The Woman Everyone Wanted to Stone

It was very early, and the sun was barely up. Jesus had come to the temple to teach, and people were sitting close to listen.

Then a crowd came pushing through the morning.

They were dragging a woman. They threw her down on the ground, right in the middle of everyone, where no one could look away. There she lay, with everyone staring, everyone knowing the very worst thing about her.

She had done something wrong. Truly wrong. And these men had caught her, and now they wanted everyone to see.

"Teacher," they said, and their voices were cold and hard. "This woman has sinned. The law says we should throw stones at her until she dies. What do you say?"

They were holding rocks. Their hands were already full of them.

But they did not really care about the woman at all. They were trying to trap Jesus. If he said, "Let her go," they could say he was ignoring God's law. And if he said, "Stone her," then where was all his kindness?

So they waited. And the rocks waited.

And the woman lay in the dust, too ashamed to lift her head.

Jesus bent down. Down low, all the way to the ground, to where she was. And with his finger, he began to write in the dust.

Long before, on a mountain wrapped in smoke, God had written his law on stone with his own finger. Now that same finger was writing in the dust of the temple floor.

The men kept shouting their question. So Jesus stood up, and he looked at them, and he said something they were not ready for.

"Whoever has never sinned," he said, "you go first. You throw the first stone."

Then he bent down again and kept writing.

It got very quiet.

Because not one of them had clean hands. Each of them knew the secret things he had done, the things he hoped no one would ever drag out into the morning light.

One by one, they let their rocks fall. Thud. Thud. The oldest ones went first, and then the rest, until they had all turned and walked away, and the courtyard was empty.

Empty of everyone but Jesus, and the woman, still on the ground.

He stood up. "Where did they all go?" he asked her, gently. "Is there no one left to accuse you?"

"No one, Lord," she whispered.

"Then I do not accuse you either," he said. "Go home. And do not live that way anymore."

There was only one person in that whole courtyard who truly had never sinned, the only one with the right to lift a stone. And he was the one who would not.

He stood between her and the rocks. He put himself in the gap, in the dangerous place, where every stone would have to come through him first.

That is who Jesus is. The only one clean enough to throw, choosing instead to cover her.

And one day, on a hill outside the city, all the blame and all the shame of the whole world would come flying like stones, and Jesus would stand in the gap again and let them land on him, so that you could walk home with no one accusing you.

That morning, the woman got up out of the dust. And she walked home through the early light with her head lifted, past the rocks lying right where they had fallen.