A Life for A Life - Grace and Justice
Leviticus 24:10-23
Psalm 16
John 8:1-11
What does it mean to be given new life? This is an immense promise that Jesus gives us. When we believe that Jesus is Lord and God, then are baptized, we are given new life. It could be easy to dismiss this as a nice idea or to put it aside as a mystery, but Christians throughout generations have seen this new life as a fundamental new reality that changes everything for them. The early disciples took the simple invitation to come and see as an opportunity to give up their old lives and follow Jesus. Nicodemus was offered new life, but struggled with how it was even possible. The Samaritan woman felt like she had no life and suddenly she was given life, community, purpose and God. These have all given us a glimpse of what new life in Jesus means. Today, we see a woman, guilty and deserving of death, yet Jesus enters in and gives her back her life and offers her a new way, a new life better than the first. It is the same reality with us. We might not realize it, but we are all guilty and deserving of death, yet Jesus enters in, saves our lives and now is offering us a far better life than any we had before. He is offering us new life, which is salvation from a broken destructive life, and salvation to a redeemed, life of creativity and faith.
So first to understand this we need to pour into why every single person is guilty of death. The root of this goes back to the garden. Adam was told that if they eat the fruit from the tree of knowing good and evil he would die. That seems like a harsh punishment, right? That is only the case because we don’t get it. By taking the fruit Adam would be disobeying God, he would be running away from the source of life. Where would his life be then if we was running away from life itself? Their eating the fruit of disobedience or selfishness is like someone jumping off a cliff. Someone jumping off a cliff no longer has something supporting them, so it wouldn’t be surprising that the consequence is a fall which depending on its height would leas to death. When we run away from the only true support of our life, we shouldn’t be surprised when it leads to a fall and well death.
There is more though. When Adam and Eve ate that fruit for the first time they knew evil intimately, they took evil into their body. Evil is like the worst infection, or virus, or chaos that we could imagine and now it lives in us. Every bit of evil we injest, or act on, or watch is just adding to the disease that is in us, slowly corrupting the good. Again, it should be surprising when this corruption kills us.
It is only by the grace of God that these do not lead to death. God didn’t lie that they would die if they ate the fruit. But, instead of letting them fall off the cliff, he put a safety net in to catch them. Instead of letting the corruption take hold he gave them and us his promise that is like a medicine that we need to make sure to trust and take in.
This leads us to our first reading from Leviticus. We get this situation where someone blashemes God and those that hear it are called to punish him with death. Following this the writer seems to parallel this act of blaspheme with murder as it has the same punishment - a life for a life. We might, rightfully, have some issue with the death penalty, which we will get to, but a eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth and a life for a life does make some judicial sense. In fact, in many places and hearts this law can actually curb worse retribution. We can see plenty of places in our world and even in our hearts when an act does not warrant the retribution that someone responds with, but God’s law is meant to curb that. I think this equating the punishment with the act is not meant to be an ideal, but a base line. The equal law for foreigners as well as citizens is the same thing - a baseline.
How then is blaspheme worthy of death? This seems to us to be beyond the scope. Did you notice that all the hearers were the ones that were charged to take the man out of the city and stone him? The ones that heard the blaspheme were the ones that wrong had been done to, and so they were doing an equal punishmen. When God’s name or word is shamed or belittled, it is like killing God in the hearers hearts and minds. It’s not that God is hurt or killed, its that our connection with him is severed and torn and so it hurts us; it hurts our lives, our image of ourselves (as the image of God), the image of one another, the beauty of creation, the present and all encompassing love and hope. It is pulling us away from the life we are meant for. It kills us. In this way, Blaspheme against God is worse than murder, because it can be like a walking death. I think sadly our world is too full of the walking dead.
Yet, we still struggle with this punishment and we should. We live in a state of grace. We live in a state of grace, whereby God puts out safety net after safety net, offering us every antidote possible. We live on the other side of the cross, where Jesus took on all of the just punishment of our sins. We live in a time, where hopefully, we know how mercy is greater than justice - and where ultimately we can work more redemption and hope than this idea of an equal justice.
Yet, even though we live in this state of grace it is important for us to recognize what is wrong - to still see the line that was crossed. We still need to know that we only live and thrive by the grace of God. We need to know that something needs to set us right and give us another life. Sadly today, most people don’t realize what is saving them and protecting them again and again, everyday, practically every moment. They don’t know God’s grace, even though they are surrounded by it. They don’t know the death that otherwise would take hold of them. Most people live leaning off a cliff, only kept up by the hand of God and yet they blame God when he lets them fall even a little. Even for us Christians, it can be so easy to ignore the depth of the wrong and so ignore God’s grace that is working in the good and bad times of our life.
The adulterous woman in today’s passage was facing the reality of her situation. The adultery isn’t explained. Maybe she was married, maybe the man was, maybe both. Why the man wasn’t brought forward I can’t say? We could guess, but we don’t know and we should move forward with what we do know. She did commit adultery. When someone is married they become one flesh. So, in this act of adultery she tore apart a married life. She ripped a life in two. You could say this is more of a spiritual reality, but as someone who has seen adultery from the outside and its consequences I can tell you that it involves a killing of the spirit, the body, the emotions, the psyche and more. Now this woman was facing her death, a life for a life.
This is where God comes into our brokenness, just as he has done trillions of times before. She is brought before Jesus’ judgement. The people had already decided what was the right course of action. They had judged and they had used what God had said to legitimize it, but thankfully this time they actually asked God to judge by asking Jesus. So, what does Jesus say? Let him without sin cast the first stone. Jesus challenged them to judge themselves first before they judge her. People back then had a better understanding of how all corrupting sin was. They knew enough about themselves to acknowledge that they had turned away from God, taken in evil and were deserving of something worse than they had.
This didn’t nullify what this woman had done wrong, but it did cast a shadow over their ability to judge rightly and to be the just actors of this punishment. Notice Jesus says all that is needed is one righteous person to cast the first stone. There are none, not one - Jesus is the only one that remains. Even though Israel had been given God's law, Jesus is the only one that can judge rightly, and he is always just in his judgements. This does not discount God’s law or say we should ignore it, instead it challenges us to hold all of it together and put ultimate judgment in God’s hands. Jesus knew all of Scripture (not to mention the heart of God), how mercy is greater than justice and that a lot of the time mercy is what is needed to create justice. This time God’s mercy meant this woman’s punishment was taken away, but oftentimes God’s mercy means a lesser sentence or a diminished punishment. Sometimes real equal judgement, but we must trust God in that judgement.
Did you notice the interesting detail: Jesus writes in the sand, twice? It's a funny detail without much description. Yet, it was important enough that John mentions it, twice. The Bible doesn’t use any superfluous language and Jesus doesn’t act without purpose either. As Augustine wrote, Jesus writing in the sand has a parallel to God writing the law with his finger on those tablets of stone. Again in Jesus this is God writing his law and order into the earth. Yet as he is writing it in the dust, which humanity was created from, he is also rewriting God's law into our hearts. Jesus is both upholding the law and lifting it up when he challenges people to look at the ways they have disobeyed and not lived into God’s law. He writes the law on their hearts so they might begin to understand. God has shown his grace in their sin, evil, and wrong doing that deserves death, so doesn’t she deserve some grace too.
The law of God is truly good and most of us can see in this moment that it does good in their hearts. Can't it do the same in ours? We can only imagine what this does to their hearts, how it begins to reshape all those present and how it hopefully would lead them to repentance and a more faithful following of God in Jesus. Jesus did not condemn them and he doesn’t condemn this woman either. He doesn’t ignore her wrong, he challenges her to do the same thing as the others - “go and sin no more”. It is the same message to all of those present. Truly look at the wrong you have done and are doing - when you do see it, even in little places, change your direction and stop sinning.
We don’t know what happens to any of these people present. I believe that Jesus changed many hearts, but I don’t know. We do know what happens to Jesus though. He can justly save her life, even when a life has been destroyed, because ultimately he gave his life in her place. He is the just and equal retribution - in fact he over pays. It is a life for a life. Yet, as I said it is far more. When we give our broken life that has fallen to many times, our corrupted flesh that is so full of sickness and evil, he takes it and gives us a new life instead - His life. It is a life for a life, but we never realized that the ideal of this law a life for a life isn’t a punishment, it’s a gift. We are given God’s life when we give him our own. This is saving us from a just punishment, but it is also saving us to a far better reward than we have ever asked for, imagined or deserved. Now in loving and faithful self-sacrifice directed towards God, he lovingly and faithfully sacrifices himself for us. A life for a life. What we find, is that we are far better for the trade. AMEN
Notes:
Why is blaspheme and adultery a sin leading to death?
What is it about the parallel between killing and blaspheming God’s name? The name?
If we relate moral code to physical laws adultery or blaspheming God’s name would be equivalent to walking into traffic. People knew that it destroys and hurts all those witnessing - yourself included. We may not see that because we live in such a state of grace that we are saved from the sheer consequence.
Why do people stop stoning her? What does this tell us about our own judgment? Even when we are thinking about God’s law?
Why does Moses’ law say to stone her, but Jesus does not condemn her?
How do grace, mercy, and justice relate to God’s legal code? 70 elders
Why does Jesus write? Establishing God’s word - writing it into creation and this moment
Let him without sin cast the first stone (What this says and doesn’t say)
What does this do for all those watching and for this adulterous woman?
Go and sin no more - there is still a confrontation with the sin and the need to change - a death to self.
Why was it just for Jesus to take away the death penalty here?
What does it mean that Jesus gives up his life for us?