A woman accused of adultery is brought before Jesus. The religious authorities see this as an opportunity to ensnare Jesus in a trap. The Mosaic law, they say, mandates that the woman be stoned to death. So, they ask Jesus, what do you say?
They think they have Jesus stuck between showing the woman mercy, thus violating the law, and following their interpretation of the law, thus contradicting his own teachings. Jesus responds by writing something in the sand in front of him.
We don’t know what he wrote. A search for what Biblical scholars theorize Jesus wrote offers up just that: theories. The very fact that Jesus wrote in the sand guaranteed that whatever the message was had no permanence beyond what someone in the crowd would have remembered and passed on to others—which there is no evicdence that anyone did.
We only know the impact of that drawing in the sand and what Jesus said afterward: “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” For one thing, Jesus knew that the authorities were giving him a false choice. Adultery is not an act that a woman can commit alone. But no man was presented to share the penalty for the crime. But Jesus was also making a larger point: It’s not just that we are all sinners individually, but we collectively create the conditions that lead people into behaviors that we are quick to condemn. I’m thinking of how we’ve locked up young Black men for decades because they choose to make large sums of money selling illicit drugs—a choice we help set up by marketing to young people expensive consumer goods they can’t afford with the meager wages they can get from honest work. Add to that the market for drugs we create because we as a society do too little to help people cope in better ways with the mental and spiritual stresses of living in the midst of poverty, racism, violence, and marginalization.
So who gets to throw the first stone when we are either active participants or passive collaborators in a sinful system? When Jesus confronts us with this, we all have to put down our stones and walk away. Then, when we stand alone with Jesus, face to face, one on one, Jesus asks us where our accusers are. Our accusers having been disarmed and dispatched, Jesus tells us that the charges have been dropped and we can begin anew.