GRACE SOUNDS LIKE FALLING STONES

The crowd was out for blood. Some religious leaders had caught a couple in the act of adultery and saw in their shame an opportunity to trap the pesky rabbi who’d been stirring up so much trouble for them.

Admittedly, the leaders weren’t all that concerned with caring for the couple – their guilt was obvious and the law left little room for grace. Nor were they truly after justice. If they had been they would have brought both guilty parties, but they didn’t need both for what they had in mind, so they let the man go and dragged the woman through the streets of Jerusalem. She was the perfect bait for their trap.

As they made their way towards the Temple, curious onlookers joined the procession like spectators in a 1st century version of a televised car-chase. They didn’t know what was going to happen, but they didn’t want to miss the spectacle.

When the mob reached Temple Mount and they located the rabbi known as Jesus, the religious leaders forced the guilty woman to stand before him as they aired her sins publicly.

“Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery and, as you know, the Law of Moses clearly states that we should stone her to death for her act. So what do you suggest we do?”

The trap was set. Now all they had to do was wait for Jesus to step into it. No matter what he said, they would benefit. If he agreed with their assessment and called for her death, he would be affirming their authority as the guardians of the Law. But if he argued for grace, as they suspected he would, he’d be openly contradicting the Law of Moses and, in so doing, he would expose himself as a false teacher.

What they didn’t expect was that Jesus would remain silent. Instead of talking his way into their trap, he knelt down and began to draw in the dirt. It was obviously a play for time, so they pressed him for an answer.

Finally, after several moments, Jesus stood up and looked them in the eye as he delivered a very unexpected judgement: “Let any of you who has never sinned throw the first stone.” And then he knelt back down and continued drawing in the dust as his words spread through the crowd.

After a few moments, the first stone hit the dirt, dropped from the hand of an elderly man as he turned and walked away. More stones quickly followed as Jesus’ words swept away their bloodlust and exposed their hypocrisy. After several minutes, only the woman remained standing before Jesus.

Looking up from the ground where he’d been writing, Jesus addressed her for the first time, “Where are your accusers? Has no one condemned you?”

She glanced around at the stones sitting in the dirt where the mob had been. “No one, sir,” she replied, the relief evident in her voice.

“Then I don’t condemn you either.
Now go and leave your life of sin.”

*****

It dawned on me a few years ago that there was actually someone in the crowd who could have thrown the first stone. Jesus. He was without sin. He could have picked up a rock and thrown it and then the feeding frenzy would have been on.

But he didn’t. He chose grace over punishment. And that right there is the breathtaking audacity of the gospel in a nutshell. The only one who is worthy to pass judgement on us chooses to give us grace instead. We don’t deserve it. We couldn’t do enough good things to make up for our mistakes. But He chooses to give us grace anyway. And that’s what makes his grace a gift, not a prize we have to earn.

So if you’ve been holding Jesus as arms-length because you’re ashamed of the way you’ve been living, or you think you have to get your act together to be worthy of his love, may I be the first to tell you that you’ve misunderstood the heart of God. We may be guilty, but He’s way more interested in caring for us than condemning us. He’s not some self-righteous God who finds a perverse joy in throwing our sins in our face. Rather, He’s the self-sacrificing God who took our punishment upon himself so that we can be restored back into relationship with Him.

So don’t run from Him. Run too Him. Just know that if you're holding onto stones of your own, He's going to ask you to drop them, too. You don’t need to carry that weight around anymore.