Sign in Subscribe

A Woman and a Bunch of Men Caught in their Sin (Full Transcript)

A Woman and a Bunch of Men Caught in their Sin (Full Transcript)

Alternative Routes, Part Three

In this post:

Watch this message:

Full Transcript

I want to share with you a story. You may not know this, but before I was married, before I even met Tamara, I had just graduated from college, and I was a math teacher, believe it or not, and got my first job in Nyssa, Oregon—some of you might know where that's at. But I was still single, and so I was kind of thinking, "This is my time to do some adventure." So I applied for jobs teaching overseas, and I got a job in Indonesia at a small international school teaching math and computers and coaching basketball.

So I flew over there. As the plane was landing, I thought, "I must be crazy. What am I doing?" I had no cross-cultural or very little cross-cultural experience at that point in my life. I moved into this house in the neighborhood, and on one of the very first days, I was walking through the school, and I walked by this house, and someone called to me. Didn't know what they said, but you know the motion, right? It's a universal motion: "Come and sit." So I did.

It was a young mother holding an infant baby, and two other young girls running around. She gave me tea—hot tea on a hot, humid day, perfect, right? And we couldn't say anything, just smile and kind of make sign language as best you can. But then day after day, that continued to happen. She'd call me over, and we'd have tea. I met her husband and her family who lived next door, so I got to know them. Again, no language—mostly nodding and smiling and drinking tea together.

Over those two years I was there by myself, and then when we went back as a family to Indonesia, we didn't live in the same town, but every time we'd visit, we would come and visit and share tea and snacks. Again, language was getting a little better, but it was still difficult to communicate, but we did the best we could. Over years and years, just spending that time together, little by little getting more comfortable with each other and learning to communicate and all those things.

So years down the road, I got a call from Ibu Tati—that was her name—and she told me that her husband had died unexpectedly that day. In Indonesia, most burials take place the same day, or if it's in the afternoon, it's in the very next morning. So she called me about noon and said, "We're having a special prayer time at 4:00. Can you be here?" We lived hours and hours away from her, but I just happened to be in a town about 2 hours from her, teaching a class. I was away from home, so I arranged things, and I got up there in time for the prayer thing.

When I got there—this is not culturally appropriate for Muslim women—but when I got there, she came running. Running was a no-no, first of all, and then she wrapped her arms around me and just said, "I'm so glad you're here"—very culturally inappropriate. And then she invited me into the house.

People are gathering, hundreds and hundreds of people. I mean, there's chairs out in front of the house, there's chairs in the street, the streets are blocked off, and there's hundreds of people outside the home. But she says, "No, you're coming inside." So she took me into the inner room, into the small room where all the family was. And the prayer started, and the loudspeakers were blaring, and the imam was doing his prayer thing, and there was music. Everyone in the room's got their little prayer book in Arabic, and they gave me one. I couldn't read it.

They start just wailing and moving back and forth and tears flowing, and I'm like, "I don't know what I'm supposed to do." This is not the kind of thing they invite foreigners to. This is not the kind of thing that they invite a Christian to. These are all—this is a Muslim family and the whole community, and I'm there in the inner, inner room with the family, and I'm like, "I don't know what to do."

So I just kind of started moving back and forth with them and closed my eyes, and I just prayed to the Lord the whole time: "Lord, just help me in this situation. Lord, I don't know what I'm supposed to do, but thank you for this opportunity. It's incredible. Help me somehow to be a light. Help me somehow to have the opportunity to share something, perhaps at some point."

And I learned something: that when you develop presence with people when life is good, when life is easy, when it's smooth sailing, then when the waves get rough and life starts to fall apart, you already have a voice in their lives, and they will often invite you to come in and be a part of that time. But you've got to do all the work ahead of time first, and that's the hard part.

In our story today, Jesus is teaching at the temple, and as was normally the case, he's confronting the religious leaders who often tried to build fences around God's kingdom, to keep certain people out or make it difficult for some people. He's confronting them about their traditions and their ways of thinking that do not reflect the heart of God, because Jesus was all about reflecting the heart of God and opening wide the gates of the Kingdom for all who would come, for all who would come to him.

And then we see in John 8:2, like JT read (thank you, JT), Jesus teaching, and they bring to him a woman that's caught in adultery. They take her and put her in front of Jesus, in front of the group, and they say, "This woman was caught in the act. What are you going to do, Jesus? What should we do here?" I mean, she's guilty—we assume she's guilty—but what we don't see is that, according to the law, to make an accusation like this required eyewitnesses. I won't go into too much detail, but if there were eyewitnesses to the act, then that means there was a man and a woman, right? Get that? Of course, the man is nowhere to be found. It's only the woman who's brought before Jesus. Funny how that happens sometimes, right?

But according to the law in Leviticus 20:10, if a man commits adultery with a woman, both of them are to be executed. That's what the law of Moses said. So the tension is high, and they brought her before Jesus, and they're saying, "What should we do? What's your answer, Jesus?" They're hoping to catch Jesus in a kind of catch-22 where he has no escape, and they're hoping to get him in a situation where he has to break a law. He either needs to break the law of Moses by saying, "No, don't execute her," or he has to break the law of Rome, which didn't allow the Jews to carry out executions.

So if he answers, "Execute her," he's following the law of Moses but breaking the law of Rome. If he says, "Don't execute her," he's following the law of Rome but not the law of Moses. So they're hoping they'll catch him here and then get him.

He bends down and writes in the ground, and we don't know what he wrote. We have no idea what he wrote. There's a lot of thoughts on what he might have been writing, but we don't know. But we can almost feel the tension rising. There's no answer. You can see the men with the rocks in their hand. They're ready to go, right? They're ready for Jesus to say, "Yep, she broke the law. There you go." And the tension is building, and the tension is building, and the tension is building.

And finally, Jesus stands up in verse 7. He says, "All right, well, if you have no sin in your life, go ahead and throw that first stone." And you can almost feel the awkward pause, right? Like, "What?" And you can feel them kind of thinking through their options: "Do I throw it? Do I not? What am I supposed to do here?"

And Jesus, we see, leverages the power of communal culture here, because these men are thinking, "If I throw the rock and I have sin in my life, then not only am I breaking the law of Moses, but I'm also going against what all my neighbors and friends know about me." I mean, your friends, your family, your neighbors—they know the worst parts of you, right? You tell your friends, you tell your wife, you tell your husband that you don't have any sin in your life, you're going to get laughed at. They know who you are.

And so these men are stuck now. They're the ones stuck. "If I throw it, then I'm condemned because I've got sin in my life too. And if I don't throw it, I'm also admitting that I've got sin in my life." They're stuck. They've been caught, just like the woman was caught. And so Jesus has kind of tiptoed his way around both the law of Moses and the Roman law of the time, because none of them could honestly claim to be sinless. So they leave the scene, and Jesus is left with the woman.

Now, there's probably a few stragglers kind of watching from afar. I would imagine they still want to see what Jesus is going to do, right? They still want to know what's going to happen here—Jesus the rabbi and the woman caught in her sin. What's Jesus going to do?

Jesus is there with her, and she's guilty. Again, let's remember she's guilty. We don't have many details about what the situation looked like. I kind of imagine maybe she's a little disheveled. She was pulled straight from being caught. Maybe she's not fully or appropriately dressed in that situation. So there's shame already. Maybe there's fear in her eyes, confusion. What would the rabbi say to her, the one that people were listening to?

The men had brought her into this picture. They had put her into proximity with Jesus. (We talked about proximity a couple weeks ago.) But now Jesus comes closer. He's not just in proximity with her. He's not just in the same room, so to speak, but now he's looking in her face. He's looking at her eye to eye.

I like to imagine maybe he covered her up with his cloak. Maybe he wiped away the tear-soaked hair from her face. It's not in scripture, but I can see Jesus doing that kind of thing. And I can imagine him saying something like, "You got yourself into a mess, didn't you? But don't worry, it's going to be okay. It's going to be okay."

The presence of Jesus has quieted that previously chaotic scene. The rocks are gone, the men are gone, and there's just Jesus and the woman. Just like when Jesus was with Zacchaeus—remember, he took proximity with Zacchaeus into presence when he moved into the house and invited himself over for dinner. He's done the same thing with this woman. He's not just in proximity anymore; he's actually with her in a very meaningful and active way. And this is a moment—a powerful reminder of grace and forgiveness and mercy and compassion that reflects all that Jesus did and taught.

And then he says to her in verses 10-11, "Woman, where are all the men? Is there no one here to condemn you?" She said, "No one, sir." And these are the words that, if we're honest, I don't know if we—I mean, we like it, I think, but it's kind of hard for us to get sometimes, right? "Neither do I condemn you. Go. Stop sinning. Just stop it. Live a different kind of way."

Jesus doesn't condone her sin—let's be clear about that—but he also doesn't condemn her. He sees her. He sees who she is. He sees the situation she's in, and he urges her to live her life differently. He urges her to start walking a different path, to take an alternative route, to use the phrase we've been using.

So this story isn't trying to downplay the seriousness of sin. I've heard some people try to teach it that way. But I think it illustrates the depth of Jesus's compassion for us, people who are often stuck in our sin and struggle with it. This story illustrates the depths of Jesus's compassion for all people. He forgives her, and then he gently reminds her to live as someone who has been forgiven, encouraging her to live a new kind of life, a different kind of life, a new way of life.

And in a world that's quick to condemn—anybody have experience with a world that's quick to condemn, whether it was your family or a church or a group or whatever?—in a world that is quick to condemn, Jesus chose mercy. Jesus shows a radical kind of compassion that, if we're honest, I think is even hard for us to imagine doing sometimes, isn't it? It's the kind of thing that got Jesus in trouble a lot, right? "Too merciful, too compassionate," or fill in the blank with whatever "too"—"too loving." Got him in trouble a lot. And if we've experienced this too, sometimes it probably has gotten us into trouble sometimes too, hasn't it?

Jesus's actions here invite us to reflect again on—you know, we talked about bowing before. Who in our life, or what in our life, do we bow the lowest to? Forehead-on-the-ground kind of bowing down? Who or what in our lives do we bow the lowest to? Or who or what is on the highest throne of our hearts? Are we so focused on our contemporary versions of Roman law and Jewish law, Christian law, church law, our national law—whatever that might be—are we so focused on those things that we forget sometimes to see the people like Jesus did?

Because Jesus sees people. He sees you right where you're at, because we are all caught in our sin as well, aren't we? And he sees us as people of God. He sees people created in God's image but yet burdened by this thing called sin, enslaved by this thing called sin. This thing called sin causes all kinds of trouble in our lives, and yet he sees us as people in need of grace, in need of forgiveness, in need of a little mercy and grace.

And here's the thing: Jesus, in that whole crowd of people—and we don't know how many people there are here, if it's 20 or 50 or 100, we don't know, but in that whole crowd of people—there was only one person worthy of throwing a stone. Jesus is the only one who's truly worthy of throwing a stone, and he doesn't. In that whole crowd of people, he's the only one worthy of throwing the stone of judgment at the woman, and he chooses not to because he understands that lives can change profoundly when individuals meet Jesus and bow down before him. Lives are transformed. Lives are changed. New lives begin. We take an alternate route that takes us in a different way.

And again, let's be clear that Jesus is not telling us to turn a blind eye to sin. That's not the lesson here. He's not teaching an "anything goes" kind of faith. "It doesn't matter, do what you want, you know, there's forgiveness." No, no, no. But he is reminding us that grace and mercy and forgiveness are more powerful than the sin in our lives. Amen? Let me say that again: The grace and the mercy and the compassion of God are more powerful than whatever sin is in our lives. Say it again: Amen.

And as I reflect on the story, I'm challenged to examine my own heart. Does my heart break for the lost? Does my heart break for those who are like this woman, or like those men, both caught in their sin? Does our heart break for the neighbors around us, just 100 yards that way or that way or that way, who aren't walking with the Lord, who maybe have never known or heard or experienced that kind of grace or mercy or forgiveness in their lives? Does my heart break? Does our heart break? Am I more concerned with my own comfort and my own well-being, or of that of my family or my church or whatever, than I am with the eternal well-being of those who are far away from the Lord? That hits me right where I live.

How often do we—how often do I, how often do we, like the accusers, rush to judgment and kind of push aside our own failures, our own failings? How often and how frequently do we focus on other people's sins and just kind of overlook our own? Someone said—I don't know who it was, but he said something like, "We judge ourselves by our intentions; we judge others by their behavior." We write ourselves off like, "Well, yeah, that wasn't good, but I had good intentions." Then we turn to someone else, and we only judge by what they actually did, don't consider what might be behind that.

More importantly, do we reflect Jesus's approach to combining truth with grace—truth and grace in balance together? Do we reflect in our lives that balance of justice and mercy together in balance, as Jesus did so masterfully? Because this is really important: No one—say that with me. No one. Say it. No one. No one is beyond the reach of God's grace. One more time: No one is beyond the reach of God's grace. Do you believe that? No one is beyond the reach of God's grace, no matter how far they might seem to be away. No one is beyond the reach of God's grace, whether that's a family member or a neighbor or whomever, and whether we or I or you are the accused or the accuser. Jesus offers us all a better way, a different path, a new way to walk, an alternative route. It's different than what we've been doing.

This is the heart of the Gospel, that lives change when people meet Jesus. Lives change when we bow before Jesus and give our lives and surrender our lives to him. And that's the challenge for us: to learn how to stand for truth without becoming agents of condemnation, how to stand for truth without being the men holding the rocks. Because those rocks—we just want to hold those rocks sometimes. And sometimes we really want to throw those rocks, don't we? I mean, we just can imagine: "I feel so good."

How can we become agents of truth and grace and mercy without becoming agents of condemnation? Jesus shows us that it's possible. It's possible to acknowledge the reality of sin while also creating pathways for redemption and restoration. That's what the church is all about: seeing and acknowledging the reality of sin because it's real. We've all experienced it. We've all seen the damage. We've all experienced the damage in some way. And yet, at the same time, as a church, as a people, as families, creating pathways for redemption and restoration. To create communities where grace and transformation are possible, where every person is seen and every person has the opportunity to feel and experience that grace and that mercy, that compassion, the love of God in real and tangible ways. This is what the church is: What we have experienced, we share with others. We live as people who have been forgiven.

Last week, or a couple weeks ago, we talked about how we all have proximity with people, right? This church has proximity with all the people around us, neighborhoods here. Your home, where you live, you're in proximity with people in your neighborhood, your workplace, your school. Wherever you are, you have proximity with people. But the thing is, now we have to realize that proximity is not enough. We can be in proximity with someone and still be very far from them. It happens in marriages all the time, doesn't it? You live in the same house, and it's like you don't even know each other anymore. It can happen in families. It can happen in neighborhoods. You can live next door to the same person for decades and realize you don't even really know them. You're in proximity, but you've got no presence with them.

We must learn to utilize the proximity we have and begin intentionally moving towards presence—meaningful, active presence with people, where we don't just know they're over there, but we begin to walk with them. We begin to stand with them. They have our ear, and we have theirs. And we're willing, when necessary, to slow down or even stop our lives in order to make ourselves available to them. Because proximity is being close to people, which we need—we all have that—but presence is being active and meaningful in their lives, having a voice in their lives.

So going back to my story that I started with, Ibu Tati and her family, I'm there in that room, and it's just—it's honestly chaotic, just wailing and crying and praying. I'm again confused. I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be doing here. So I just—I'm just praying, and I'm closing my eyes, and I'm just praying, "Lord, do something. Use me. I'm here. You put me here for some reason, so whatever that is, help me to figure it out."

And the thought came to me in that moment that this moment would not have been possible without years of making that extra drive to go see them when we were close by. All those uncomfortable times in their hot and humid house—one time, we spent the night in their house, and it was the worst night of sleep I've ever had. I think the mattress was lumpy and hard, and it was so hot—with all the shared hot tea on those super hot, humid days, and the meals that we weren't quite too sure about sometimes, and all those times just smiling and nodding and having difficulty communicating, and confusion sometimes, probably a little hurt feelings from time to time, not intentionally, but it just happens. But that moment would not have been possible without all of those years and all of those times and all of those experiences where we didn't really know what God was going to do but just trusted that this was a relationship we needed to spend some time on.

I don't know what relationships you have in your life, but I encourage you to find ways to intentionally move from proximity with people. Choose two or three people and try to intentionally move from just proximity to presence, having a meaningful presence with them. And it'll be uncomfortable. It won't be easy. It'll be awkward, especially if you've been living next to them for 20 years and you've never learned the names of their children, or whatever. It might be awkward at first, but take those first steps because you never know, down the road, what opportunities are going to come. Because if we have presence with people when life is good and life is easy and smooth sailing, then when life gets rough and the waves come crashing and things start falling apart, you've already got a voice in their lives. And more times than not, they'll come and say, "Hey, you've been talking about God. You've been inviting me to church. You've been talking about Jesus. You've been talking about your faith for all these years, and I've never really been interested. But hey, now my life is in trouble. Tell me about this."

And that moment, again, in that room was something I could not have dreamed of. I couldn't have planned it. I couldn't have done anything to make that happen. But I learned that when we have presence with people, God uses that. Eventually, in time, God will use that. And developing that presence takes time. It's not easy. It's uncomfortable. It's awkward. But it's worth it when the Lord begins to work in and through that.

So I don't know what your life has been like. Maybe your life was like the woman, or maybe it still is like the woman caught in her sin—shame, guilt, disgrace. Perhaps that's the kind of story you've had or the kind of story you're living right now. I don't know. Or maybe your story is like the men. Maybe you were or are a rock-thrower, but you're still guilty. Whatever your story is, the good news is that Jesus is present with you right here, right now, sitting right next to you.

In a moment, we're going to pray, and I'm going to ask you all to pray together. We've done this before, but again, whether this is your first step towards Jesus or whether you've been walking with Jesus for a thousand miles already, I'm going to ask you to pray this prayer together with one voice. For some, it might be the first time you've prayed something like this. For others, it might be a confirmation of the life that you've been trying to live, the life you desire to live.

And I need to say, too, that when we pray, the words themselves, they're not magic. There's no secret formula of "Say this word after this word, and say it this way, and God is forced to do something." It doesn't work that way. But if the words we pray match what's in your heart, if the words you say with your mouth match what's in your heart, then the Holy Spirit is at work, and the Holy Spirit will work and continue to work.

So I'm going to ask you—let's all stand together, and I'm going to invite you to pray. Oh yeah, we got it up there. Okay, good. And again, whether it's your first time or whether you've been walking with the Lord forever, let's pray this prayer with our voices out loud as part of our worship today. Let's pray together.

"Dear Heavenly Father, with a humble heart, I come before you, acknowledging the weight of my sins and the ways I have strayed from your path. I surrender my pride and stubbornness and all the ways I've tried to walk alone. Forgive me, Lord, for choosing my will over yours, for those I've hurt, and for the sins that have separated me from your perfect love. Wash me clean and help me begin anew. Guide my steps so that I can know the way to you. Fill me with your peace and give me the strength to begin walking in your ways. Transform my heart and mind and help me to know and understand your purpose and plan for my life. I trust in your unfailing love and mercy. Help me find hope in your promises and joy in your presence. In Jesus' name, Amen."

I want to ask Albert to come and prepare for our closing song. Lord, thank you for this time we've had together today. Thank you for this message that we have received from Jesus and how he interacted with this woman and these men. Help us, Lord, to remember your grace, and show us how we can extend that same kind of grace to the people in our lives. We ask this in Jesus' name. Amen.