Daily Lesson for February 6, 2018

Today’s Daily Lesson comes from John chapter 8 verses 1 through 8:

Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. 2Early in the morning he came again to the temple. All the people came to him and he sat down and began to teach them. 3The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery; and making her stand before all of them, 4they said to him, ‘Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery.5Now in the law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?’ 6They said this to test him, so that they might have some charge to bring against him. Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. 7When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, ‘Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.’ 8And once again he bent down and wrote on the ground.

I have sometimes wondered what it was that Jesus was writing on the ground. A friend says Jesus wrote: “Where is the man?”  I like that interpretation.  Older commentaries suggested he was writing down all the sins of the men who were making a spectacle of her. Maybe he was writing the names of the women and men some of them had carried on affairs with. I like that interpretation too. 

Whatever it was he was writing, it worked. They each dropped their rocks. None of them was without sin, so none was willing to cast the first stone.

A pastor mentor of mine has heard his fair share of confessions of adultery. Upon hearing of it, he always does the same thing. The first thing he says is, “Well, this should keep you from ever, ever again casting a stone at somebody else’s sin.” Then he reaches out to hold their hand.

When Jesus said, “Let him who is without sin be the one to cast the first stone,” he kept everyone else from executing the full law on the woman but still allowed provision for himself to do so. For he was in fact without sin. But then he also refused. The one who was in fact without sin refused to cast his stone also, and so the woman who still might have gotten justice instead got grace.

In fact, if it was indeed the sins of all those men which Jesus was writing down then that means they all got grace also.

And that’s why I don’t think there’s going to be any rocks in heaven.