so that, in repeating them, they might possibly become aware of the cruelty which lay behind them.
(3) The historian Sir John Seeley in Ecce Homo makes an interesting suggestion. ‘Jesus was seized with an intolerable sense of shame. He could not meet the eye of the crowd, or of the accusers, and perhaps at that moment least of all of the woman . . . In his burning embarrassment and confusion he stooped down so as to hide his face, and began writing with his fingers upon the ground.’ It may well be that the leering, lustful look on the faces of the scribes and Pharisees, the bleak cruelty in their eyes, the prurient curiosity of the crowd, the shame of the woman, all combined to twist the very heart of Jesus in agony and pity, so that he hid his eyes.
(4) By far the most interesting suggestion emerges from certain of the later manuscripts. The Armenian translates the passage this way: ‘He himself, bowing his head, was writing with his finger on the earth to declare their sins; and they were seeing their several sins on the stones.’ The suggestion is that Jesus was writing in the dust the sins of the very men who were accusing the woman. There may be something in that. The normal Greek word for to write is graphein; but here the word used is katagraphein, which can mean to write down a record against someone. (One of the meanings of kata is against.) So, in Job 13:26, Job says: ‘You write [katagraphein] bitter things against me.’ It may be that Jesus was confronting those self-confident sadists with the record of their own sins.
However that may be, the scribes and Pharisees continued to insist on an answer – and they got it. Jesus said in effect: ‘All right! Stone her! But let anyone among you that is without sin be the first to cast a stone.’ It may well be that the word for without sin (anamartetos) means not only without sin, but even without a sinful desire. Jesus was saying: ‘Yes, you may stone her – but only if you never wanted to do the same thing yourselves.’ There was a silence – and then slowly the accusers drifted away.
So Jesus and the woman were left alone. As Augustine put it: ‘There remained a great misery [miseria] and a great pity [misericordia].’ Jesus said to the woman: ‘Has no one condemned you?’ ‘No one, sir,’ she said. Jesus said: ‘I am not for the moment going to pass judgment on you either. Go, and make a new start, and don’t sin any more.’
WRETCHEDNESS AND PITY
John 7:53–8:11 (contd)
THIS passage shows us two things about the attitude of the scribes and the Pharisees.
(1) It shows us their conception of authority. The scribes and the Pharisees were the legal experts of the day; problems were taken to them for decision. It is clear that to them authority was characteristically critical, censorious and condemnatory. That authority should be based on sympathy, that its aim should be to reclaim the criminal and the sinner, never entered their heads. They conceived of their function as giving them the right to stand over others like grim invigilators, to watch for every mistake and every deviation from the law, and to descend on them with savage and unforgiving punishment; they never dreamed that it might lay upon them the obligation to cure the wrongdoer.
There are still those who regard a position of authority as giving them the right to condemn and the duty to punish. They think that such authority as they have has given them the right to be moral watchdogs trained to tear the sinner to pieces; but all true authority is founded on sympathy. When the Methodist evangelist George Whitefield saw the criminal on the way to the gallows, he uttered the famous sentence: ‘There, but for the grace of God, go I.’
The first duty of authority is to try to understand the force of the temptations which drove the sinner to sin and the seductiveness of the circumstances in which sin became so attractive. No one can pass judgment on another unless some attempt has been made to understand what the other has come through. The second duty of authority is to seek to reclaim the wrongdoer. Any authority which is solely concerned with punishment is wrong; any authority which, in its exercise, drives a wrongdoer either to despair or to resentment is a failure. The function of authority is not to banish sinners from all decent society, still less to wipe them out; it is to make them into good citizens. Those who are set in authority must be like wise physicians; their one desire must be to heal.
(2) This incident shows vividly and cruelly the attitude of the scribes and Pharisees to people. They were not looking on this woman as a person at all; they were looking on her only as a thing, an instrument whereby they could formulate a charge against Jesus. They were using her, as a person might use a tool, for their own purposes. To them she had no name, no personality, no feelings; she was simply a pawn in the game whereby they sought to destroy Jesus.
It is always wrong to regard people as things; it is always un-Christian to regard people as cases. It was said of Beatrice Webb, afterwards Lady Passfield, the famous economist, that ‘she saw men as specimens walking’. Dr Paul Tournier in A Doctor’s Casebook talks of what he calls ‘the personalism of the Bible’. He points out how fond the Bible is of names. God says to Moses: ‘I know you by name’ (Exodus 33:17). God said to Cyrus: ‘it is I, the Lord, the God of Israel, who call you by your name’ (Isaiah 45:3). There are whole pages of names in the Bible. Dr Tournier insists that this is proof that the Bible thinks of people first and foremost, not as fractions of the mass, or abstractions, or ideas, or cases, but as persons. ‘The proper name’, Dr Tournier writes, ‘is the symbol of the person. If I forget my patients’ names, if I say to myself, “Ah! There’s that gall-bladder type or that consumptive that I saw the other day”, I am interesting myself more in their gall-bladders or in their lungs than in themselves as persons.’ He insists that a patient must be always a person, and never a case.
It is extremely unlikely that the scribes and the Pharisees even knew this woman’s name. To them she was nothing but a case of shameless adultery that could now be used as an instrument to suit their purposes. The minute people become things, the spirit of Christianity is dead.
God uses his authority to love us into goodness; to God no person ever becomes a thing. We must use such authority as we have always to understand and always at least to try to mend the person who has made the mistake; and we will never even begin to do that unless we remember that every man and woman is a person, not a thing.
WRETCHEDNESS AND PITY
John 7:53–8:11 (contd)
FURTHER, this incident tells us a great deal about Jesus and his attitude to the sinner.
(1) It was a first principle of Jesus that only those who are themselves without fault have the right to express judgment on the fault of others. ‘Do not judge,’ said Jesus, ‘so that you may not be judged’ (Matthew 7:1). He said that the man who attempted to judge his brother was like a man with a log in his own eye trying to take a speck of dust out of someone else’s eye (Matthew 7:3–5). One of the commonest faults in life is that so many of us demand standards from others that we never even try to meet ourselves; and so many of us condemn faults in others which are glaringly obvious in our own lives. The qualification for judging is not knowledge – we all possess that; it is achievement in goodness – none of us is perfect there. The very facts of the human situation mean that only God has the right to judge, for the simple reason that not one of us is good enough to judge any other.
(2) It was also a first principle with Jesus that our first emotion towards anyone who has made a mistake should be pity. It has been said that the duty of the doctor is ‘sometimes to heal, often to afford relief and always to bring consolation’. When a person suffering from some ailment is brought to a doctor, the doctor does not regard that patient with loathing even if the ailment turns out to be a loathsome disease.
