Jesus went to the Mount of Olives.
But early in the morning he arrived again in the temple area,
and all the people started coming to him,
and he sat down and taught them.
Then the scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman
who had been caught in adultery
and made her stand in the middle.
They said to him,
“Teacher, this woman was caught
in the very act of committing adultery.
Now in the law, Moses commanded us to stone such women.
So what do you say?”
They said this to test him,
so that they could have some charge to bring against him.
Jesus bent down and began to write on the ground with his finger.
But when they continued asking him,
he straightened up and said to them,
“Let the one among you who is without sin
be the first to throw a stone at her.”
Again he bent down and wrote on the ground.
And in response, they went away one by one,
beginning with the elders.
So he was left alone with the woman before him.
Then Jesus straightened up and said to her,
“Woman, where are they?
Has no one condemned you?”
She replied, “No one, sir.”
Then Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you.
Go, and from now on do not sin any more.”
I love this story but maybe for a different reason. When Jesus told her to be on her way, he told her to sin no more.
If Jesus call it a sin, it is hard to escape that it is nor a sin. Adultery can lead to crimes of passion. I know of one case where the man shot his girlfriend and then pulled the trigger on himself. Her adultery led to the death of two people. The same woman cheated on her husband 3 years prior.
The deaths caused at least one other person to go into a deep depression over the event. Adultery is not a victimless sin.
Wow that’s really eye opening. Thank you.
( to avoid double standards ), with greater awareness, and honesty. no one threw the first stone.
( to commit adultery, does that need to have 2 people to commit the act? Did anyone encircle the other person? What did ‘the law’ at the time, say about the other person ( adulterer too? ) )
Thou shall not commit adultery.
How well is society upholding the commandment?
Yes, there are individuals succeeding.
Does jollywood ( TV shows, movies ) teach virtue?
That being said, Kevin Sorbo and others prepare some good shows – teachable moments. Imho
Faith and good works
James 2:22
“to commit adultery, does that need to have 2 people to commit the act? Did anyone encircle the other person? What did ‘the law’ at the time, say about the other person ( adulterer too?”
You only need yourself to commit adultery or fornication. You can covet mightily all by yourself. You can do it in your mind. “Better to tear out an eye and enter Heaven that way than keep both eyes and go to Hell.” St. Matthew 18:9, St. Mark 9:47.
Not all girls are sugar and spice and everything nice. That was just nursery school propaganda.
I have been sexually assorted by women multiple times. There are women out there with the mindset that “I am just going to take it!”
Maybe we don’t call it rape but if we redefine it as “What in the hell just happened?” it is the same thing. Sometimes it is like getting hit by a coiled snake.
The first time I was physically assaulted it was in kindergarten by a girl.
She slugged me in the stomach.
Her way of letting me know who would be the Alpha if we ever became pals.
Which we never did.
I made sure to keep a “social distance” between us. Several decades before the term existed.
I wasn’t assaulted in kindergarten by a girl.. I was chased..
we were on the playground.. she was fast.. she tackled me..
then sat on top of me.. and gave me one right on the kisser..
..my first kiss..
I still remember her name.. Cherie..
Definitely. It is the violation of Trust. Once lost, it can never be regained completely.
True, but the greatest personal risk is in making oneself an object of scorn. There is no escaping God-given moral imperatives, of which marriage and fidelity in marriage are top rank. It doesn’t matter whether your restraints are religious or pragmatic; the wholesomeness of dedication to mate, offspring and home is understood on an instinctual level, and sinners always suffer inner revulsion as well as that which society metes out.
The other interesting thing I have noticed about adultery is that it is full of double standard. If one is unfaithful, it is never OK for his/her partner to do it. Just because you did not go domestic violence does not mean you are going to get off scott free for the same thing.
Adultery is a sin , but you don,t understand what Jesus said. …….. He did not say to stop the Adultery. ……. He said to ” Sin no more. ” ……. This has a much wider meaning.
Thank you, Menagerie!
God bless you, Menagerie, for sharing God’s Word!
Thank you Menagerie.
“Let the one among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her”…
Indeed. Blessings to all this Lenten season. Pax vobis.
Divine Judge,
you framed the earth with love and mercy and declared it good; yet we, desiring to justify ourselves, judge others harshly, without knowledge or understanding.
That’s done every day, is it not? Life must be heroic, denying oneself all such “pleasures” as justifying ourselves.
“knowledge and understanding” are the lawyerly cracks through which all manner of undesirable behaviours slip. Stoning the adulteress would have been extreme hypocrisy but to condone her sin (yes, and that of her co-sinner) would be a greater sin, for we must “hate the sin” for the good of society.
The man should be stoned too, why just the woman?
I wonder what Jesus wrote on the ground. Perhaps specific names that inspired them each to leave one by one?
Good question .
We are all, broken.
I’m pretty sure he wrote of each’s sin.
They convicted themselves by leaving.
A most sobering thought.
And their sins?
Specific sins is my guess. Or the 10 commandments.
He was rewriting the Decalogue: remember The Two Greatest Commandments? He indeed rewrote Scripture, really; non-Christian OT scholars chastise Him for reading insights into the Scripture that traditional exegesis denies. It would be like Shakespeare appearing in a literature class and explaining what a scene in one of his plays really means, and the professor throwing him out for not knowing what he was talking about!
…love thy neighbors…
( the core theme along with virtues via symbology, words, parabels, and actions, actions, actions…
Seek and ye shall find…)
“Love” is mentioned 714 times in the Bible.
It likely means something, right?
There’s a bunch of different words for “love” in Greek, while English usually has just “luv”. But “I love my wife” is a quite different love from “I love ice-cream”, etc.
It’s the only time He wrote anything, but we know He could read. He read from the Prophet Isaiah in the Nazareth synagogue. It’s a lot to ponder why he didn’t write, but you can be sure the “scribes and pharisees” were writing down this dialogue and just about everything He said publically. They even had a special word for writing on your clothes to record something important!
What if we are presented a picture of God writing the law onto fleshy softened tables of the heart vs. hard hearts like stone; the dust of the ground in which he wrote being the dust of the ground from which man is created?
Great point!
Pretty much every time the Pharisees and scribes came to entrap Jesus, they misused scripture, and He corrected them with scripture (usually quoting Deuteronomy).
They were angry that he had healed a man on the Sabbath, and because he had said God was his Father (they considered him a bastard, and as such per Deuteronomy 23:2 they wanted him excluded from the temple), and He had accused them of not believing Moses (John 5). According to Leviticus 20:10 and Deuteronomy 22:22, both the man and woman were to be punished equally; unless she was being accused under Deuteronomy 22:13-21, in which case she was to be taken to her parents’ house. Instead, they decided to take her to Jesus (under the guise of following Deuteronomy 17:8-13) for Him to decide her fate (knowing they needed Roman approval for any execution, so He could be accused of violating Roman law).
Deuteronomy 4:2 comes to mind as His possible response: “You shall not add to the word which I command you, nor take from it, that you may keep the commandments of the LORD your God which I command you.” They were as guilty as she.
Always beautiful.
pos
This one is so very humbling.
Thank you Menagerie. You’ve always given me so much inspiration and faith.
Retired Magistrate here: My past before salvation was not pretty; very ugly. If JESUS can save me, and HE did in 2014, HE can save anyone.
If you have not repented and come to JESUS, you can do so today; HE will welcome you with open arms. GOD Bless.
I can see you’re a real rocket scientist. Get Lost.
This too is a reminder that unlike Islam, Christianity grew. Many who call Christians ugly and unforgiving are bumper sticker educated about the faith. They fail to realize the gap in time from Moses to Christ and while the sins do not get re-defined, the punishments levied by men did. Hope, forgiveness, and a future of acceptance replaced the stone.
Christianity was always about one’s “Transformation in Christ”; it is about God Incarnating Himself into humanity so that some humans can be incarnated into God. “Islam” on the other hand means “submission”, and one who submits is a “Muslim” (note the word relationship there?). One sure has heck doesn’t get uplifted, transformed, or incarnated. What one DOES get is 72 grapes (the original of the mis-Arabized “virgins”) in the Garden of Allah. So, you know, there is that. 🙂
And…those were Unspoiled Grapes! 😉
Ok. I have a crude screen name, make crude jokes all the time, have a bit of a potty mouth sometimes, but must confess, I love God with all of my heart and Jesus Christ is my Lord and Savior. Every morning I come to the Treehouse to start my day off reading aloud the Lords Prayer, then I thank God for showing me the way to him through Christ. I made it a goal to read the Bible from front to back and then spend the rest of my life reading and referring to it every day. Been at it for over a year. In the New Testament right now. Almost done. It’s a life long journey and the Treehouse is where it started and it was the Lords Prayer at the top of the page that did it. Thank you Treehouse and Friends.
When you finish reading this time, you might want to check out The Bible in a Year podcast. I’ve read the Bible through several times, but the podcast puts in in chronological order, tells the continuous story of God’s people, and it has excellent commentary. I got more out of doing that last year than any of my other readings.
Thank You Menagerie. I most certainly will do that. I have been absorbing everything I can. It is definitely a life long journey. I really mean it that it started here with the Lords Prayer every morning. God always finds a way into our lives in the most unsuspecting ways. Thank you all for this great community.
I grew up amongst old German-American Ohio farmers, and every other word was “crude” indeed. Still working on getting that out of my system after six decades. I’m reminded of Mrs Truman, to whom at a Washington dinner party the aristocratic hostess said, “Mrs Truman, I wish you could get the president to stop saying ‘manure’, to which Mrs Truman said, “Dear, it’s taken me 30 years to get him to say ‘manure'”. 😀
Thank you for this👏
Thank you for this.
His mother or another? Implying it would have made a difference in his response? There were certainly other women present. The initial response was silence, he bent down and wrote upon the ground and only when pressed stood and delivered the lesson. Why silence? Because he knew the intent of their hearts. It was not to judge or otherwise adjudicate an alleged offense but, was meant merely to entrap him or allow them to charge him somehow which was almost always the intent of the Pharisees and others sent by the ruling authorities to find some means to allow them to maintain a modicum of decorum in their attempts to stop him from teaching and leading what they saw as a movement and thus a challenge to their authority. We know where these attempts ultimately ended, with the fraudulent conviction of imagined crimes by the Sanhedrin and their subsequent blackmailing of Pilate to carry out a sentence that they legally could not.
Profound illustration
Pharisees, Sanhedrin, …
I couldn’t help but think of our current corrupt Congress (elected, maybe), SCOTUS (appointed), POTUS (fraudulently installed), Jan 6 Unselect committee, and the deep state actors of government employees and contractors–the swamp.
We need to turn to God and ask for help to throw off this evil we let come upon us.
Our Lord knew it was all an act on the part of the guys with the stones. If he followed the Laws of Moses, the woman had to die that horrible death by stoning. Then they would go to the Romans and say, “See! He orders the death of people against Roman law!” Or if the Romans blew them off, they could at least say to the general populace, “See! All his ‘love’ talk is just rot!” Conversely, were Our Lord to tell them to let her go/forgive her, etc., they could shout: “See! He rebukes the Law of Moses!”
Our Lord Christ here did a variation on the Pharisees of His “Whose image and inscription is on this coin?” He turned the tables on them. No wonder they eventually refused to ask Him any other questions.
Under the first covenant, the law given through Moses, the hard-hearted accused each other of sin. Jesus specifically said that divorce was allowed under the law of Moses due to hard hearts (of stone).
Under the second covenant, through Jesus, we are shown that we have power to forgive (cover) sins of others (and in doing so, our own are forgiven). God said He will no longer note our sin; we voluntarily change our ways due to the power of the Royal Law of Love written upon softened fleshy tables of the heart.
The law taken literally is a curse. The law understood spiritually is a blessing. Therein lies the difference in the first and second covenants. This was shown to the world by the actual literal history of the people of Iudea.
Without the work of Christ on the cross we are all lost
I am not exactly sure of what you are implying here, but I am not without sin so I won’t condemn you. But I sure can pray for you!
With the “finger” of God
Jesus wrote on the ground
???
Mene Mene- God has numbered the days of your reign and brought it to an end
Tekel- you have been weighed on the scales and found wanting
Peres(parsin) your kingdom is divided.
The Ten Commandments were also written by the “finger” of
God.
Exactly 💯 💯
Another thought… the pharisees were focusing on the sin of adultery but were blind to the fact of their own unfaithfulness to God. Unfaithfulness to his word and to his sending the promised messiah whom they were scheming to kill.
Carl Rove needs to review the text here.
Maybe a little wisdom within the Word (law) of God [Genesis thru Malachi] will teach us a few things here… as it was then so is it today that ‘the scribes and Pharisee’s’ were not of Israelite descendants therefore thru deception they had subtly bamboozled the people enough for them to believe that they the ‘scribes, Pharisees’, sadducees, high priests, and elders’ were caretakers (as false judges) of the Word (see above)… They knew that the people had only entrusted themselves to these false accusers and wannabe judges… so basically the Lord stooped down on the ground and wrote the ‘law’ concerning this woman that was not betrothed unto another man… (otherwise the man involved would have also have to been brought forth for the same accusation). When the Lord stooped down the second time to write on the ground he wrote on the ground portions of the law concerning ‘false witnesses’ maybe from Deuteronomy 19:15-21 or any number of passages throughout scripture relating to the word ‘False’. Seek and ye shall find, ask and it will be given unto thee.
The bottom line is that the same ‘pretending’ that took place with these ‘non-Israelites’ as judges is exactly the same pretending that is going on today, they get away with it today because of mass ignorance of the people. The Truth will destroy their deception in due time.
The Father sent the Son to open the eyes of the blind, and hearing to the deaf.
The historical side of the scriptures show that the Israelites became lazy over a period of time and allowed these ‘heathen actors’ to come in and subjugate them to what Christ taught the opposite of… His power to forgive sins.
I felt compelled to tell this story. I used to work with a medical doctor who was a devout Catholic. He was an unusual but very kind person. Unusual in the sense that he was very spiritual in an honest sort of way. He put me to shame. I remember asking him what he thought of church tradition once, hoping to start a productive conversation. At that time I belonged to an Anabaptist group that was heavy on tradition. He immediately replied that if he would have been born into the family that I was that he would be a member of that group and honor it’s traditions. That was the end of that conversation. I think I understood what he was trying to say. At our small clinic, the doctors had weekly devotions early in the morning before the nursing and office staff arrived. I don’t remember the subject one morning, but I will never forget Lou’s story. He said that once, Jesus was standing before a crowd, and faced with a woman who was accused of adultery. Jesus spoke and said that whoever was without sin should cast the first stone. Everyone stood around in silence and all at once a large stone flew through the air and landed near Jesus and the woman. Jesus said “ok, mother”. When I get to Heaven, and I am trusting the Lord to work His will in me, I hope Lou is one of the first I see there. God has a sense of humor in a good sort of way.
“He immediately replied that if he would have been born into the family that I was that he would be a member of that group and honor it’s traditions.”
Both he and you seem like good persons, but I don’t agree with his advice. I think that one has to ask the following questions:
Did Jesus Christ start a church?
If so, which one did he start?
It follows then, that it makes sense to join the true church, if there is one.
Every muslim man picks up the stone with bloodlust and demonic glee to please Shaytan/allah. Still happens to day in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Syria.
Yet they spend millions on billboards across the US as part of their dawa propaganda to say that “why yes, we REVERE “Jesus””…. although they mix up his Mother, Mary our Holy Mother, “Miryam” with the wife of Joshua who lived 1000 years earlier….and they say “Issa” paid someone else to “take his place” on the Cross (who would be stupid enough to do that and suffer and agonizing death??!!); that is why muslims hate the Cross (and crucifixes) and that at the end of time, Issa is going to “destroy the Cross”. Mo committed very select and ignorant plagiarism by denouncing the divinity of Jesus. That is why the Scottish pastor who was in the group of pastors who serve Queen Elizabeth raised a reasonable stink after a muslima chanted aloud in arabic a prayer that denied Jesus during an ecumenical Mass. He was stripped of his duties. He told the Truth. (And it looks like future King Chuckles is going to have an imam play a role in his Coronation at the ancient Westminster Abbey prior of St. Peter.
Love this story. Often wondered what our Lord, Jesus was writing in the sand? Perhaps the name and sins each of those who were judging the woman caught …. Regardless, they all left. Perhaps we will all know someday, in heaven?
Thank you Menagerie for these posts!
In this morning’s sermon at my old Catholic church (which I still attend via the net), the deacon connected the three readings which had to do with getting rid of the past and focusing on the future.
Then he said something which really got me: “I don’t know, but this me talking, I find it hard to appreciate a Christian who is afraid.” He didn’t say what the Christian would be afraid of. This really resonated with me – my thoughts throughout the pandemic were that there are those who live their lives with fear, and there are those who live their lives with hope.
Now we know who is the true Christian and who is not.
Jesus Christ did NOT have long hair. From the Word of God, given by Christ to the Apostle Paul:
“Does not even nature itself teach you, that, if a man have long hair, it is a shame unto him?” – I Corinthians 11:14
It is a form of blasphemy to produce an image, that one believes is of Christ, with long hair.
That lesson went two ways. First was the issue of the woman who committed adultory. The others, ready to stone her, learned (hopefully), that sinners should not be so ready to punish. None were without sin. And the One without sin did not condemn.
Great lessons, Menagerie.