“GO AND SIN NO MORE!”
Demands Jesus, wagging his finger at yet another woman who couldn’t keep her legs together.
At least that seems to be how some modern day evangelical men read the story of “The woman caught in adultery.” At least once a week someone on the internet will tell me that I should be wagging my finger at those they consider “sexual sinners” in the same way they seem to imagine Jesus wagging his finger at this woman.
It’s almost as if they believe the story is about adultery.
It’s not.
It’s about a group of religious men, using a woman to try to trap Jesus into a debate about capital punishment, and Jesus stepping up and defending that woman from being murdered by a group of abusive religious men, who consider a woman’s life merely a pawn in their game.
It’s about Jesus defending the vulnerable, it’s about Jesus refusing to go along with religious “slut shaming” and instead setting a woman free from sin and shame, be that hers or someone else’s.
Adultery?
We are given no details about the woman, about what she had been doing, or what had been done to her. All we know is that she is accused of committing adultery. We don’t know if she actually did or not, and we don’t know who she was apparently committing adultery with. It’s not included because it’s not relevant, because this story is not about adultery, it’s not about what constitutes adultery, or the moral rights or wrongs of adultery. It’s not about this woman’s sin (if indeed she had even committed a sin.)
To put this story in context we must remember how little power women in biblical times had. If she was married she is unlikely to have had any say in choosing her husband. She could have been a child married to an adult old enough to be her father. She may not have been his only wife. She may have been “put away” and only able to feed herself by providing sex to another man. She may have been a rape victim, who a married man forced himself upon, cast as an adulteress like Bathsheba was, when in reality she had no choice. She may have been a rape victim who didn’t scream loud enough. (Deuteronomy 22:24)
She may not have done anything, she may just have been accused of adultery. We don’t know. We aren’t told. Because this story is about sin, but it’s not about her sin.
It’s about the sin of the men who violently dragged her to Jesus’ feet and demanded she be brutally executed. These are the same kind of men who today, read this passage and gleefully declare that Jesus told her to “go and sin no more.” Men who claim that when they heap similar shame on sexually active women and gay people, they aren’t being like the Pharisees, they’re being like Jesus.
They’re not.
Jesus doesn’t condemn.
He makes no comment on the supposed “adultery” ; he simply frees her from the affliction of sin. This sin might have referred to the specific sin she was being accused of, or it could have been a generalised statement. After all she wasn’t the only person Jesus said this to, he also said it to a lame man after healing him (John 5:14). Was Jesus suggesting that the man was lame because he was sinful? Was he equally wagging his finger at the lame man? Showing him mercy but refusing to condone his sin of what? Being disabled? Of course not. We would never use the same language to talk about this incident as some people do to talk about the woman caught in adultery, despite the fact that Jesus said the same words to both of them.
When Jesus tells people “Go, and sin no more” he’s reminding them that he has freed them and given them a fresh start. They are free from lives trapped by sin, not necessarily their own, not necessarily a specific sin, but simply the human condition of being unable to live life in all its fullness, of being unable to have full fellowship with the divine, because of the affliction we call “sin.”
We are all the woman caught in adultery.
I identify with the woman caught in adultery despite the fact I didn’t commit adultery, why? Because I was trapped in a life marked by abuse, marked by sin, and Jesus set me free from that life. I think it’s a mistake to think of sin as simply things we do wrong; rather it’s a disease that infects us, that keeps us from God. I didn’t commit abuse, my husband did, but I was infected with that sin, I was trapped by it, and it prevented me having a full and healthy relationship with God. Jesus, the great physician healed me, and then said “Go, and sin no more.” Sure, I still mess up from time to time, but my life is not marked by sin; I am able to enjoy the fullness of life, because of the fresh start Jesus gave me.
Jesus set the woman free from sin. We are all, at some point in our lives, trapped by sin. He certainly set her free from the sin of murder and male violence, we see that overtly. He may also have set her free from whatever the situation was that had caused the Pharisees to target her; whatever her culpability was, or was not in that. She was free. He did not ask her to repent, he did not “hold her accountable”, he did not condemn, or shame or exclude. He simply freed her. He set the lame man free from this same affliction, in the same way, no demands, no condemnation, just freedom. Yet what of the violent men who dragged the woman before Jesus, and wandered off when their double standard was called out? It would appear that they were left festering in their sin.
Has Jesus freed you from sin? Are you now free to “go and sin no more”?
