Of Grace and Justice
The Culprit’s Perspective
This is an old story told in a way you’ve never heard.
She was caught pants down — literally mid-orgasm — squealing to perfection the notes you would hear if sex had a soundtrack. The way he held her… the way they moved together in sensual rhythm… her husband was nothing like him. This… this was a real man, she thought, writhing with forbidden pleasure.
But pleasure quickly turned to shock, then fear, when the locked door flew open with a loud cracking sound as the men broke into the room, and in a matter of seconds dragged her out by the hair, half-naked.
She held on to the bed sheets with one hand, trying to cover her exposed breasts, and with the other she grabbed the strong arm that clutched her hair so painfully, trying to pull herself up to ease the pain as he tugged. The fear in her eyes told its own story. She was as good as dead, and she knew it.
She kept expecting to feel the pain of many rocks bashing her brains in… after all, they were dragging her out to stone her, weren’t they? She wasn’t the first person getting stoned for sleeping with another man. Heck she was pretty sure she could identify some of her former lovers in the small crowd of young men grabbing rocks to end her. The crowd kept growing, the men kept dragging, and as she stumbled step after step in the direction of the force she wondered why nobody had launched the first projectile at her face.
It wasn’t long till she had her answer, as the man who held her so firmly by her hair threw her violently to the floor. “So this is where I die”, she wondered. She shook her head, a little dazed. She lifted her eyes, trying to take in the scene and figure out where exactly these men had decided she was going to take her last breaths.
The temple. A fitting execution ground for her kind.
And then her eyes met his. They were different… sad… not at all like the angry eyes looking down on her. But it wasn’t just the sadness, there was something else there, a knowing. His gaze pierced into her soul, and she felt exposed, naked even — and not just because all she had wrapped around her was a sheet stained with bodily fluids — somehow his eyes looked right into her heart, and she knew he could see what she had done. No, what she had been doing. It was like he was reading her life, and the more he saw, the sadder his eyes got. For whatever reason, this man she had never met was deeply hurt by all the wrong she had done. She looked down, even more ashamed now than before.
Finally, someone spoke.
“Teacher, this woman was caught in adultery, in the very act. Now Moses, in the law, commanded us that such should be stoned. But what do you say?”
She held her breath (which is a weird thing to do when you don’t know how many breaths you have left). They called him “Teacher”. She had heard about this “Teacher”, a man they called Jesus. A righteous man, she had heard. Surely it was over for her. Surely, he would soon pick his own rock and blot out her shameful lust-filled existence. If she was right, and as pure as this man was, he had looked into her soul and seen all her filth, then certainly he had to do the just thing and finish her. In no version of this story was she deserving of mercy. She was guilty, and she knew it.
The teacher did not speak a word. He bent down, and taking his sweet time, began to write on the floor with his finger. The men were getting agitated. The young ones clutched their stones tighter, ready to hurl them as soon as they were given the nod. The teacher just kept writing.
“Teacher?” the man who had spoken prodded impatiently.
The teacher straightened himself and looked over the crowd. “Let he who is without sin throw the first stone.” Her fears latched on to that last phrase, “throw the first stone”. She squeezed her eyes shut and clenched her teeth, expecting to feel her skull cave in under the force of the man’s exceptionally jagged stone.
And then she heard it. “Thump!”
It made her jump, but she didn’t feel anything. Then “thump thump”, “thump thump thump thump”. She gingerly opened one eye, then the other. She was surprised. They were leaving, one by one, oldest first. And as they left, they dropped their stones, “thump thump”.
She watched in shock until the last person had left. She let out a huge sigh, realizing that she had been holding her breath for a really long time. And then she froze, she could feel an intense pair of eyes trained on her.
She looked in his direction, the teacher. In his eyes was an expression that looked very out of place. There was no hatred, no anger, just mercy. For someone like her? Even she hated herself in that moment. How could this man not hate her?
His words broke her train of thought, “Woman, where are your accusers? Has no one condemned you?” The realization overwhelmed her. “No one, Lord”, she said, shocked at the very words escaping her lips.
The teacher looked at her keenly. She could see the hurt returning to his eyes over all her mistakes. She wouldn’t understand that day, but he knew something she didn’t, that he was going to pay for her sin — and that of the men who dragged her there — in due time.
“Neither do I condemn you; go and sin no more.”
She felt very light. The tears streamed freely down her face. Just five minutes earlier she was as good as dead, but now here she stood with her life handed back to her. She wrapped the sheets around herself a little tighter and fell at his feet thanking him, and crying, and thanking him some more.
And that’s where our story ends, at the feet of Jesus, where mercy was available even for a woman covered only by the bed sheets of adultery.
There’s always grace, more than enough mercy at the feet of Jesus for those who seek it.
