Scripture: Deuteronomy 22:22-29; John 7:53-11

“As they persisted with their question, he looked up and said, ’If there is one of you who has not sinned let him be the first to throw a stone at her.’”

-- John 8:7

Each of the stories in the Fourth Gospel is intended to reveal the glory of Christ and thus the nature of God. When we read of what Jesus does and says we learn about the nature of God, that is, we see behind the appearances to the way things really are. John calls this insight, “Truth and Life,” so clearly we must believe it and live it out. The stories tell us how to live if we wish to be living eternal life, and our present story is in this respect stunning.

We religious folk normally assume that the life with God is morally rigorous and that God’s demands are clear and simple. God inhabits the world of moral clarity, with God there is only “Yes or No,” there is no “Maybe.” Laws and customs reveal the requirements of God and those who do not obey are to be punished, either directly, as in our story today, or indirectly, as in the exclusion and social aversion shown to non-conformists. Our story tells us that God is not as simple as all that and that before God the hypocrisy of religious people can be as sinful as the transgression of ordinary adultery. Not that either is praiseworthy, but that the one is as bad as the other.

The hypocritical process of punishing exclusion goes on in our midst in many ways I could analyze if there were time, but I leave you to do that for yourself. Here let me simply by way of current example call attention to the case reported last month of the woman condemned to stoning in Northern Nigeria because she became pregnant too long after her husband’s death for him to have been the father of the child. A court of appeal eventually acquitted her after Western human rights groups had made an international cause of it. Some years ago I heard from a well-known Palo Alto physician, that he had witnessed a stoning in Jiddah, Saudi Arabia, during a tour of duty he made there. On a Friday afternoon, before the weekly services of worship, the young woman was made to sit bound on a three-legged stool in the city square. A dump truck loaded with large stones backed near and tilted its load upon her. She disappeared from view under the stones. That was in the 80’s of last century. The Nigerian case was last month. The law in question was the Islamic Shariah. Something like these laws was behind our story for today and so we know what Jesus would have done and said in the recent cases I have mentioned (cf. our reading from Deuteronomy).

I could tell you so much more that is anthropologically interesting about the role of stoning in human culture, why, for instance, the pyramids of ancient Egypt are stylized piles of stones, but that is for another time. Here let us focus on a few points in our story and see what they tell us about God and about ourselves, that is, what they tell us about ultimate reality and how to live so that we might always be in touch with it and escape the loss of reality that the Gospel calls death.

Firstly we note that the men involved are the religious leaders and intellectual elite. It is the scribes and Pharisees who bring the woman to him. Secondly we note that they make her to stand in full view of everybody so as to shame her to the max, and since they say they have just caught her in the act, we are left to wonder what, if anything she was wearing. Thirdly we note that their chief motive is not to vindicate the law so much as to show up Jesus as a teacher who does not take the law seriously enough. The woman herself, her modesty and her feelings mean nothing to them. They use her as a pawn in the chess game they are playing against Jesus. They might even have set her up for the purpose of entrapping Jesus as the police do these days when they entrap prostitutes or their customers.

Next we note Jesus’ reaction. He looks down and away at the ground, bending to write in the dust. He does not say anything and he does not look either at the accusers or the woman, that is, he avoids confrontation. What do you think he wrote? This is the only time he is reported to have written anything. Did he write a message in the dust that the accusers could read, which prepared them for his verbal response? Perhaps, but more important is the fact that he does not look them in the eyes but looks down and away. He avoids confrontation. Can you imagine what an OT prophet would have done? How he would have railed against the hypocrisy and adultery and humiliated all concerned? How angry he would have been? Why did Jesus avoid confrontation? Perhaps he was taking time out to get his anger under control; we know that he could be very angry at times. Could it be that he knows how powerful the eyes of the mob are and how difficult it is to resist the glare of the righteous when they are serving God, not to be sucked in, not to join the lynch mob? Could it be that he could not bear to look into the eyes of religious persons when they were full of the righteous contempt for sinners and steamy indignation at those whose religion was so liberal that it opposed capital punishment.

I think Jesus looked away in embarrassment at them, and sadness, and to control his temper. He must have been outraged at the way they treated the woman, at their sickening hypocrisy. Yes I believe that Jesus got angry, although pastors are not supposed to. I see here a vivid instance of the meeting of true religion and true reality. These religious people will soon get the Romans to crucify Jesus.

But there is still hope, and note how Jesus deals with them all. The accusers persist in their question, they are not going to let Jesus off the hook; he cannot escape by looking down and doodling in the dust, saying nothing. So Jesus looks up and challenges not their law but their hypocrisy, and he does so not by accusing them but rather by inviting them to judge themselves. “Ask yourself,” he says, “if you are in a position to condemn others.” “If there is one of you who has not sinned, let him be the first to throw a stone at her,” says Jesus, and then he looks down and away again and returns to his doodling. He does not confront the accusers, but rather appeals to their best selves, to the honesty that lies buried under the hypocrisy, and behold! they find it. They get in touch with the truth of their own selves, and that truth is the fact of our sinfulness and unworthiness. Or at least one of them does. The oldest accuser drops his stone and slinks away, and all the rest imitate him. Because no one threw the first stone, no stones were thrown.

Now we might hope that older people would be more merciful than younger because they have had more time to commit sins and to discover and acknowledge them, more time to know themselves and gain a moral modesty. In our story that is the case and we affirm that oldest man who led the procession away from hypocrisy back to candor, and want to be like him. Alas however many of us are not that wise and the older we get the more punishing and censorious we get. A meditation on the first stone might help us here. It might take us to the truth of our hypocritical unworthiness, to the log in our own eye before we accuse the splinter in another’s.

The important stone is not the one that kills the victim but the one that is thrown first. The first stone breaks through the veil of natural reticence that ordinary people have when it comes to harming others. We normally do not want to harm, let alone kill, others, and normally would not do so were it not for the network of influence we live in, the cultural images of cruelty in which our minds are culturally embedded. I’m sure that the culture of video games, for instance, influences the phenomenon of school shootings and gang shootings in important ways, by making such activity culturally familiar, shootings which have become so prevalent in our culture that they are no longer reported on the front pages of our newspapers. In this way video games are the first stone.

So I invite you to meditate on the first stone effect as it appears in all our culture, especially our current political culture which so readily justifies the use of extreme violence in the service of national policy; but let us in closing meditate on the phenomenon of the first stone in the more personal contexts of our lives, and here in our congregation. The critical word, the word of slander, the unwarranted complaint, those are the first stones that give permission to others to throw their stones, and soon the victim is buried under a pyramid of rejection. We usually know who are the habitual throwers of the first stone; let us resist their example and rather walk away from hypocrisy. “”When they heard this they went away one by one, beginning with the eldest, until Jesus was left alone with the woman, who remained standing there. He looked up and said, ‘Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?’ ‘No one, sir’ she replied. ‘Neither do I condemn you,’ said Jesus ‘go away and don’t sin any more’ (John 8:8-11).”