Pastor Josh: welcome to the Grace House podcast this evening and tonight's sermon.
Tonight's sermon is called Meek Sauce.
Meek Sauce, 'cause, we'll be looking at the beatitude of
meekness, the beatitude of meekness.
Matthew
says, "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth,"
or congratulations, you're meek.
You shall inherit the earth.
In the 1930s in Detroit, three rowdy young men boarded a city bus
and tried to pick a fight with a lone, quiet man sitting in the back.
They continually hurled insults at him, escalating the aggression,
but the man said absolutely nothing and kept to himself.
Eventually, the man stood up, and the young men realized he was much
larger and more physically imposing than he had appeared while seated.
Instead of throwing a punch, the man calmly reached into his
pocket, handed them a business card, and walked off the bus.
The three young men gathered around the card to see who
they'd been trying to provoke.
It read, "Joe Lewis, boxer."
"Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth."
Let us linger for a moment over this word meekness.
It is an attribute that for centuries has been misunderstood.
It's been maligned and diluted until it resembles a faint
shadow of its biblical self.
Our modern ears, marinated as they are in the brine of self-assertion, hear meekness
and interpret it as resignation Weakness the sorry posture of an individual who has
been reduced to barely an audible whisper by the loud machinery of the world.
This is not meekness as Jesus understood it, nor as it pulses through the pages
of scripture, invigorating prophets and poets, outlaw kings and apostles alike.
To unearth the full breadth of this concept, we must first expose the
impoverishment of our imagination and then allow the text to re-educate us, to remold
us, to school us in its formable paradox.
So this evening, I wanna look at what meekness is, what meekness looks
like, and what it takes to be meek
What meekness is.
in Galatians 5, Paul lays out what he famously terms the fruit of the Spirit.
It's not a fruit basket, mind you, from which you select your favorites
and politely decline the rest.
The fruit, singular, erupts and blossoms in a life that has been tilled and watered
by the living Spirit of God, and among its many facets, love, joy, peace, patience,
and so on, resides near the terminus.
The word prautes, translated in the Old King James as meekness, or in more
recent translations as gentleness.
To our ears, gentleness has a more palatable lilt than meekness, but I
would argue that the old word, abrasive as it may be, carries the truer freight
The Greeks, with their love of nuance and their suspicion of sentiment, gave
us the word prowess, which our modern translations flatten into meekness,
a virtue at once praised by Jesus and misunderstood by almost everyone since.
Prowess is not the limp fragility conjured by Victorian pieties or the brittle,
milky passivity that so often passes for gentleness in the public imagination.
No.
In the Hellenic mind, sharpened on Homer, pounded by Plato, soaked in the
vinegar of war, the meek man was not one who could not fight or would not,
but one who possessed the sword and the arm, the retort and the wit, and yet,
in the moment of trial, sheathed it.
Prowess is the arsenic-laced comment left unsaid.
The clenched fist opened into a handshake.
It is the strength coiled and waiting, but governed by
something keener than animal will.
In this way, meekness is not the absence of anger or power,
but its deliberate calibration.
It is the synthesis between the urge to destroy and the higher directive to heal.
In fact, Greek physicians, meticulous as they were with their mortars and pestles,
borrowed the word for their own art.
A doctor might describe the healing salve as meek if when applied
it neither stung nor festered.
When poured onto an open gash, it did not scorch the patient with caustic
violence, nor did it sit on the wound inert and useless like a potus of ashes.
No.
The right prowess, the true balance of active and passive drew out the infection
and stitched together flesh, never tipping into the cruelty of the overcorrection
or the failed mercy of inaction.
So also says the apostle is the meekness of Christ, power precisely calibrated
so that it heals but does not destroy.
Elsewhere, the Greeks gave us another vision of meekness, this
time in the breath of the wind.
"The Aegean Sea is a capricious partner," they would say.
Now, a morning could dawn with the sea flat as hammered bronze and a wind so
absent you would think divinity asleep.
But by noon, the gales could crack ships in half and roll whole villages in dust.
The mariners of old believed in winds with temperament, gossamer or
ruthless, sprightly or murderous, and they named them accordingly.
The prowess breeze was the sailor's delight.
Not a hurricane that snapped masts, nor a limp, useless exhale that
stranded you, but a gentle wind, insistent and true, that carried your
boat toward home without breaking it.
The meek wind held the capacity for destruction.
Everyone knew what a storm could do, but it chose in that
moment not to unleash itself.
The meek wind was the difference between a journey and a shipwreck.
In this, as in so much, the Greeks understood the paradox.
What holds back could also let go.
Scripture, with all its genius for moral illustration, offered its own
image, and that's of the bridled horse James, the brother of our Lord
and connoisseur of the human tongue's violence, wrote of horses whose titanic
power is subdued by the insertion of a single piece of metal, the bit.
A wild stallion, once broken, does not become less wild, nor does it lose
the memory of what it's capable of.
It simply learns a new form of power, one that is channeled,
guided by the hand of its master.
this too, the text tells us, is meekness.
The stallion does not whimper or shrink.
It stands, muscles taut, ready to run, but it waits for the signal.
When the master tugs the reins, the horse obeys, not because it
has been emptied out, but because its fire has been reordered.
The animal's dignity is not lost.
In fact, the submission to that higher will is what makes it noble.
The meek are not neutered, but they are harnessed.
In the language of the ancient world then, meekness is not weakness.
It is controlled capacity, power that could break but chooses to mend.
The ocean that lifts you instead of drowning you, the stallion that gallops
only when guided by the trusted hand.
It is the medicine in the correct dose, neither too bitter nor too bland.
The world is overrun with the unbridled and the inert.
The rarest breed is the one who, possessing real power, lays it down.
And so when Jesus says, "Blessed are the meek," he is not blessing those who
never lift a hand or raise a voice, but those who, even in the heat of anger
or the press of injustice, can bridle their strength and temper their passions.
He is not commending the cowardly, but the dangerous man or woman who out of
love refuses to exploit that danger.
He is not assembling an army of doormats, but those who have learned
to master themselves before they would ever dare master others.
When we imagine the meek, we tend to picture the timid, the deferential,
the chronically apologetic.
If we're spiritually inclined, we see it as an awkward virtue we're
meant to perform in a church setting and then shed like a moth-eaten
cardigan the minute we have to get anything really done in the world.
But in the gospel, we're presented with a very different image.
Consider Jesus before Pilate, battered, bloodied, yet possessing
a dignity so immovable that Rome's governor can only marvel.
Jesus said, "You would have no power over me if it were not given you from above."
This is the voice of meekness, utterly submitted to the will of
the Father, unmoved by the threats or the blandishments of the world.
Meekness at its heart is the sovereign capacity to absorb the assaults and
injustices of the world, and yet instead of returning violence for violence, to
respond with a creative, redemptive force.
Meekness is magnetic.
It draws the poison out of an encounter and transforms it
into the possibility of mercy.
It is not passivity, but an active refusal to allow the evil of
others to dictate your own posture.
It is, as Kierkegaard would put it, the infinite resignation,
except that in Christ, resignation becomes not the endpoint, but
the doorway to joy and agency.
This is the medicine of meekness, not the absence of strength, but the
commitment, no matter how costly, to use it for the good of others, even
those who would use theirs against you.
If you have ever loved someone who did not love you back, or forgiven
a parent who could not apologize, or simply held your tongue when every
neuron in your brain screamed for vengeance, you've tasted this medicine.
It is not easy, but medicine never is.
in the kingdom of God, the meek inherit the earth, not because they
are weak, but because they are the only ones fit to steward power.
Only those who have mastered themselves can be trusted with anything at all.
the gentle wind, the healing balm, the bridled stallion, these are not images of
suppression, but of disciplined greatness.
It is precisely here that Jesus plants his flag, and it is here
that he calls us to follow.
In Matthew eleven, in what must rank as history's most beautiful invitation, he
says, "Come unto me, all you who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.
Take my yoke upon you and learn of me, for I am meek and lowly of heart, and
you will find rest for your souls."
Notice that he does not say, "I am domineering and impressive,"
or, "I am clever and strategic."
He says, "I am meek."
and then as if to drive the point home, he says that in this meekness
of his, there is profound rest.
Not agitation, not striving, but rest.
But before we know what meekness is or why Jesus rates it so highly
for himself and for us, we have to see it actually lived out.
The best way to recover a meaning is to see it embodied, pressed
into the grain of actual life, tested in the teeth of conflict.
I think of stories like David when he was being pursued by Saul
in the wilderness of En Gedi.
But the story that I wanna dive into is Jesus himself, 'cause he
does embody, And it's two stories, one in John 18 and one in John 8.
the first one is where Jesus is arrested in the garden.
I'm gonna read the verses and then just expound upon this section.
So again, think of this meekness as you hear this, scripture and this story.
John 18:1-11: When he had finished praying, Jesus left with his disciples
and crossed the Kidron Valley.
On the other side there was a garden, and he and his disciples went into it.
Now Judas, who had betrayed him, knew the place, because Jesus had
often met there with his disciples.
So Judas came to the garden, guiding a detachment of soldiers and some of
the officials from the chief priests and the Pharisees, and they were
carrying torches, lanterns and weapons.
Jesus, knowing all that was going to happen to him, went out and asked
them, "Who is it that you want?"
"Jesus of Nazareth," they replied.
"I am he," Jesus said.
When Jesus said, "I am he," they drew back and fell to the ground.
Again he asked them, "Who is it you want?"
"Jesus of Nazareth," they said.
And Jesus answered, "I told you that I am he.
If you are looking for me, then let these men go."
This happened so that the words he had spoken would be fulfilled: "I have
not lost one of those you gave me."
Then Simon Peter, who had a sword, drew it and struck the high priest's
servant, cutting off his right ear.
The servant's name was Malchus.
Jesus commanded Peter, "Put your sword away!
Shall I not drink the cup the Father has given me?"
The shadows beneath the olive trees in Gethsemane lengthened, dense and
wavering, as if even the ancient trunks recoiled at what they sensed coming.
The moon hung sallow and swollen, blue-white light brushing the slopes
of the mount with a sluggish mercy.
And in the garden, every sound was amplified.
The cricket's abrupt trill, the scuffle of a sandal, the slow and guilty
breath of the earth at midnight.
The disciples, all eleven, had gathered close to Jesus as if proximity could
somehow avert the approaching dread.
But he stood a little apart, his posture neither slumped nor rigid,
the quiet hinge on his neck betraying the weight he now carried alone.
He had just finished praying.
words hoarse and shivering, words of relinquishment, surrender, not only
to the will of the Father, but to the inglorious mechanics of betrayal.
There was something emptied and yet titanic about him now as if
what had been poured out made more room for what was to come.
He turned his face toward the black mouth of the Kidron Valley.
Down there, the narrow stream would be sluggish, its waters thickened
with the runoff of the city, rotten blood and the residue of history.
The moonlight twisted through the branches, rendering every figure
uncannaly, and in the near distance, a procession of lights appeared.
Torches and lanterns bobbing, fireflies grown monstrous in the midnight haze.
There were voices, the muttered calculations of men who told
themselves that they were instruments of justice, the uncertain bray of
authority disguised as resolve.
as if he was acting in a script written before he dared to hope for its rewards.
Judas, one of their own, moving with a certainty and a haste that seemed
to cleave the ground before him.
The torchlight threw bold shadows onto his face, and for an instant he
looked not like the friend with whom they had shared bread, but a stranger
animated by some private catastrophe.
He did not hesitate, did not falter, though every step must have
cost him a splinter of his soul.
There was in him, in his walk, an urgency, a resolve, as if having given
himself to betrayal, Judas must now inhabit it perfectly, lest some last
flicker of conscience consume him.
The armed crowd fanned out at his back, advancing with the oafish pride of men
emboldened by darkness and by orders from men in higher, holier places.
Judas passed the first cluster of olive trees, his pace increasing
as if the cold pressing in on his neck was his only thought.
The path he walked was familiar, so familiar that it must have
hurt him in some secret place.
He had walked there a hundred times with the man he had come to betray, had laughed
and eaten figs and spoken of the world to come as if he truly believed in it.
Now every step toward the gathering of disciples was as
inexorable as the swing of a blade.
The disciples clustered around Jesus and watched his approach with confusion
that would later turn to horror.
Some reached for weapons, others froze, unable to reconcile the advancing
figure with the friend they loved.
Only Jesus stood unflinching, his posture neither defensive nor
expectant, merely accepting, the way a king might receive an errant son.
Judas' eyes reflected the wavering torchlight, and in a voice that
strove for casualness and missed, he called out loud enough for
all to hear, "Greetings, Rabbi."
The title hung in the air, brittle as glass, and what little warmth the word
once held was drained from it, leaving only a shell, a ritual phrase spoken in
the precise way a betrayer might say it to keep his own heart from shattering.
The crowd surged forward at his call, and Judas pressed forward,
arms opening as if for a embrace.
But as he drew in close to Jesus, there was a trembling at the corners
of his mouth, a desperate mute plea for understanding or forgiveness or
perhaps simply to be released from the role history had given him.
He reached out and took Jesus' hand, and with the other pressed his lips to his
teacher's cheek A gesture of friendship so practiced that even now it ached with
a sincerity that he no longer possessed.
The kiss was both an ending and a beginning, a sign agreed upon in
the shadows of the city, but now performed in the open for all to see.
The moment stretched, torches sputtering, swords shifting in anxious
hands, the garden holding its breath.
And in that hush, Jesus looked at Judas, really looked at him as only one who
had loved him could, and spoke not in anger, but in a voice that might
have been used at any dinner among friends, "Do what you came for, friend."
What must have it have felt like to walk at the head of a mob with
murder in their hands, and yet to know you were leading them to the
lamb who would meet them with peace?
The thought did not cross the minds of the soldiers from the cohort, their
armor clanking with every step, Or the temple police whose faces were smudged
with torchlight and anticipation.
Nor did it trouble the officials from the chief priests and the Pharisees,
so certain in the righteousness of their errand that they had
lost the scent of mercy long ago.
Jesus, seeing them approach, stepped out from the shelter of the tree
canopies, moonlight etching a faint silhouette against the backdrop of night.
He did not wait for them to find him.
Even in this moment, he would not be seized like prey.
He would not cower or run, for meekness is not weakness, but the terrifying
strength to lay down power by choice.
Thus he initiated the encounter, voice calm and stripped of all ornament.
"Who is it that you want?"
He asked.
The words were not a challenge nor a plea, but a kind of unveiling.
The leaders in the front, some temple guards, a Roman tribune blinking in
the unfamiliar darkness, hesitated, unprepared for such self-possession
from one they considered their quarry.
"Jesus of Nazareth," they said in a rough chorus, the name falling
heavy as a stone into the hush.
"I am he," said Jesus.
It was not just the words, but the way he said it.
A clarity and a fullness that seemed to echo through the hollows of the trees,
Judas, standing a little to the side, flinched at the sound as if expecting
the syllables to scorch the air.
As the last syllable hung suspended, something unseen swept through the mob.
It was if the declaration, "I am he," struck them with a force beyond logic,
a force more profound than violence.
the entire cohort fell back, some toppling over one another, weapons
clattering, torches flaring and sputtering at the sudden confusion.
no one would ever be able to say why fifty, a hundred men with
swords and torches found themselves
Thrown to the ground by the words of an unarmed man.
But it happened, and for a moment the world paused in disbelief.
Jesus waited.
The disciples pressed against the gnarled trunks, gasped in wonder and terror.
If there was ever a chance to fight for victory, it was now,
but Jesus neither ran nor exulted.
Again, he called out, his voice unshaken, "Who is it that you want?"
They rose slowly, the bravado gone from their eyes and
repeated, "Jesus of Nazareth."
The repetition was almost comical, but Jesus did not mock them.
told you that I am he," he said.
"So if you are looking for me, let these men go."
Behind him, the disciples heard the undertone, his concern even now for
their safety, his refusal to allow his friends to suffer for loyalty to him.
It was not bravado, but a shepherd's devotion, a king's self-sacrifice
at the threshold of humiliation.
This, John would later write, was so that the words spoken before
would be fulfilled: "I have not lost one of those that you gave me."
In that moment, the script of powerlessness and violence was upended.
Jesus, unarmed and alone, stood as both shield and offering,
and the soldiers hesitated.
But not everyone was slow to act.
What happened next, for those who witnessed it, occurred in a confusion
of muscle memory and ancient terror.
One of Jesus' companions, Peter, impulsive, always teetering
between the edge of devotion and the brink of rashness, had in
the long night secreted a weapon.
Now as the torches closed in, the disciple unsheathed the blade in a single desperate
arc as if to carve a path back to the world they had all just so recently lost.
the sword flashed in the firelight, slicing the ear from the head of
the high priest's servant, blood spattering the stones, a hot, bright
offering for the gods of violence.
And for an instant, chaos lurched toward its natural end.
The soldiers rallied, weapons rising, the disciples shrieking, the world about
to fracture into violence and death.
But Jesus raised his hand, and with an authority that made the cries
and clashing arms fall silent, he shouted, "No more of this."
The words cleaved the uproar.
Even Peter, panting and wild-eyed, froze mid-motion.
"Put your sword back in its place," Jesus commanded.
And the words fell heavy and final upon the air.
"For all who take the sword will perish by the sword," Jesus continued.
And the paradox burrowed into the minds of his followers, even the most zealous
among them, who had always imagined that spiritual victory would look more
like an insurrection than a surrender.
At that moment, in the gasping and the guttering torchlight, Jesus turned his
gaze upward, not to the clouds, but to the invisible brink between earth and heaven.
do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father and he will at once send me
more than twelve legions of angels?
He asked rhetorical but not sarcastic, as though genuinely,
as though genuinely perplexed at the smallness of their vision.
Twelve legions, seventy-two thousand celestial warriors, more
than enough to turn back the night or to unmake the world itself.
The fact that he did not call upon them was not a sign of weakness, but
of deliberate, unfathomable strength.
in the choice not to retaliate, Jesus inverted the very logic of
power that animated his captors and his own disciples alike.
blood still slicked the stone, and the high priest's servant moaned,
holding the side of his head in agony.
Then Jesus stooped, cradled the servant's bloodied head, and with
a touch restored him, as if to say, this is what true power looks like, a
power that heals what others destroy.
The soldiers looked at one another, uncertain whether to proceed with their
duty or to fall back in awe again.
Even the traitor, who stood off to the side with the sick pallor of a man already
dying, seemed to wilt a little, as if the air itself had shifted and made room
for something larger than his own design.
But how then should the scriptures be fulfilled that it must be so?
Jesus concluded, his voice softer and now tinged with acceptance
that bordered on sacramental.
The question hung in the garden not so much as a challenge, but as an invitation.
For one moment, the machinery of violence and the inevitability of
his betrayal halted, suspended in the fragile, lucid logic of divinity.
The only thing more terrifying than the sword was the willingness to bear
it unsheathed and then set it aside.
John 8:1-11, the woman caught in the act of adultery.
Now, just as a side, there's some footnotes in your bibles That says
that this story wasn't in some of the earliest manuscripts, and that's true.
And in fact, sometimes you find this story in the Gospel of
Luke in the early manuscripts.
but there is enough scholarly work that says that this was likely a
canonical experience that Jesus had.
And, and so we're gonna, we're gonna get into it.
And again, as you hear the scripture, just think of this power under restraint, this,
this meekness, this power under control.
verse one.
"But Jesus went to the Mount of Olives early in the morning,
and he came again to the temple.
All the people came to him, and he sat down and taught them.
The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery,
and placing her in the midst, they said to him, 'Teacher, this woman has
been caught in the act of adultery.
Now in the law, Moses commanded us to stone such a woman.
So what do you say?'
This they said to test him, that they might have some
charge to bring against him.
Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground.
And as they continued to ask him, he stood up and said to them, 'Let
him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.'
And once more he bent down and wrote on the ground.
But when they heard it, they went away one by one, beginning with the older ones.
And Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him.
Jesus stood up and said to her, 'Woman, where are they?
Has no one condemned you?'
She said, 'No one, Lord.'
And Jesus said, 'Neither do I condemn you.
Go, and from now sin no more.'"
Let us immerse ourselves in the unfolding of one of the most profound
episodes of compassion, wisdom, and the subversion of legalistic cruelty
in the entire New Testament narrative.
I will examine verse one through eleven, but as we do so, let us
not pass over the moment quickly.
Let us enter the scene, as it were, and linger among its characters,
their motivations, their fears, their hopes, and the seismic reordering of
the world that occurs in the span of just a few breathless minutes beneath
the porticoes of the Second Temple.
The city of Jerusalem had not yet shaken off the slumber of night when Jesus
stole away to the Mount of Olives.
He went alone, as he so often did, searching for the silent company of trees
and the constellations arrayed above.
The coming day would be no ordinary day, with the unhurried certainty of
one who knows that the hour has come, he descended the slopes and crossed the
Kidron Valley, a solitary figure in the blue-gray half-light before reentering
the city through one of its eastern gates.
Word of his presence spread as if on the wind, and soon as the sun
burned off its golden haze, Jesus appeared again in the temple courts.
Now the outer court, a place both of commerce and teaching, had grown
crowded with pilgrims and townspeople, all seeking their business or
perhaps something more transcendent.
Jesus settled himself on the cold stone, and the people drawn by the promise
of his words gathered around him.
He sat among them as one of them and began to teach,
Not with the imperiousness of a scholar or the distant authority of
a priest, but with the humility and clarity of one who possessed both
wisdom and the desire to share it.
Yet as the crowd swelled, so did the watchful vigilance of those who
guarded tradition with jealous piety.
the teachers of the law and the Pharisees who perceived in Jesus
not a prophet but a threat had been conspiring for weeks, perhaps months,
to entrap him in his own teachings.
They understood that the law properly wielded could be as deadly as any sword.
And they arrived that morning with their last weapon, a woman, disheveled
and wide-eyed, flanked on each side by men who gripped her arms as
though she might at any moment tumble to the ground or attempt to flee.
The crowd parted in slow serpentine fashion as the men advanced, all eyes
drawn to the spectacle of public shame.
The woman herself was younger than many expected, her hair loose
and wild, her garment torn at the shoulder, feet conspicuously bare.
She had been caught, they insisted, in the very act of adultery.
The words fell heavy into the expectant hush, their accusations not only against
the woman, but as a trap for Jesus.
The Pharisees arranged her in the center as if she were both evidence and exhibit,
and then with a calculated display of deference, addressing their question
to the teacher who had gained such a following, said, "Rabbi, this woman
who is seized in flagrante delicato, the law of Moses, as you well know,
commands us to stone such a woman.
What do you say?
Shall we execute judgment as prescribed, or will you
counsel mercy against the law?"
Their question, though posed with the appearance of piety, was a snare.
If Jesus advocated for the woman's execution, he would lose his reputation
for mercy and love and might even fall afoul of Roman authorities who reserved
capital punishment to themselves.
If he urged clemency, he could be denounced as a heretic,
an opponent to the Torah.
It was a perfect trap, one that had been rehearsed and
sharpened for just this moment.
The air itself tensed as if the stones beneath the feet of the crowd
strained in anticipation, waiting for the first hand to pick them up.
Let us slow down and peer for a moment through the thick haze of this ancient
scene and take a deliberate and even slightly uncomfortable look at the true
shape of the problem presented here.
The text repeats itself with almost surgical insistence.
This woman was caught, not suspected, not rumored, not shamed
by innuendo or whispered accusation.
She was caught actually in the act.
The word choice is not ornamental.
Even the old King James does not fudge.
Taken in adultery twice over, while the modern translation keep the
more stark, almost clinical caught.
The ancient lawgivers were not the kind to allow for ambiguous prosecution.
By Jewish law, such a charge could never have been levied without direct
corroborated eyewitness evidence.
Not one, but at least two witnesses must have seen the deed
itself, not simply the aftermath.
No one could be convicted for emerging from a suspicious door or
being found tousled in a lover's bed.
The law demanded not implication, but demonstration in its most literal sense.
So we are not dealing with circumstantial evidence.
Jesus is not being asked to arbitrate facts or discern truth if in a she said,
he said, but to judge what ought to be done once the facts are ascertained.
The religious experts, the teachers and the Pharisees come to him with
the law of Moses, not as a live question, but as a theological cudgel,
pointing with meticulous confidence to Leviticus and Deuteronomy, where
the consequence for such transgression is codified in no uncertain terms,
execution, capital punishment,
The law is unambiguous.
it is, in a sense that is often lost in contemporary moral
squabbles, absolutely clear.
To violate the union of marriage is to take life in one's hands,
to gamble against the absolute.
Pharisees present themselves as the stewards of the tradition,
the curators of the legal code.
but their question is not a sincere request for wisdom or a humble
solicitation of Jesus' judgment.
The text is explicit.
This is a trap.
It is, in its way, an ingenious trap, for it is honed and sharpened by the prior
knowledge of Jesus' public teachings Here is the first edge of the blade.
Everyone in Jerusalem by now knows that this rabbi, this Messiah candidate,
speaks always of grace, of forgiveness, of a kingdom entered not by merit or
bloodline or even moral rectitude, but the reckless unearned embrace of mercy.
He has preached that God's welcome is broader than the width of the law.
He is, in this sense, a walking affront to the punitive purity that the Pharisees
have been paid in reputation to maintain.
If he lets the woman live, if he forgives, then he is not only rejecting the law
of Moses, but undermining the very foundation of their authority, and by
extension, the authority of God himself.
This trap is not simply a legal question.
It's an existential one, sharpening both the authority and
plausibility of this new teacher.
If he chooses mercy, then he is a heretic, a seducer of the people,
justifying the death sentences that may themselves be waiting in trap for him.
But if he chooses the law, if he affirms the Mosaic code and
consents to the woman stoning, the trap closes on the other side.
What of all his teachings of love?
What of his claim that the kingdom was one of weary souls and broken hearts?
his followers will see a contradiction so gaping as to be unfillable.
the Pharisees can now turn to the crowds and say, "So much for gentle Jesus.
He forgives only so long as you aren't actually guilty."
Or as the text itself would have it, "See your Messiah?
He says, 'I'm meek and lowly in heart.
Come to me, and I will give you rest.'
Only first, he will publicly execute you for your failures."
The spectacle of such hypocrisy would be enough to crush his
movement and his message at the root.
this is not a trick so much as it is a crucible, designed not only to
break the woman, to break the man who claims to be the Son of Man.
They know his answer must reveal either his hypocrisy or his heresy.
There is no third rail, no exit.
It is a technical masterpiece of religious and political theater.
The brilliance of the trap comes not simply from its legal cleverness, but
from the way it exposes a rift that is as old as consciousness, a split
that neither religion nor culture nor philosophy has ever managed to bridge.
It is the ancient, perennial, and seemingly irreconcilable opposition
between two foundational goods, justice and mercy The Pharisees are not, as
is often caricatured, uniquely cruel.
They are instead the hard, frigid expression of a problem that
society itself has never resolved.
How can a culture survive?
How can a moral order be sustained if the guilty are always forgiven?
But on the other hand, what becomes of souls or humanity if the law is
always and only without remainder?
What community can stand if it destroys the weakest and most desperate members
in order to maintain its own purity?
Old stories, old laws, ancient civilizations all wrestle with this.
The Greeks imagined justice as a goddess blindfolded, sword in hand.
The Romans built their empire in the spectacle and ritual of punishment.
The Chinese and the Persians and the Egyptians all codified their
tables of right and wrong, and death was always at the end of the line
for those who crossed the line.
even in our modern day, where the sword has sometimes been
blunted, the mechanism persists.
The first impulse of any system under threat is to punish,
to exclude, and to expel.
The logic of justice is as inexorable as gravity.
But mercy, too, keeps cropping up, sometimes in secret or as
a rumor, a hope, sometimes as a subversive counter-narrative.
The ancient Hebrews, for all their extensive statutes and punitive codes,
also spoke in their stories of a God who relented, who forgave, who
walked in the cool of the evening.
Poets and prophets alike dared to imagine a form of justice that could somehow be
completed, even superseded by compassion.
The Psalms are full of cries for mercy.
The prophets thundered not only about sin, but about redemption and restoration.
And yet the tension remains.
The scales always tip, and it is the rarest mind or heart that can hold
both the need for order and the desire for pardon in both hands at once.
So when the Pharisees bring this woman to Jesus, they are setting before him
not only the woman's life, but the ancient unsolvable problem of how power
and compassion, justice and mercy, law and love could ever dwell together
or even speak the same language.
in their world, as in ours, the answer has always been to oscillate
between the two, to alternate eras or moods, to forgive in private and to
punish in public, to let exceptions slide but never rewrite the rule.
The woman is not only a test case, she is every human being caught in the gears
of judgment, every soul that has ever needed something more than what the
law unaccompanied by love can provide.
This crux, this clash, is why the story sparkles with such an
electric, almost timeless resonance.
It is not only about a dusty courtyard in first-century Jerusalem.
It is about every father or mother, every judge or teacher, every boss
or friend or child who has ever had to choose between the honesty of
consequences and the hope of redemption.
The Pharisees present Jesus with a problem that is, in its way, unsolvable.
Do you side with the law or with the lawbreaker?
Do you preserve the moral fabric, or do you unravel it for a single frayed life?
There is, by their logic, no third way, no reconciliation, no synthesis.
But what happens next, and what has captivated imaginations and scandalized
moralists for two thousand years, is that Jesus does not step into the trap.
He doesn't even seem to acknowledge it as a real dilemma.
His response is not a lecture or a counterargument, but a moment of
profound and almost infuriating silence.
He bends down, the text says, and writes in the dust with his finger.
What does he write?
No one knows.
The text, with intentional ambiguity, passes over the detail in silence.
Augustine speculated he wrote the sins of the accusers.
Others think he doodled as though to demonstrate his disregard for their logic.
Maybe he drew the crowd's attention away from the woman's shame.
Did he jot the very commandments they claimed to defend?
Or perhaps it was nothing, just the idle, echoing silence of creation,
the very finger that once carved the tablets of stone now moving in the
dust, the residue of the first Adam.
Maybe he simply refused to perform for their spectacle.
In any case, the gesture itself is a refusal, a refusal to play the game on
their terms, to accept the categories as given, to let ancient antagonisms
dictate the possibilities of the present.
And so, for forty-five seconds or a thousand years, we are left with the
image of Jesus bending low, stripping the moment of its violence, its
spectacle, its cheap vindication.
He gives the mob nothing to gloat over, nothing to clutch as theirs.
Instead, they are made to wait, to simmer in their own righteousness
until the silence becomes unbearable.
And when they pester him, when they refuse to let the silence stand,
watching him straighten up, and he looks them in the eye and utters a
sentence that detonates in the heart of every bystander and every accuser.
He did not raise his voice, but the clarity of his words sliced through
the tumult with surgical precision.
Let the one who is without sin cast the first stone.
Not a denial of the law, not even an evasion of the facts, not even a
sentimental plea for pity, but a knife that cuts through the ancient knot.
He does not dismiss the law, he universalizes it.
In that instant, something ancient and cruel passed like a shadow
over the faces of the accusers.
The crowd, which had been gathering stones in its mind, now found itself weighed
down by the heaviness of its own guilt.
Jesus knelt again, resuming his cryptic writing, and the silence
that followed was more deafening than any outcry could have been.
Slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, those who had come
to accuse begin to withdraw.
The oldest among them first, perhaps knowing better than the young the burden
of sins accumulated through the years.
The younger ones followed pride giving way to the last inescapable
logic of Jesus' challenge.
One by one, the stones dropped to the ground, thudding softly
until only Jesus and the woman remained in the center of the court.
She stood trembling, uncertain whether to face the man or empty space
Jesus straightened once more and regarded her not as an
object lesson, but as a person.
Battered, but not broken by the ordeal.
Woman, where are they?
Has no one condemned you?
he asked.
Her voice, when it came, was small but clear.
A voice yet not used to hope.
No one, sir.
Jesus nodded, his eyes kind and grave.
Neither do I condemn you, he said.
Go now and leave your life of sin.
And with those words, the machinery of accusation ground to The woman, still
trembling, was released not merely from public disgrace, but from the narrative
that others had written for her.
She exited the temple courts a changed person, And in her wake,
a hundred whispered conversations broke out among the crowd, each
one debating the implications of what they had just witnessed.
So what does this scene mean?
It means two of the greatest problems ever to face human society, how
to achieve true justice and how to e-exercise true mercy, are fused together
in one single unrepeatable event.
The mob expects a binary outcome.
The woman is either condemned or excused.
The law is either upheld or trashed.
But Jesus does something else entirely.
He forces everyone present to look inward, to feel for a moment the excruciating
weight of their own fallenness,
And then, as if by grace itself, lifts the impossible burden
from the weakest among them.
he gets up.
He never actually says that a stone shouldn't be thrown, does he?
He says, "Throw a stone, but make sure the one who does it is without sin."
He never denies that there needs to be punishment.
He says, "In any case, you are not qualified to be
witnesses or executioners."
Why not?
and therefore, it was absolutely almost impossible to actually
convict somebody of capital offense.
What the Jewish law did was make it extremely, extremely difficult to do.
The Jewish law required that for someone to be convicted of a capital
offense, there had to be at least two witnesses who not only saw it as
eyewitnesses, but in their testimony under cross-examination, there had to
be absolute and complete agreement.
The Mishnah, which was the Jewish commentary on the law, said, "A court
that executed more than one person every seven years was a slaughterhouse."
In order for this woman to be caught in adultery, she virtually had to be set up.
She virtually had to be entrapped.
The evidence for that is, where's the man?
You see, if two witnesses had actually seen this woman do adultery, then
they must have seen the man, and the Old Testament law absolutely
is clear that the man and the woman are the ones to share in the guilt.
There is no double standard.
the Old and New Testaments are absolutely against what is called
the sin of partiality injustice.
The Old and New Testaments absolutely abhor the idea that you would have
partiality toward the rich versus the poor, partiality for men versus women.
the fact that these people came with this woman and said, "We saw her do it," but
the man is not there virtually proves there was entrapment, there was prejudice,
and possibly the man engineered it.
more to what's at work in this passage and what unfolds in
that open dust-swept court.
For when Jesus says, "Let him who is without sin cast the first stone,"
he addresses not only the letter of the law but also the hidden rot, the
insidious misapplication, the ferocious joy in condemnation, the way in which
the law itself becomes a tool not of justice but of humiliation, and even
at its worst, of sadistic pleasure.
The very phrase, "Let him who is without sin," is a sword drawn and held to the
throats of the accusers, not because Jesus is denying the law or denying the gravity
of the offense, but because he is exposing a deeper, older, and more universal guilt.
The urge to judge, to punish, to create an object of scorn or violence in order
to mask one's own shame and inadequacy.
The scribes and the Pharisees, experts in the written and oral law,
understood this better than anyone.
They cite Leviticus twenty-ten and Deuteronomy twenty-two, twenty-two
with theatrical gravity, but their hands are already stained
with the blood of intention.
For if they cared about the law, they would have brought both.
They would have followed the procedures with fastidious attention.
Instead, they are seeking a spectacle, not justice, and in so doing, they have
perverted the law they claim to defend.
This is why Jesus does not take their bait.
He does not refute the law, nor does he deny the reality of sin or guilt.
Instead, he refracts the accusation back upon the accusers.
He says, in essence, "The law must be fulfilled, yes, but so must the
law's requirement that the judges and the executioners themselves
be pure, impartial, and free from both prejudice and hypocrisy."
He puts them, not the woman, on trial.
He forces them to look through the magnifying lens of their own obsession
with righteousness and to see not the woman's shame but their own.
The law says one thing, the world another.
Even today, in the realms of both religious and secular justice,
we see the same dynamics.
Selective prosecution, gender shaming, the thirst for vengeance
masked as concern for order.
What's more, the narrative does not tidy up the implications for us.
It leaves the dust to settle, the silence to echo.
It is not merely a moment of clever evasion or rhetorical wit.
No, what happens here is a living parable, a fleshing out of words
once spoken by the prophets and now incarnate in flesh and blood.
the incident in the temple is a window thrown wide, exposing the
way of the Messiah, the very logic of heaven made visible in the
person and the posture of Jesus.
Consider again the promise that hovered over the coming of the Christ
as spoken in the age of Isaiah and echoed in the Gospel of Matthew.
"Behold my servant, whom I have chosen, my beloved, in whom my soul delights.
I will put my Spirit upon him, and he will proclaim justice to the Gentiles.
he will not quarrel or cry aloud, nor will anyone hear his voice in the streets.
A bruised reed he will not break, and a faintly burning wick he will not quench
until he brings justice to victory, and in his name the Gentiles will hope."
This is not a cold-hearted administrator of judgment, nor a sentimentalist whose
mercy blunts the knife of truth, but a reconciler of opposites, a holistic
healer who can both wound and bind up, expose and cover Reprove and restore.
The world had expected a certain kind of Messiah, a conquering lion, a judge
armed with the sword of righteousness, the hammer that would finally shatter
the rule of Rome Yet when the Messiah comes, he kneels, tracing letters
in the sand while the accusers stand in their borrowed authority,
armed with stones and certainty.
Here is power so secure, so unthreatened by the posturing of men that it can stoop
and pause and make space for the faintest ember and the barest remnant of hope.
A bruised reed he will not break.
A faintly burning wick he will not quench.
in that statement is contained an entire theology of rescue.
Reflect on the two images Isaiah offers, the bruised reed and the smoking wick.
A reed, slender and flexible, is already fragile even when whole.
Bruised, it is all but useless, liable to snap beneath the slightest pressure.
In the ancient world, reeds were tools, measured, trimmed, and used as pens
or as part of musical instruments.
Once bruised, they were discarded.
likewise, a smoking wick signals a lamp nearly spent.
The oil gone, the flame reduced to a memory just shy of extinction.
What is the point of keeping such a wick?
The pragmatic would snuff it out and replace it without a second thought.
The rhythm of the world is merciless to the weak.
It prizes only those who are unbroken, unblemished, and
ablaze with power and promise.
It sharpens its stones for the guilty and heaps shame on those who flicker and fail.
The logic of self-sufficiency is pitiless.
If you cannot stand, you are left behind.
If you do not burn bright enough, the darkness swallows you.
even the teachers of the law, those who traffic in the words of God, had
internalized this arithmetic of worth.
They present the woman as evidence.
Here is a life irreparably marred, a vessel unfit for anything but destruction.
She will serve as a warning to others.
Her failure will be weaponized as spectacle.
Into this machinery of condemnation steps Jesus, whose
very presence disrupts its gears.
And it is here that the prophecy finds its fulfillment, the vision of
Isaiah taking on flesh and breath.
"Woman, where are they?
Hath no one condemned you?"
She replies, perhaps in a whisper, "No one, Lord."
And Jesus, with the authority of God and the compassion of a mother
hen, says, neither do I condemn you.
Go, and from now on, sin no more."
The standard is not lowered.
The call to holiness is not abolished, but the path to it is now paved with
mercy, with a gentleness that refuses to break what is already bruised or
to extinguish what is barely burning.
This is not some middle ground between justice and leniency, a weak
compromise that satisfies neither.
It is a radical synthesis, a union of opposites that the
world finds incomprehensible.
Jesus is not a divided self, sometimes soft and sometimes stern, doling out
comfort or discipline according to mood.
He is the living axis where all virtues meet, the intersection point
of perfect justice and perfect love.
There is in him no shadow, no tension, no internal war.
His mercy is not softness, and his righteousness is not severity.
Each is the expression of the same underlying reality, the relentless
pursuit to bring forth judgment to victory, to see the reign of evil finally
overthrown, but never at the cost of the least or the lost what does this mean
for us who live as both accusers and accused, as those who've been wounded
and those who've wounded others in turn?
It means that the one who knows us best is also the one who handles us most gently.
He is not indifferent to our failures, nor does he excuse
or ignore the damage we cause.
But neither does he discard us when we are bruised or on the verge of collapse.
but Christ, the true judge, is also the physician, the shepherd,
the midwife of new beginnings.
in practical terms, this means the church, if it is to reflect the Lord, must be a
place where the bruised are not broken, where faint hope is not smothered,
but tended until it ablazes new.
the logic of grace is not, as some imagine, a license for
complacency or a tolerance of evil.
on the contrary, it is a relentless insistence that no one is beyond the
reach of healing, that the final word belongs not to our failings, but to the
one who stoops in the dust to lift us up.
to follow Christ is to be inducted into the paradox of his character,
to learn the difficult art of being both upright and humble, clear-eyed
about right and wrong, but unyielding in our gentleness toward the fallen.
This is why the story does not end with a conclusion, a tying up of
a moral lesson, but with a charge, "Go, and from now on, sin no more."
The mercy received is not an endpoint, but a new beginning, a summons to a
life no longer defined by shame, but by the possibility of transformation.
The same Jesus who shields us from the stones of condemnation also calls us to
leave behind what which once enslaved us.
The grace that forgives is also the grace that empowers.
It means that no one gets to stand outside the circle of need.
No one is exempt from the claim of grace or from the call to extend it to others.
The stony-hearted Pharisees, the shamed woman, the assembled crowd,
even the silent disciples are all equal in their dependence.
All are summoned to the same table.
there are no insiders and outsiders in the economy of the kingdom, only those
who have tasted mercy and those who are still trying to earn it the hard way.
Let this be our consolation and our commission.
The one who will in the end judge the living and the dead is already
at work, refusing to crush us in our weakness, refusing to snuff us
out when we are barely holding on.
He does not deal in quotas of forgiveness or rations hope
according to our worthiness.
He is the bruised reed restorer, the wick tenderer, the master who sees
not just what we are, but what we might yet become if we are only given
time and space and grace to grow.
In this way, the story of John eight is not merely a lesson for individuals,
but an indictment of all systems and communities that perpetuate cycles
of condemnation and abandonment.
It is a challenge to every assembly that defines itself by
exclusion, by the maintenance of purity at the expense of mercy.
The church, if it is to be the body of Christ, must be a sanctuary for
the bruised and the smoldering, a hospital for those who limp, who
stumble, who have failed spectacularly.
Briefly, what does it take to be meek?
Notice the line in verse nine, "And Jesus was left alone with
the woman standing before him."
So how do we know about this interaction if they're alone together?
How do we know what she said and what Jesus said if it's just the two of them?
Because this is her testimony.
Because she was transformed.
Because when she hears the words, "Neither do I condemn you," it changed everything.
And so it can change everything for us.
He asks the woman, "Where are they?
Has no one condemned you?"
She unfreezes enough to whisper, "No one, Lord."
Only then does Jesus say the words that live at the very heart of the
gospel, the words that reshuffle the very logic of heaven and hell.
"Neither do I condemn thee.
Go, and from now on sin no more."
He does not hedge.
He does not soften.
He does not say, "Let's call it a misunderstanding."
He names it a sin, a rupture, a poison in the bloodstream of creation.
But then, just as decisively, he declares the rupture healed, the poison
neutralized, the guilt acknowledged, and yet its sentence commuted.
What's even more astonishing, and what every careful reader should notice, is the
order in which he speaks these two halves.
First, "Neither do I condemn you."
Then, "Go and sin no more."
In every other human attempt at justice, these are reversed.
A judge might say, "If you show remorse and clean y- up your act,
maybe I will withhold judgment."
Society says, "You are what you do.
Change and you might be accepted."
Religion at its most human says, "Prove your repentance, pay the
price, and perhaps mercy will follow."
But here, Christ gives her the verdict before she begins the penance.
he hands her an acquittal that is so out of proportion to her offense
and so upstream of her effort that it feels like a breach in reality.
But that is the gospel.
Condemnation is lifted before reformation has even begun.
This seems impossible, even irresponsible.
Isn't this how you get lawlessness, people ask?
Isn't this how you destroy the very fabric of morals in society?
yet Jesus stands on the trembling ground between law and grace, between
cosmic order and cosmic forgiveness, and with those two sentences, he
tunnels a passage between worlds.
For the first time in history, someone embodies both absolute moral clarity
and unyielding mercy, and he does it without dissolving either into the other.
He could have picked up the stone and thrown it with godlike precision, and
everyone would have called it justice.
He could have shrugged and said, "Just don't do it again," and
everyone would have called it mercy.
Instead, he names the sin without denying it, and then he hurls the
condemnation not at her, but at himself in a move so costly that even eternity
will struggle to reckon the price.
Imagine then what it cost Jesus to say, "Neither do I condemn thee."
this is not a platitude.
It is not a loophole or a technicality.
In the world of law, debts are not ignored.
They are paid one way or another.
Forgiveness does not erase the bill.
It transfers it.
for every sentence commuted, a hidden judge must shoulder the punishment.
Every act of pardon is an act of substitution, and the only question
is who will absorb the cost.
Now comes the part that few ever see.
Imagine a cosmic ledger, every debt and crime meticulously recorded.
for every neither do I condemn thee, a red mark ticks upward, waiting for
someone, somewhere to take the blow.
This is why Jesus does not throw the stone.
In that gesture is a prophecy.
The stoning that should have shattered her will instead shatter him.
The crowd is gone.
The accusers are silent, but the sentence hangs in the air,
waiting for its executioner.
He absorbs the wrath that was meant for her and for all of us.
And in that absorption, both law and grace find their equal and opposite fulfillment.
This is the crux, or literally the cross of the matter.
Only someone who is himself without sin can take up the full force of the law,
and only someone who is full of love can refuse to wield it against others.
For the first and last time, justice and mercy are not enemies, but friends
entwined in the person of Christ.
In every myth, every legend, every religious or secular system, you
can have a God who is just or a God who is merciful, not both.
Human beings themselves can't hold these in tension.
They break, they split, they side with one or the other.
Some become Puritans, other become libertarians.
Some become executioners, other become enablers.
But here in this dusty corner of a temple courtyard, a third way is
born, a good news so unlikely that the universe cracks open to receive it.
When Jesus says, "Go and sin no more," it's not a threat or a
catch, it's an invitation to a life previously unimaginable.
The power to change, to break cycles of self-destruction is found precisely
in the absence of condemnation.
The unearned pardon is the engine of real transformation.
Shame cannot do it, neither can fear.
Only grace can, and this too is a scandal.
People assume that if you remove condemnation, you remove
the motivation to do good.
But in practice, the opposite is true.
The freest people in history are the forgiven ones, the ones who know that
they are not defined by their worst, the ones who know that they have been
loved into a new existence, the ones who know that their judge became their
brother, their priest, their ransom.
Let's take a step back now and see ourselves in this scene.
Who are we really?
The answer is all of them.
We are the self-righteous mob with the exposed woman, the waiting judge.
Sometimes we are crushed by the awareness of our own failure.
Sometimes we wield stones of doctrine or ideology or Twitter
with the zeal of prosecutors.
Sometimes we are silent witnesses too paralyzed to speak for mercy,
But always, always we are in need of the neither do I condemn thee.
and yet even here we miss one thing if we stop at the forgiveness.
The story is not complete until we realize where the stone will finally fall.
The crowd has dispersed.
The woman has gone home, changed or at least haunted by
the encounter at this point.
But Jesus remains and the shadow of the cross lengthens behind him.
The debt does not disappear, it accumulates.
For every sin pardoned, the price is stored up.
and when the law would rightfully demand our stoning, when the weight
of our guilt and failure should pin us to the ground, what we receive from
Jesus is not a list of conditions, not a tightening of the noose, but a voice
that says, "Neither do I condemn you."
Yet he does not simply wave away the offense as if it were nothing
or as if justice were irrelevant.
Rather, he utters those words because he alone intends to absorb
the full blunt of our condemnation.
He is already on his way to the place where the stones will not
just threaten but find their mark, where the judgment of the entire
world will be aimed at him, not us.
"Neither do I condemn you," he says, because very soon he will
drink the cup of condemnation in our place down to its dregs.
This is not mere leniency, but a costly blood-bought pardon, a declaration
that the debt is not ignored but paid in full by the one who owed nothing.
In that moment, Both justice and mercy find their voice.
The law's not overturned, but its verdict is fulfilled in the suffering to come.
What's more, that verdict is not just a judicial technicality.
It is a living, breathing assurance that you are now and ever will be embraced.
You are not simply acquitted.
You are welcomed.
You are not merely tolerated, but you are treasured.
The difference is not semantics.
To stand under this verdict is to live each day unshackled from the
exhausting project of self-justification.
It is to know at the very core of your being that your failures
have no power to disinherit you.
You are clothed in the approval earned by another, free to walk into
the future without the ghost of past mistakes muttering at your heels.
This is the kind of acceptance that cracks the stone of
habit and addiction and shame.
This is the love that melts even the most recalcitrant heart.
The more you believe it, the more the old compulsions lose their grip.
You are not changed by the threat of condemnation, but by the
unimaginable audacity of a love that refuses to ever let you go.
So how do we become meek?
Man, you yoke yourself to this good Savior.
You yoke yourself to Jesus.
You join him.
You come under his gentle, powerful hand.
You come and you find your rest and your everything.
He is the king.
He is in charge.
He is all-powerful, all-knowing, always present, and he's good.
Always good.
And he loves you and marshals every atom in the universe to bring
about your good and his glory.
Amen.