack in such a way that it recoiled against themselves.

At first Jesus stooped down and wrote with his finger on the ground. Why did he do that? There may be four possible reasons.

(1) He may quite simply have wished to gain time and not be rushed into a decision. In that brief moment, he may have been both thinking the thing out and taking it to God.

(2) Certain manuscripts add: ‘as though he did not hear them’. Jesus may well have deliberately forced the scribes and Pharisees to repeat their charges, so that, in repeating them, they might possibly become aware of the cruelty which lay behind them.

(3) The historian Sir John Seeley in Ecce Homo makes an interesting suggestion. ‘Jesus was seized with an intolerable sense of shame. He could not meet the eye of the crowd, or of the accusers, and perhaps at that moment least of all of the woman . . . In his burning embarrassment and confusion he stooped down so as to hide his face, and began writing with his fingers upon the ground.’ It may well be that the leering, lustful look on the faces of the scribes and Pharisees, the bleak cruelty in their eyes, the prurient curiosity of the crowd, the shame of the woman, all combined to twist the very heart of Jesus in agony and pity, so that he hid his eyes.

(4) By far the most interesting suggestion emerges from certain of the later manuscripts. The Armenian translates the passage this way: ‘He himself, bowing his head, was writing with his finger on the earth to declare their sins; and they were seeing their several sins on the stones.’ The suggestion is that Jesus was writing in the dust the sins of the very men who were accusing the woman. There may be something in that. The normal Greek word for to write is graphein; but here the word used is katagraphein, which can mean to write down a record against someone. (One of the meanings of kata is against.) So, in Job 13:26, Job says: ‘You write [katagraphein] bitter things against me.’ It may be that Jesus was confronting those self-confident sadists with the record of their own sins.

However that may be, the scribes and Pharisees continued to insist on an answer – and they got it. Jesus said in effect: ‘All right! Stone her! But let anyone among you that is without sin be the first to cast a stone.’ It may well be that the word for without sin (anamartetos) means not only without sin, but even without a sinful desire. Jesus was saying: ‘Yes, you may stone her – but only if you never wanted to do the same thing yourselves.’ There was a silence – and then slowly the accusers drifted away.

So Jesus and the woman were left alone. As Augustine put it: ‘There remained a great misery [miseria] and a great pity [misericordia].’ Jesus said to the woman: ‘Has no one condemned you?’ ‘No one, sir,’ she said. Jesus said: ‘I am not for the moment going to pass judgment on you either. Go, and make a new start, and don’t sin any more.’