This is the text of the sermon I preached at the Ebenezer Baptist Church on Sunday, November 6, 2016 as part of a pulpit exchange with their Pastor, Lehman Bates.
It begins with a stoning and
it ends with a stoning, and in between there are some important teachings about
truth and judgement, and there’s one big challenge. That's my 15-second synopsis of the 8th
chapter of the Gospel of John, the passage my friend, and your pastor,
suggested that each of us preach from this morning.
It all starts with what’s
come to be known as “the story of the woman caught in adultery.” We’re told that a woman had been caught in the
act of adultery, and that the "teachers of the law and the Pharisees"
brought her to Jesus to ask him what they should do with her. It seems that they wanted to test him … to
trip him up.
Now, the Law of Moses was
very clear -- she should be stoned to death.
But Jesus had a reputation for being merciful and compassionate, and of
saying and doing things that weren't necessarily in accord with what the Law of
Moses taught.
They must have been feeling pretty
proud of themselves, because it could seem that no matter what he said, they'd
have him. We’re told that he had just
sat down in the temple courts to teactea and a crowd had gathered, waiting to
hear his words about God's love. So, if
Jesus said that the woman should be stoned in accordance with the law, he'd
look to the crowd as if he was flip-flopping on his whole "compassion
thing." But if he said that they
shouldn't stone her -- said that here in the temple courts, no less -- he'd
prove that he was not the good, observant Jew he claimed to be.
Now, before we go any further
I want us to be clear about what was at stake.
When someone is stoned -- as people still are in some parts of the world
today -- a group of people take rocks of various sizes and throw them at
someone until the cumulative effect of all that blunt force trauma leads to
that person's death. It could take
minutes; it could take hours. However
long it takes, though, stoning is an extremely awful way to die.
In all of the ways we humans
have devised to kill one another, crucifixion, of course, is unimaginably
brutal. The lynching tree is hardly
better. Being shot while playing with a
toy gun by a police officer who'd arrived on the scene less than two seconds
before he fired and who then refused to offer any first aid to your twelve-year
old self is right up there. One thing these all have in common is that
they not only accomplish their intention of killing the person, they also send
a message. They're not just a means of
execution, they're also an example.
They're an expression, and a reinforcement, of the power dynamics at
work in a society. And they’re all
legal. That's another awful thing ...
not only could somebody do these things, but according to one reading of the
law, at least, they’re supposed to.
So that was the trap. Jesus either had to condone such a heinous
act, respecting the law but betraying his values, or refuse to go along,
staying true to his principles but breaking the law. Well, Jesus was too smart to be so easily
trapped by so simplistic a seeming dichotomy.
He didn't answer the question they asked. Instead, he gave them the answer to the real
question at hand: who gets to judge.
Who are you, who am I, who
are any of us to judge? Who, here,
hasn't made a mistake at some point in our lives? Who here hasn't done something we wish we
hadn't done, wish we could take back, wish we could go back in time to
un-do? In other words, who among us
here, today, right here and right now, has not done something for which we,
ourselves, could be judged?
That's the question Jesus answered
that morning in the temple courts, with a crowd around him waiting to hear his
teachings, and people who wanted to test him and prove him wanting, and that poor,
frightened woman who could have been any one of us. He didn't answer the question of whether or
not it was right to follow the law. He
answered the question of who has the right to judge another. No one.
Not one of us. He answered by saying that the person who had never
sinned should be the one to cast the first stone, and we're told that one by
one -- starting with the oldest, the scripture points out -- the people in that
crowd, that mob, that had gathered to murder that young woman they had not only
judged but condemned, dropped their stones and walked away. Every single one. And when they had all gone, Jesus asked the
woman a question, "Does no one judge you?" "There's no one here," she
said. "I don't judge you
either." Jesus replied. "Go and sin no more."
That’s the first stoning of
the two stonings, and the first teaching about truth and judgement. The truth is that none of us is free to judge
another, because each of us has our own things for which we could be
judged. No one can cast that first
stone. But we know this, don't we? I mean, you and I, we've heard this
before. We've probably even said it to
people. Maybe we've even tried to live
like that a little bit, from time to time.
But seriously now ... how are we supposed to go through life not
judging? We're in the final days of the
Presidential campaign, and it all comes down to a choice between two major
party candidates, and a handful from third parties. But how do we choose among them if we don't
judge -- judge their words and their deeds, judge their temperament, their
character? How do we choose who gets our
precious vote if we don't judge them?
And if you pay even the
slightest attention to the news, you hear day in and day out of terrible things
happening -- in our world, our country, even right here in Charlottesville --
things that seem to cry out for a response.
But knowing which ones to respond to, and how to respond, often requires
us to judge. To judge who is the victim
and who is the perpetrator; to judge the impact as well as the intent. How can we not judge? And even in our families -- I'll bet some of
you are thinking, "especially in
our families" -- it would be impossible to avoid all judgement. And it's not just that sometimes we can't
help it; it's that so much of the time we seem to have to.
In verse 15, Jesus says
something interesting: "You judge
by human standards; I pass judgement on no one."
Huh. "I pass judgement on no one.” What are we supposed to make of that? "You judge by human standards [but] I
pass judgement on no one."
There are a lot of
commentaries written about this passage, written by all kinds of scholars, with
all kinds of points of view. I
know. I looked at a bunch of them as I
was writing.
But what I want to say to you
this morning is not something I red in any of those commentaries, but something
that I heard as I was meditating on the text itself. It came to me that every time we judge
something, someone, we're expressing an opinion. You judge me to be a kind person, because
everything you know or have heard about me leads you to think of me that
way. But you can't really know, can
you? How often have we heard the
neighbors of a serial killer being interviewed, saying something like, "he
always seemed like such a nice person."
So when you or I judge someone to be a kind person, or a not-kind
person, we’re not stating a fact as much as we are offering an opinion.
But Jesus says that he
"pass[es] judgement on no one."
I think what this means is that he doesn't have opinions about who a person is.
He knows, really knows -- he can see, really see -- who we are. He doesn't have to judge. The beautiful 139th Psalm says:
1 You have searched me, Lord,
and you know me.
2 You know when I sit and
when I rise;
you perceive my thoughts from afar.
3 You discern my going out
and my lying down;
you are familiar with all my ways.
4 Before a word is on my
tongue
you, Lord, know it completely.
5 You hem me in behind and
before,
and you lay your hand upon me.
6 Such knowledge is too
wonderful for me,
too lofty for me to
attain.
I think that Jesus is saying
that he doesn't have to judge, doesn't have to rely on mere judgement, because
the One he calls Abba, Father, knows us better than we know ourselves. And he knows the Abba, he knows God, with
such intimacy that what God knows, he knows.
"... I do nothing on my own but speak just what the Father has
taught me," Jesus says in verse 28.
"The one who sent me is with me; he has not left me alone
..." That's verse 29. Jesus doesn’t have to pass judgement because
he knows God, and God knows us.
This is where we get to that
big challenge. Jesus not only says that
he doesn’t need to judge because he knows,
he also says, essentially, that those who are judging him are doing so because
they don’t know.
Your Pastor told me that he
said something of the sort from this very pulpit not that long ago. It is so much easier to know about God, than to know God. It is so much easier to embrace the concept
than to make the connection. Far, far,
far too often religion becomes focused on the rules, when it’s really about the
relationship.
42 Jesus said to
them [and this is still from John 8], “If God were your
Father, you would love me, for I have come here from God. I have not come on my
own; God sent me. 43 Why is my language
not clear to you? […] 47 Whoever
belongs to God hears what God says. The reason you do not hear is that you do
not belong to God.”
It’s a good thing that Jesus
doesn’t pass judgement or he might have had even more to say!
But that’s the thing. If I look at myself honestly in the mirror, I
have to acknowledge that this isn’t a mere judgement. It’s not just an opinion. It’s the truth. I don’t know God with the fullness God
invites me to. I don’t tend to, care
for, cultivate a relationship with the Nameless One such that I, too, might
call God “Abba.”
There’s an old joke that a
great place to hide from God is in church; the best way to hide from God is to
become a minister. I have so much “sacred”
work to attend to that I can run out of time for the holy communion with God
that gives that work Life. (Have you
ever noticed that if you rearrange the letters in the word “sacred” you get the
word “scared”?)
You probably have your own
version of this same problem. There’s so
much to do taking care of the kids, trying to make ends meet, caring for
grandkids (or grandparents), making a plate of something for someone in need, dealing
with the courts, struggling with an addiction, trying to make a difference in
the world, trying just to get by.
There’s so much to do that we’re often more Martha than Mary. And if you’re anything like me, you judge
yourself – and maybe judge yourself harshly – for that. The funny thing is, that judgement can become
one more thing in the way of deepening our relationship – the guilt that we’re
not as intimate with God as we know God wants becomes a stumbling block to
really knowing God at all.
In the little time I have
left I want to offer some good news.
That’s what preachers are supposed to do, right? It’s in this chapter of the Gospel of John
that Jesus says, “You shall know the truth, and the truth will set you
free.” The fact that we don’t know God
as deeply, as richly, as God would like is only part of the truth. The other part is that God’s okay with
that. We judge by human standards, we
live by human standards, because we are
humans, and God knows that. God doesn’t
expect any more of us than that. God is
patient and kind. God always protects,
always trusts, always hopes, and always perseveres. That’s good news.
And that good news, that
truth, can set us free from the guilt and shame that holds us in bondage
because God tells us – God promises us – that there is no one here who can
judge us, tells us that there are no stones ready to fly, because there is no
one who can cast that first stone. And
through the eyes of Jesus God looks at us just as Jesus looked at the poor,
frightened woman, and says, “I don’t judge you either. Go and sin no more.”
One last thing. I said that this chapter begins with a
stoning and that it ends with one. It
seems that the folks Jesus was talking with that morning in the temple courts
didn’t like the truth he showed them about themselves, didn’t like being told
that they knew more about God than they knew God directly. So they did what we humans so often do when
we don’t like the message we hear, they judged, and condemned, the messenger. John tells us that that crowd picked up
stones with the intention of stoning Jesus.
But while they were gathering their weapons, Jesus disappeared.
And, apparently, this didn’t
deter in him the least. He went right
back with his mission of spreading God’s love.
John’s 9th chapter begins with Jesus healing a man who’d been
blind since birth. May we pray that our
blindness might be healed, so that we might drop the stones in our hands and
stop fearing the stones in the hands of others, so that we might focus our
hearts on the God who sees us, and knows us, and loves us.
Amen.
