Connect Live - Session 5

Session Five – Julia Watkins
Jesus and the Adulterous Woman

John 8:1-11

A few weeks ago, I participated in a pilgrimage alongside members of Covenant’s wider church family. Together, we traveled through Georgia and Alabama to some of the places where our nation’s civil rights movement is still unfolding.

One of the many impactful sites we visited along the way was the Equal Justice Initiative’s Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama, where we learned about America’s history of racial injustice and its legacy.

Not only does Equal Justice Initiative support a museum, but as a legal practice, it also defends those Jesus calls the inheritors of God’s kingdom (Luke 6:20). The organization’s founder, Bryan Stevenson, and his team have dedicated their lives to advocating for the poor, the wrongly condemned, and those forgotten in the furthest reaches of America’s prison system.

In his memoir, Just Mercy, Stevenson shares the unforgettable stories of those he’s represented and reflects on what sustains him through such challenging work. He writes:

“I frequently had difficult conversations with clients who were struggling and despairing over their situations—over the things they’d done, or had been done to them, that had led them to painful moments. Whenever things got really bad, and they were questioning the value of their lives, I would remind them that each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done…And I told myself what I had been telling my clients for years. I am more than broken. In fact, there is a strength, a power even, in understanding brokenness, because embracing our brokenness creates a need and desire for mercy, and perhaps a corresponding need to show mercy. When you
experience mercy, you learn things that are hard to learn otherwise…You begin to recognize the humanity that resides in each of us” (290).

This week, John describes Jesus’ interactions with ordinary people, who are
more than the worst thing they’ve ever done.

The scene begins at dawn on the Mount of Olives, where Jesus would eventually spend his final hours as a man wrongfully condemned to death. A crowd has already started to form. While some of them had come to learn from Jesus’ teachings, others were there as adversaries to “test him” (8:6).

According to John, Jesus is in the middle of his lesson, when the law-enforcing scribes and Pharisees present “a woman who had been caught in adultery” (8:3). They solicit a reaction from Jesus, hardly concealing their hope that he might respond in some self-incriminating way.

What happens next turns preceding notions of justice on their head. Where the scribes and Pharisees had positioned themselves as the faultless judges (of both the woman and Jesus), Jesus invites them to consider their own faults before pointing their fingers at others. He challenges them to “let anyone…who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her” (8:7). In doing so, Jesus neither excuses the woman’s behavior nor condemns it.

Instead, he judges with the compassion of one who bears the world’s brokenness and conquers death with scars still on his hands.

Questions for Discussion:
• What might cause any of us to see ourselves or others as “the worst thing we’ve ever done?”
• How might our brokenness shape how we perceive and treat one another?
• How would you describe the relationship between mercy and judgment?
• What do you find challenging about this story? Hopeful?