It’s good to be back with you after missing a couple of Sundays in search of some warmer air!

I won’t ask for a show of hands, but I suspect there are some people here this morning looking for a church to be part of. We’ve all church-shopped as we’ve moved to new places.

Well, I have a new perspective on that for you. Several times in sermons I’ve mentioned one of my mentors, my Greek professor in seminary named Cullen Story. Dr. Story and I still stay in touch. I called him on the phone this week because I hadn’t talked to him for awhile and I was using a commentary he wrote on the gospel of John.

Dr. Story recently moved to Georgia with his wife into a retirement community. In fact, he’s 86 years old, and he is leading a Bible Study for the swing shift work crew at the retirement center that starts at 11 PM! At 86 years old!

Anyway, he said to me, “Dan, you need to pray for us, we haven’t found a church home here yet.” He told me about a couple of churches they’d been to, and the last one sounded pretty darn good to me, so I said “Well, why don’t you plug in there? It sounds great!” He said “oh, it is…but everybody is old there!”

Humor me. Look at your hands. Hands are interesting things, aren’t they?

What do your hands tell you about yourself? Age?…wrinkles or not. The kind of work you do or did?…callouses, or cracks. Maybe how fastidiousness you are, if you take care of your nails. Or how busy, are they rough and chapped with little care? Some people speak with their hands, express emotion, threaten, welcome. We could probably learn a lot about a person by studying their hands.

In these next weeks of Lent, we’re going to actually study Jesus…by looking at his hands. Since we don’t have any pictures, we’ll look mostly at what those hands did.

Will you stand with me for the reading of the gospel?

John 7:53-8:11

Some Bible scholars don’t think this story should even be in the Bible, because it wasn’t in some of the earliest manuscripts. You probably have a footnote in your Bible that highlights this question. It’s an interesting study. But many of the very earliest church fathers clearly knew the story. And St. Augustine (4 th century) thought he had figured out why some early versions of the Bible didn’t put in this story: it was too dangerous.

“Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground.” If we’re going to look at Jesus’ hands, we can start here…but it doesn’t seem too dangerous, does it? “Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground.” It IS an interesting way to respond when the religious authorities, the Scribes and the Pharisees (Senior Pastors and Sunday School teachers??) are breathing down your neck, trying to trap you.

All eyes are on Jesus…and it looks like…he calls a time-out to consider.

What goes through Jesus’ mind? Surely he is reviewing:

The Players:

1. He (Jesus) is surrounded by a crowd of people who gathered early in the morning to listen to him teach.
2. The Religious (scribes and Pharisees) are there, glaring at him. They’re not happy at the attention he’s getting, he’s not even in the union, nobody’s heard of him, but he’s making some audacious statements: “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, let the one who believes in me drink,” he had said. Surely this is the Messiah, some of the people concluded. The Religious thought Jesus was dangerous, and they stand, glaring at him.
3. A woman also stood in front of Jesus, caught, so they say, red-handed, in the very act of adultery. She says nothing to deny it. She is nameless, faceless.
4. Two witnesses must have stood there as well, the two that the judicial system required to come forward with an accusation.

The Predicament:

From the standpoint of the Religious, the case is clear and obviously intended to put Jesus in a no-win situation. The woman was caught in the act, there are proper witnesses willing to testify.

The law of Moses, of the Old Testament calls for a sentence of death, and death by stoning. IF they can goad Jesus into upholding the law and approving of the woman’s death, they win on two counts: first, under the rule of the Romans, the Jews had lost the legal right to execute people. So if Jesus says “Yes, uphold the Law of Moses,” he goes against the Roman authority and thereby commits his own crime. And second, if Jesus approves the woman’s death, his ministry of mercy, of grace, of compassion, of healing, seems to be shattered.

If, on the other hand, Jesus says “No, do not kill her,” he clearly puts himself above the law of Moses…and puts himself in an unfavorable light with the people.

No matter what, the Religious win and Jesus loses. The funny thing is, and the thing that makes Jesus dangerous is…he is not trying to win. He is trying to save.

How long can this time out last, Jesus squatting there, silent? What on earth could he have been doing, there with his hands in the dirt, his finger writing?

Since the early centuries, the guesses have poured in:

doodling, buying time

• Jesus was writing the sins of the accusers in the dust.
• Jesus was first writing what he would then speak out loud, a very Roman way

legislating a judicial process

• Jesus was writing Jeremiah 17:3, “those who turn away from God shall be written in the earth.”
• They get more creative. One scholar surmises that Jesus was crouching, and a man crouching down could write a maximum of 16 Hebrew characters without shifting position, so he must have been writing the 16 characters in Exodus 23:1, which says “You shall not support the wicked man,” ie being a malicious witness, insinuating that the woman’s husband had bribed 2 witnesses to help him get out of a marriage, or was in cahoots with the Religious to trap Jesus, or both.

asking, “Where-is-the-man?”! ...My favorite, I think I’ve mentioned to you before, from a radical feminist theologian who adamantly claims Jesus was just writing these 4 words.

Point well taken. Even in a patriarchal society where law and tradition gave the males every advantage…adultery is a 2-person project. The guilty man never appears in the story, giving further evidence that the woman was nothing more than a tool for the Religious trying to trap Jesus. She was expendable to them. But not to Jesus.

The voices continue to pester Jesus, demanding an answer. Finally he stands up and says only one sentence: “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” Then he bends down again, he again extends the index finger of his hand, he again writes in the dirt.

And everyone goes away.

Jesus once again stands up.

“Where are they? Has no one condemned you?”

No.

“Neither do I. Go, and stop sinning.”

Such great forgiveness. She didn’t even ask for it, as far as we know. She didn’t pray a certain prayer, or get on her knees, we don’t know if she repented first. We just know she received forgiveness.

It’s a dangerous story. It’s a dangerous story because Jesus’ forgiveness is too much. It is too generous, too clear, too strong. This forgiveness was liberating, freeing, astounding, make-your-head-swivel-around, I-can’t-understand-this-no-matter-how-hard-I-try kind of forgiveness. We’re not ready for it. We’re not ready for most of what Jesus brings us.

Here’s how Frederick Buechner writes it: (Telling the Truth, 70)

“People are prepared for everything except for the fact that beyond the darkness of their blindness there is a great light. They are prepared to go on breaking their backs plowing the same old field until the cows come home without seeing, until they stub their toes on it, that there is a treasure buried in that field rich enough to buy Texas. They are prepared for a God who strikes hard bargains but not for a God who gives as much for an hour’s work as for a day’s. They are prepared for a mustard-seed kingdom of God no bigger than the eye of a newt but not for the great banyan tree it becomes with birds in its branches singing Mozart. They are prepared for potluck supper at First Presbyterian but not for the marriage supper of the lamb…”

What did Jesus do? Jesus looked the Religious people right in the eye, and in one sentence took the question off the judicial plane and put it on a moral one. The issue wasn’t about legal interpretation, it was about the rest of someone’s life. The issue wasn’t about a judge’s pronouncement, but about the state of people’s hearts. Jesus wasn’t trying to establish doctrine so much as he was trying to move someone out of a rotten past and into a bright future. While the Religious had it out for Jesus, Jesus looked out for the woman. And he brought her this amazing forgiveness, which she could not possibly have expected and may well not have deserved.

Do you ever get stuck here? Do you wonder if Jesus offers you the same deal?

Last week I was in downtown Seattle with friends. It was lunchtime and we were walking across the street at a crosswalk. A man was coming towards us the other way in a wheelchair. I suspect he hangs out downtown a lot. He was moving his wheelchair with his two arms, but he wasn’t very strong, and the wind blowing very strongly against him so that he was barely making progress across the crosswalk.

I remember thinking actually…I wonder if he can make it across while the light is green. My eyes saw him, I must have noticed him, but we were in the middle of a conversation and I just kept walking. When we were almost to the other side of the street, one of my friends stopped on a dime, backed up, looked down into the man’s face and said,

“Do you want a push there, friend?”

When the man nodded, my friend pushed him across the street until he was safe on the curb, then ran to catch up with us.

It was a good moment. I admired my friend. I was more than a little sheepish that I had been too busy to notice. Now, if God was a God only of judicial proceedings, then the story ends with my careless failure. I saw a fellow human being in need, and didn’t stop to help. “Knowing the right thing to do and not doing it” is what the book of James defines as “sin.”

But God doesn’t stop there, because he is more concerned about our future. I walked away after that experience and prayed,

“Lord, help me be more like my friend. Help me notice. Help me never again pass someone by.”

Neither do I condemn you, Jesus said. Now Go, and don’t sin again.

St. Augustine thought this story was left out of scripture early on because too dangerous. Why? Because people feared that it showed too much, that maybe it took sin too lightly. And many, many times in our day, this fear has proven true…people pull out this story to justify all manner of behavior, and if someone objects or calls them on it they say “Let the one without sin cast the first stone.” But Jesus does not condone sin here. Not at all. The last thing he says is “Go and sin no more.”

You can’t get much clearer than that. Jesus didn’t call sin “okay.” He doesn’t say “don’t worry about it.” He says “Don’t sin.” Jesus didn’t say that adultery wasn’t sin. Only…that his love, his forgiveness was greater than her sin. His forgiveness is greater than her sin.

What does that mean to you? It means your sin is not bigger than Jesus’ forgiveness. What has gone on in your life, what is going on in your life, that you are ashamed of? That you know is wrong? What are the things that you have carried around, hiding because you are embarrassed? Addictions that you won’t admit, things spoken in anger, wrongs you have held onto and allowed to fester, friends you have ignored…what is the word? You are forgiven…now go and sin no more. You are released! You are free! Let it go! Now go and live differently!

I have a friend who struggles with an addiction to pornography. He’s making progress, but periodically I get this call and the quiet voice on the other end says “Dan…I blew it.” What do I say? I tell him about Jesus. I tell him about this Jesus. I remind him that Jesus does not condemn, that Jesus forgives…and that Jesus said “Go, and stop sinning.”

I wonder what this woman felt like. Knowing her life was about to end. Then watching the crowd drop their rocks and slowly drift away. Then hearing Jesus forgive her. I think she must have felt absolutely liberated. I wonder if she danced, or jumped, or skipped. I wonder if she had a smile she couldn’t get off of her face. It’s hard to imagine she didn’t. And I wonder where she went from there. I wonder what her life looked like after that.

When we have experienced God’s forgiveness in Christ, it opens the door to all sorts of possibilities. Perhaps you read the article I did this week about Manuel Vela Sr.

Ten years ago, Manuel’s son was in a middle school classroom in Moses Lake, Washington. A 14-year old boy from the school named Barry burst into 5 th period algebra with a hunting rifle and started shooting. Manuel’s son, another classmate, and the teacher were killed. An article in the paper revisited the family, now 10 years after their son died. Manuel talked about how much they missed their boy, how he would have been 25 years old now, how they do a bike ride to remember him.

He also told about sitting at the side of his father’s deathbed in 2003. His father was worried about meeting the Lord with the anger he had in his heart towards his grandson’s murderer. “I don’t want to go with this bitterness,” the grandpa said.

Manuel sat with him, and together they decided it was time to get rid of it all, to let the bitterness go. They prayed, and even addressed the boy who had shot the gun in the prayer, “Barry, no matter how much you have offended us, we forgive you.”

“We had to let it go,” Manuel said, “May God bless him.”

I’m going to be honest. It’s difficult for me to even imagine that kind of forgiveness. I think it’s supernatural. I think it comes only when we understand that in Christ, we have received forgiveness…and that God desires that we might be set free.

That would be dangerous. Imagine if in our world, nations at war could forgive one another, debts could be forgiven, grievances could be set aside. Imagine if people who had been wronged could forgive. Imagine within our families and friendships and neighborhoods we stepped out in forgiveness, even and maybe especially with those who hadn’t even asked for it. It would change our world.

The hands of Jesus. In this story, those hands are dirty. We don’t know what his finger wrote in the dirt…but we do know that he wrote forgiveness onto one life. And it changed the world.