The Woman Everyone Wanted to Stone

The road Jesus had been walking all this time came at last to Jerusalem. He spent the night out on the Mount of Olives, and at sunrise he walked into the temple courts.

People came as soon as they saw him. He sat down to teach, and they crowded around him on the stone floor.

Then came shouting and the slap of sandals. A group of Pharisees and teachers of the law pushed through the crowd, dragging a woman by the arm. They made her stand in the middle, where everyone could stare.

"Teacher," they said, "this woman was caught with a man who is not her husband. Moses told us in the law to throw stones at a woman like this until she is dead. So what do you say?"

She had broken her promise to be faithful, to belong to her husband and no one else.

(The law of Moses said the man must be judged too. Somehow no one had brought him.)

They did not care about her. This was a trap. If Jesus said, "Let her go," they could say he ignored God's law. If he said, "Stone her," what would become of the teacher people called the friend of sinners? Either way, they thought, they had him.

Jesus bent down and began to write in the dust with his finger.

No one knows what he wrote. (The Bible doesn't say, and people have been guessing for two thousand years.)

"Well?" they said. "Answer us!" They asked again, and again.

So Jesus stood up and looked at them. "Let the one of you who has never sinned throw the first stone at her."

Then he bent down and went back to writing.

No one moved. The men looked at the rocks in their hands, then sideways at each other.

THUD. A rock dropped in the dirt, and an old man turned and walked away. Thud. Then another. The oldest went first. (They had had the most years to collect wrongs to remember.) Then the younger ones, one by one, until all that was left was the scratch of a finger in the dust.

Jesus stood up. The woman was still there, but not one of the men who wanted to condemn her was left. (To condemn someone is to say, "Guilty! You must be punished.")

"Woman, where are they?" he asked. "Has no one condemned you?"

"No one, sir," she said.

"Then neither do I condemn you," said Jesus. "Go now, and leave your life of sin."

She went out past the rocks lying all over the ground.

Rocks can punish a wrong, but they cannot take one away. The men walked home with their secret wrongs still on them. Jesus had told her two things at once, "neither do I condemn you" and "leave your sin," and only someone who could deal with sin for good could say both.

He was the one person in that courtyard who had never sinned, and he wrote in the dust instead. Before long, Jesus would let the punishment for wrongs like hers fall on him, the way those stones were meant to fall on her.

Years later, Paul wrote to Jesus' people in Rome: "There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus."

The only one who could have thrown the first stone is the one who says, "Neither do I."