Throwing Stones at Sinners

But when they persisted in asking Him, He straightened up, and said to them, "He who is without sin among you, let him be the first to throw a stone at her." (John 8:7)

This verse is in the setting of a legal trap designed for Jesus to test His skill in manipulating the law. It was designed to pit His wisdom against the cunning tactics of brilliant men who had honed their skills in interpreting the law for their own advantage and putting their spin on its application. These were the people in charge of administrating religion for the Jews, the very chosen people of God on earth. These were the church leaders who had enormous power and influence over the common people and whose words were considered the final authority in religious matters.

Jesus seemed to these religious leaders to be something of an enigma. He seemed obviously rather bright, very knowledgeable about Scripture and well-educated, though this was somewhat puzzling to many since He had never attended the schools designed to educate people in His day. Somehow they had missed the chance to indoctrinate this man with their own spin on how the laws of Moses should be interpreted or place their imprint on His thinking. The ideas He propounded were in sharp contrast with accepted religious teachings, both in His day and in ours. His teachings and views on God seemed so much at variance with the mainstream and yet so potently attractive to the common people that He presented a real dilemma and a threat to these leaders.

This is exactly the situation that they were attempting to address in this story. Since they couldn't seem to diffuse His influence with the people by directly refuting His view of Scriptures or His strange ideas about God, they decided to employ their well-practiced skills in creating legal conundrums to entrap people into legal confusion. Like a sting operation, they decided to create a situation whereby they were sure that He could not escape getting Himself into legal trouble. No matter how He answered their cunning questions they felt they had a way of catching Him from some other angle to destroy His growing credibility with the people.

Many have correctly pointed out that these accusers were not following the law too carefully in how they set up this trap. In the law of Moses the man involved in adultery was supposed to be punished along with the woman in such circumstances, but in this case no mention is ever made of the man involved. This glaring inconsistency was not necessarily overlooked by these nit-picking legalists, but I am sure they felt that if Jesus pointed this out to them that they believed they could easily engage Him in a legal sparring match and still trip Him up even if they might have to damage some of their own credibility in the process. Like our justice system today, the accuser is often not held to the same standards as the accused and the law is very selectively applied based only on 'admissible evidence' without reference to other supposedly irrelevant actions or lack of integrity by members of the court.

The way that Jesus dealt with this sting operation designed for Him is very profound and instructive. Rather than entering into legal wrangling or getting sucked into analyzing how the law should be applied or to whom, He instead seemed to go along with their demands for 'justice', but inserted only one little caveat. Since they were asking His opinion – which they didn't really value anyway except as a means of discrediting Him publicly – Jesus gave them His opinion. And that opinion in this circumstance was that they should indeed go ahead with the stoning as long as the first stone was thrown by one who could be proven to be without guilt themselves.

Again, many people have focused at this point in the story on the fact that these accusers were all guilty of sin, and many if not all of them were more guilty than the woman they were accusing. In fact, the implication is quite strong here that it had been arranged for one of their own to entice this woman into having sex just so she could be set up and then conveniently 'discovered' to carry out this scheme against Jesus.

I also suspect that this woman had possibly already had interactions with Jesus, had already begun to experience His grace and forgiveness and love and was known to be in the process of being drawn to Him. This transforming of a prostitute who was possible well-known by these men for various and dubious reasons, greatly threatened the status quo of their religion and they may have decided to both make an example of her by publicly condemning and shaming her while also seeking to embarrass and hurt Jesus by attacking one whom He was successfully drawing to Himself using methods they refused to believe were legitimate.

But here is the curious twist that Jesus laid down in answer to their devious trap. Instead of trying to enter into hopeless argument with them about who was right or wrong or the validity of one's interpretation of how the law should be applied, Jesus simply allowed for their prejudging while insisting that as far as His answer was concerned the stoning could proceed – as long as the sinless one who could be found among them was allowed to cast the first stone.

This amazing answer did not contradict their law but certainly stifled their ability both to carry out the condemnation of this woman or to complete their sting operation to discredit Him. Because He alone was both the only one who was sinless and was also among them, then by laying down this stipulation He would force them to have to wait for Him to cast the first stone before He would agree for them to then cast stones at her themselves. Given those conditions obviously they were quite likely to wait for a very long time if they were going to wait for Him to cast a stone at this woman He was seeking to love back into wholeness and fellowship with God.

I never paid attention to the little phrase among you in this passage before. I assumed like everyone else that it simply was referring to these Jews seeking to find one of their own who might qualify as not having sin. But since Jesus was the only one present there without sin, this added phrase seems to include the suggestion that they needed to take seriously the fact that Jesus Himself was the only man ever found among humanity who was completely without sin. He was not only protecting this woman from vigilante's, but He was also reinforcing the truth that His version of God was the only reliable one that could be trusted. And if His view of God and how He feels about sinners was the truly accurate one, then all the assumptions about God held by everyone else were seriously mistaken and misleading.

He who is without sin among you, let him be the first to throw a stone.... If we let Him have the first crack at deciding what to do about sinners before jumping in with our preconceived ideas of what they deserve, we will always find that He is going to steer things in a dramatically different direction than we typically take in our treatment of them. For God is not into throwing stones, contrary to the terrible rumors circulating about Him. But God is very big into rehabilitating sinners and turning them into lovely specimens of His grace and mercy while drawing them into intimate fellowship with Himself.

If we want to follow in His footsteps we will have to allow Him to lead us into dealing with sinners quite differently ourselves. We will introduce them to Jesus directly (rather than dragging them there unceremoniously) so they can experience the kind of dramatic opportunity to discover His love and forgiveness for themselves just as this woman so unexpectedly did nearly two thousand years ago.