St Margaret's Church Prestwich

Rev Sue preached this sermon on Ash Wednesday. Here it is for you again:

It wasn’t the only time it happened. Jesus was teaching the people when a group of religious leaders appeared with a challenge. They weren’t interested in learning—they wanted to trap him.

The contrast between the attitudes of Jesus and the scribes and Pharisees couldn’t be clearer. The scribes were experts in the law of Moses, as written in the first five books of the Bible. They were the equivalent of solicitors—the people to go to for writing legal contracts, whether for the sale of land or inheritance. The Pharisees, on the other hand, were a group dedicated to living a blameless life according to traditional laws, scrupulously following every commandment. Together, they interpreted the law for the people, and their status and authority depended on it as the defining structure of their society.

Jesus was a threat to them because he taught without consulting them and offered his own interpretation of the law. He revered it, but for him, loving obedience to our Heavenly Father was fundamental—the law was meant to help us in that, not serve as a rigid structure of complex detail.

This time, the challenge was more than a debate over paying taxes or healing on the Sabbath. They had brought with them a woman caught in the act of adultery. She was made to stand in full view of the crowd, surrounded by men—Jesus in front of her, the religious leaders behind. She must have been humiliated and terrified. We don’t know why the man involved wasn’t there, but it’s fair to assume he was keeping as far away as possible.

It’s unlikely that the woman’s accusers truly intended to kill her. The Roman authorities would not have looked kindly on an unsanctioned public execution. Jesus’ opponents knew him well enough to guess that he wouldn’t call for stoning, so it was with the purest hypocrisy that they brought the woman before him. Jesus had a reputation for keeping company with sinners—why not further tarnish his name by making him appear lenient on adultery?

They wanted a debate on the law, to be seen as clever and to win the argument. But Jesus refused to engage. Instead, he took his time and wrote with his finger in the dust. I wish I could tell you what he wrote, but we simply don’t know. What we do know is that it gave everyone time to think. They kept pressing him for an answer until he straightened up, looked them in the eye, and said, “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” Then, unconcerned, he went back to his writing.

They had come as a group, reinforcing one another in their common purpose. But Jesus challenged them as individuals—were their consciences clean? Which one of them would be the first to begin the execution? They might have been faithful husbands, but had they always kept to the letter of the law they studied and upheld as the measure of goodness? Perhaps, in that moment, they saw themselves for what they were—men who had treated a woman as a pawn in their schemes, whose jealousy over their own status had led them to plotting and subterfuge, men riddled with hypocrisy.

Jesus didn’t judge the scribes and Pharisees; he invited them to judge themselves. They had a choice. They could be angry that they had lost the argument and been embarrassed in public, or they could recognize their own judgmental attitudes and lack of compassion. They could continue down the path of bitterness and conspiracy against the man who made them feel so uncomfortable, or they could resolve to live better lives.

The woman, on the other hand, had already been punished by public shaming and humiliation. She had been threatened with a violent, painful death. She was, presumably, terrified. Yet Jesus didn’t ask her whether she was guilty or lecture her about morality. She had already lost her husband, her respectability, and her place in society. It would have been easy for her to turn to prostitution. But Jesus told her to reform, to change her behaviour. And he let her know that he did not condemn her.

God’s judgment is not something imposed upon us from the outside, convicting us of crimes we didn’t know we had committed or were powerless to avoid. It is Jesus looking into our eyes and inviting us to see ourselves as he sees us. It is never a pleasant sight, as he reveals the things we had hidden even from ourselves—the motivations we denied and the attitudes we hoped no one would see. But after that painful realization of our inadequacy, failure, and helplessness, we receive the wonderful gift of mercy. We have judged ourselves, but God welcomes our penitence with open arms.

In the power of his love and forgiveness, we can resolve to sin no more. We hope to do better, knowing we have a long way to go. And beside us will be Jesus—encouraging us, guiding us, forgiving us, and never condemning.