Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
The Fourth Sunday after Pentecost, 6^th of July 2025

Galatians 6:7-16
John 8:2-11

I am doing something slightly naughty this morning; I am ignoring the lectionary. It is only by doing so that we can hear this story. The Revised Common Lectionary does not include that story of the woman caught in adultery, although I suspect that if we asked random people what it meant to ‘throw the first stone’, most of them would have at least some idea. This is because biblical scholars generally agree that the story does not belong in the Gospel according to John. If you look at John chapters seven and eight in your Bible, you will find that this story is printed within [square brackets], because it is considered a ‘doubtful passage’. The story does not appear in the earliest Greek manuscripts of the Gospel of John. When it finally does, in fifth and sixth-century manuscripts, it is usually marked with an asterisk, probably to indicate the scribe’s opinion of its dubious nature.

This story not only does not exist in the earliest manuscripts, but it is also not very Johannine. The expressions ‘Mount of Olives’ and ‘scribes and Pharisees’ are used nowhere else in the Gospel according to John, but they are frequently used in the synoptic gospels, which is why they sound so familiar to us. More importantly, the very nature of the story, a controversy with Jewish leaders while Jesus is teaching in the Temple, is more synoptic than Johannine, which is why some manuscripts locate this story near the end of the Gospel according to Luke, when Jesus is in the Temple in the days before the Last Supper. This is a story in which the scribes and Pharisees attempt to trick Jesus, forcing him to choose between affirming the law of Moses and challenging the Roman authorities, who would not allow anyone to inflict capital punishment except themselves, or refusing to condemn the woman and thereby refusing to obey the law of Moses. It is like the challenge about the lawfulness of paying taxes to Caesar (Luke 20:25) or the question about whose wife the woman with seven husbands would be in heaven. (Luke 20:33)

On the other hand, there are equally plausible arguments for saying this story does belong to the Gospel according to John. The first is its very existence. As far as scholars know, no other authentic but non-canonical story has ever attached itself to the Scriptures in this way. Rather than trying to explain why a non-Johannine story was accepted into the Gospel of John, it might be easier to accept that this was a story that was originally part of the Gospel of John, and then explain its deletion from some early Greek manuscripts. As it happens, Saint Augustine has provided us with a possible motive for that deletion. Writing in around 430, Augustine noted that:

Certain persons of little faith, or rather enemies of the true faith, fearing, I suppose, lest their wives should be given impunity in sinning, removed from their manuscripts the Lord’s act of forgiveness toward the adulteress, as if He who had said ‘sin no more’ had granted permission to sin.

Those of greater faith, with no need to excise the event, were in the majority, and so the story has come down to us.

Whether originally part of the Gospel according to John or not, most scholars agree that this story preserves an authentic piece of Jesus’ history. It fits with what is known of contemporary Jewish custom; for example, that it was the accuser in a death penalty case who would be the first to throw the stone. It fits with the tradition that around the year 30, the Romans took away from the Sanhedrin the right of capital punishment. And it fits with everything else we know of Jesus and the way he responded to women, and to sinners, and to women who sinned.

Most commentators assume that the woman was sinful and that the only difficulty for Jesus was the contradiction between the law of Moses, which demanded death, and the Roman law, which forbade capital punishment. But was the woman guilty? She is said to have been caught in the very act, but her partner in crime has not been brought for stoning with her. Maybe she had not, in fact, been caught in the act, despite the hyperbole of her accusers, but had been convicted based on rumour, and so her partner in crime was not known (and may not even have existed). Maybe the man had escaped, but the woman had not. Maybe the accusers had let the man go and brought only the woman for judgment, thus subverting the very law they were quoting. Or maybe the woman had been raped, and the reason she was discovered is because she cried out. A woman being raped ‘in the town’ who cried out for help should have received that help (Leviticus 22:23), but perhaps the circumstances were ignored by those who saw the case as an opportunity to trap Jesus. In that case, theirs would have been the real sin.

The story ends with Jesus telling the woman ‘Do not sin again.’ Commentators often take this as proof that the accusation was true, and the woman had committed the sin of adultery. However, in John 5:14, Jesus tells the man healed on the Sabbath ‘Do not sin any more,’ using the very same Greek words. It is possible that the sin to which Jesus was referring was not adultery, but the general state of sin that all people are in before meeting him and being healed.

Saint Augustine certainly believed the accusation was true. He describes the result of Jesus’ intervention in one of his homilies as: ‘There remained alone they two, a wretch and Mercy’, which in Latin is miseria and Misericordia. But if we focus on the woman’s sinfulness, we miss the meaning of this story. There are, after all, three parties in this story: Jesus, the woman, and the group of scribes and Pharisees who bring the woman to Jesus. The story includes two closely paralleled scenes: Jesus bends down and writes on the ground twice; Jesus stands up to address his conversation partners twice; Jesus speaks twice. The story is not simply about miseria confronting Misericordia. Jesus confronts two other parties.

When he does speak, Jesus addresses neither party according to expectations. Jesus talks to both the Pharisees and scribes, and the woman, about sin. In the first case, he refers to the way the supposedly righteous Pharisees and scribes have lived until now: ‘Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.’ They leave, none of them able to claim to be without sin. In the second case, he addresses the way that the woman is to live from now on: ‘Go your way, and from now on do not sin again.’ Both the Pharisees and scribes, and the woman are invited to live new lives. Both parties have been trapped by the old ways of life, and both have been condemned, but now both are given the possibility of freedom. I think both accept the offer of freedom: the scribes and Pharisees by leaving the scene, deciding not to stone the woman; the woman by remaining after they have left to hear the judgment of the man who saved her.

In both cases, Jesus’ interaction leads to the identification of people as individuals. The woman was originally placed ‘in the middle’ of the gathering, an object on display, given no name, no voice, and no identity apart from the accusation that she is an adulteress. Jesus treats her as an individual, refuses to condemn her, and heals her, sending her to live a life without sin. The Pharisees and scribes were originally a mob, seeking rough justice. After Jesus addresses them, they depart ‘one by one,’ no longer an undifferentiated crowd but individuals, recognising that the law of condemnation no longer applies.

It does not matter whether the woman was guilty. Guilty or innocent, she is set free from violence and injustice to live a new life. But if the woman had been guilty of adultery, then Jesus’ action would have had a further effect. Jesus is equating the woman’s sin of adultery with the sins of the men, whatever they might be. No longer is adultery seen as an ‘unnatural’ crime like treason and idolatry, in which a subordinate rebels against a superior. It is just an ordinary sin. In a patriarchal society, Jesus is taking the side of an oppressed woman by seeing her as no worse a sinner than the surrounding scribes and Pharisees.

At the heart of today’s story is the freedom that Jesus offers his followers; the freedom that the Apostle Paul has been encouraging the Galatians to embrace throughout his Letter; the freedom to turn from the rigid enforcing of the Jewish Law that denies God’s new creation. Both the scribes and the Pharisees who go away, one by one, beginning with the elders, and the woman who is told by Jesus to ‘Go your way, and from now on do not sin again,’ accept this invitation to freedom. We are invited to imitate them both.

There are few things harder than forgiving those who have done wrong, whether they have harmed us or others. For many of us, there is nothing harder than forgiving ourselves when we know we have done wrong. I suspect that the two are connected, and that the people who judge others most harshly are those who are most unable to forgive themselves. But whether we are like the scribes and the Pharisees, condemning those we see doing wrong, ready to pick up our stones, or like the woman, accused of wrongdoing and unable to defend ourselves, Jesus offers us forgiveness. Whoever we are, Jesus invites us to put down our stones and to go on our way into a new future in which we are neither condemning nor condemned. All we need to do is accept the invitation.