And after he breathes his very own Spirit into them, he presents them with two options: “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained."
After all they have experienced from the Romans, from the religious leaders, from their own and each other’s betrayals, this is a choice they must now make--whether to forgive sins or to retain them; to hold themselves and others in their sin, or to release themselves and each other from it.
Someone once told me that the root of the Hebrew word for forgiveness means literally “letting go of the jugular”. The image is that you have someone by the throat and are strangling them to death. And when you choose to forgive, you let go, let them live.
The choice is ours to make.
What does a choice like this look like? One of the other well-known stories about Jesus gives us a clue.
You remember that story...The religious leaders have caught a woman in bed with a man who was not her husband. They drag her out of bed, bring her to Jesus, and make her stand there in front of everyone.
As she stands there, they talk about how horrible she is, to the point that she deserves to be tortured and killed: “Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery. Now, in the law, Moses commanded us to stone such women.”
Imagine this scene for a moment…
What must she have been feeling? Humiliation, terror, shame….
And what were the religious leaders, all of whom happened to be men, what were they thinking? She has broken the commandment, therefore she must be stoned. That’s all of her story they care about. They do not see her as a human being with dignity, deserving their respect. To them, all she is is a terrible sinner, nothing more. All they could see was this one moment of adultery.
But what was her larger story? What might have driven her to risk her life to be with a man in an illicit affair? The gospel doesn’t tell us, we can only guess what her own struggle may have been.
Like many women of her day, she was probably in a marriage arranged for her by her parents when she was 12 or 13 years old.
Was her husband someone she loved, or who loved her?
Was her husband abusive?
Did she feel trapped?
Perhaps this man that she had the affair with was the one person she could talk to.
Maybe he told her she was beautiful.
Maybe he told her he loved her.
The larger dimensions of her story are lost on the religious leaders. In their version of the story, she is a terrible sinner, and nothing more.
I wonder if she started to believe the story they were telling about her.
I wonder what Jesus saw in those tear-filled eyes. What story would he tell about her.
Anyway, while the religious leaders are ranting, Jesus does something curious. He sits down on the ground and begins writing with his finger in the dirt.
Scripture scholars go back and forth about what he could be doing here, but the theory I like best is that he was doodling.
You know how it is when you’re on the phone with someone who can’t stop talking, and how it can get a little tedious? And so you grab a pen and a corner of the newspaper and you start to draw pictures of cats or airplanes, just to break the tedium of the moment.
Maybe this is what Jesus is doing as the religious leaders go on and on with their rants about this woman. He’s finding them very tedious. Maybe he rolls his eyes a few times. And he doodles.
And finally when they are done ranting, Jesus stands and speaks to them.
Now Jesus was a devout Jew. He knew the law as well as the religious leaders did. He knew that the law was given as a tool to fashion a people of love, to help us live more fully.
But he also saw that, among some of the religious leaders, the law had become distorted, had lost its purpose. The religious leaders used this beautiful gift from God to brutalize people and crush their spirits, to literally torture and kill them.
So Jesus stands up and says “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” He turns the tables. “If you honestly believe you can stone this woman without making a travesty of the law God has given us, then be my guest. Who will cast the first stone?” He is taunting them.
Now who is the righteous and who is the sinner? Who bears the greater weight of sin? Is it this woman, or is it those who have taken the law--something very beautiful to help us love and live more fully--and turned it into something brutal and cruel?
Suddenly those who had seen themselves as righteous, those who sought to judge and punish, they are the greater sinners for having distorted the whole purpose of the law, turning it from a means to life into a means to death.
With these words of Jesus, “...they went away, one by one, beginning with the elders; and Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him,”
and he rises to his feet to speak to her.
He says to her, “Woman….”
In our English translation, this can seem rather cold and formal, but for Jesus it is a word of profound respect. This is the word he uses when he speaks to his mother. “Woman.”
It’s probably been awhile since this woman was addressed with this profoundly respectful word.
“Woman,” Jesus says, “has no one condemned you?” She said, “No one, sir.” And Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you. Go your way, and from now on do not sin again.”
When he tells her to “Go,” he’s using the same word Moses used when he said to the pharoah “Let my people go!” It is a call to become free from slavery and to start the journey to the promised land. This is more than an encouragement to avoid falling into sin. He’s beckoning her to a life of freedom--freedom not only from sin, but also from the crushing story the religious leaders had woven for her around that sin, a story that perhaps she herself came to believe.
While you acknowledge the effects of sin and brokenness in your own life, begin, nevertheless, your journey to the promised land. Even as you own the mistakes and failures of the past, write yourself a new story--one that leads to a more abundant life, greater joy, more love. Step into a new future.
Perhaps we have to do this not only with ourselves but with other people in our lives. Perhaps we need to do this with El Buen Samaritano as our time with them comes to an end. Even as we acknowledge the sin and brokenness in our relationship, we are not bound to that. That’s not the whole story. Perhaps we can write the story of our relationship with that community these past seven years, and write it in a way that leads us all to greater love and fuller lives.
It’s the choice Jesus offers: to hold ourselves and each other in our sin, or to let go of the jugular, free ourselves and each other from an alienated past, and begin a new story, a new future, that leads to life.
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