STONES OF JUDGMENT
Dr. Stephen D. Jones
March 2, 2008
John 8:1-11
If you go back in our church’s history,
you will find a number of notations when the church removed someone from
membership due to a moral lapse of one sort or another. Some seem almost
deserving. Brother Green was a member of the Baptist church in St. Louis in
1830, when, intoxicated and in the heat of passion, he attempted to kill his
wife, cutting a man’s hand severely, and was put in jail. The church
“excommunicated him on April 2, 1831.”
I suspect that if one among us made such
a drastic mistake that we would work with him in repentance and change, not
membership removal. This is an awkward part of our heritage. If it makes you
feel better, every church I have served has been over 100 years old, and all
have records of errant church members being disciplined. Our ancestors in faith
were much more comfortable judging one another publicly and holding one another
accountable for their actions. We tend to look the other way.
I was half-way into
my ministry before I realized how accepting I am of human judgment and how
unaccepting I am of God’s judgment. Only then did I realize that I had it the
opposite of Jesus, who was hard on human judgment and receptive to God’s
judgment.
The truth is, we
have to judge others. We select judges in the courtroom to pass judgment. We
enter the jury box to judge the guilt or innocence of others. We’re doing our
job as citizens.
Teachers judge
students; parents judge the behavior of children; voters judge the integrity of
elected leaders; teenagers judge the integrity of adults; stockholders judge the
effectiveness of management; employers judge employees; umpires judge whether
the runner is safe on first base; customers judge the trustworthiness of a
salesperson; congregants judge their pastor.
The truth is that
from the moment we wake up in the morning until we fall asleep at night, we
judge others. Sometimes our judgment can be harsh and petty: “Her skirt is too
short.” “His nose is too pointed.” “Their house is dilapidated.” “His attitude
stinks.” Often we would do well to keep our opinions to ourselves.
Once when I was a
young boy I entered our kitchen and my mother and her best friend were drinking
coffee around the table. I noticed a new wall hanging and asked, “Where did we
get that ugly thing?” And, of course, it was a gift made by my mother’s best
friend which they had just proudly hung on the wall. We’ve all had embarrassing
moments when we said something critical we didn’t need to say.
The new pastor’s
car started sputtering just after the morning service. So, on Monday, he drove
it into the local garage. He told the mechanic, “Now, son, I hope you’ll go easy
on the price. After all, I’m just a poor preacher.”
And young mechanic
looked up from under the hood and said, “I know, I heard you yesterday.”
In my final year in
seminary, the church I served as a pastoral intern went through a major
disruption, with the pastor resigning, announcing his divorce, and the church
splitting. The younger members formed a new church, and most of the older
members stayed behind. We had close friendships with both groups, though our
sympathies were more with the younger members who left.
Because my salary
was our only income that semester, I had to stay with the church. In those
remaining four months, that abandoned congregation took out its anger on the
only remaining pastoral staff member: me. The attacks against me turned ugly
and ferocious. We had long planned a series of educational conversations for the
congregation, not knowing of the impending crisis. The leader of the Christian
Education Board literally escorted me into and out of those sessions for fear
that things might turn physical. I was so young and naďve as to not understand
why they were venting such rage against me. It wasn’t my marriage, my
resignation, or my departure. But I was a convenient target.
One older couple in
the church had become like parents to Jan and me. They took a real interest in
us. I was shocked when Bob stood in one of those meetings and was unusually
cruel in his accusations against me and others who had destroyed “his
church.” The next morning, his wife, Dorothy, came into the church. I went out
in the hall to greet her and she walked around me as if I was the drinking
fountain in the hall. I became a non-person to them from that moment on. And I
kept asking myself, how could nice people act like this?
Human judgment can
be so harsh, and often mis-directed.
Vincent Van Gogh’s
father was a pastor, and after Vincent’s failed efforts at being a salesman in
an art studio, he felt led to become an evangelist. Unable to secure a church,
he went to serve the poorest of the poor, the miners in Belgium. “There were
many sick people in the village and each day Vincent made his rounds like a
doctor, bringing them whenever he could a bit of milk or bread, a warm pair of
socks or a cover to put over the bed. Typhoid fever descended upon the huts. .
.The number of bedridden miners, emaciated, weak, and miserable, grew day by
day. . .There was not a hut in the village to which Vincent had not brought food
and comfort, in which he had not nursed the sick and prayed with the miserable
and brought God’s light to the wretched. . .” (p. 58, Lust of Life,
Irving Stone).
Vincent decided
that he could no longer rent a room in a nice house in town. He rented a shanty
with a mud floor and leaking roof. “He now lived in the same kind of house as
the miners, ate the identical food, and slept in an identical bed. He was one of
them. Now he had the right to bring them the Word of God” (p. 76). Conditions
got worse in the village. He argued with the manager of the mines for better
conditions, but nothing was done. One day, an accident occurred down in the
mines that buried 57 men and children. The mines temporarily closed and the
miners' meager salaries stopped. “Vincent’s wages for April arrived from the
missionary society. He. . .bought 50 francs worth of food. He distributed it
among the families. The village lived on it for six days. After that, they went
to the woods to collect berries, leaves, grass. . . Anything that could be put
into the stomach to stop the throbbing ache of hunger. At last, there was
nothing more to find. The miners sat down to watch their wives and children
starve under their eyes. T
hey asked Vincent
to hold services for the 57 lost souls. A hundred men, women and children packed
into Vincent’s tiny shanty. Vincent had had almost no solid food since the
accident. He was too weak to stand on his feet. . .He began speaking in a
parched, feverish voice, every word filling the silence. The blackjaws, as the
miners were called, thin, emaciated, wracked by hunger and defeat, kept their
eyes on Vincent as they would on God.
Suddenly, “Strange,
loud voices were heard outside the shack, lifted in indignation. The door was
flung open,. . .and two well-dressed men stepped in” (p. 87). It was two
leaders of the missionary society. They spoke to Vincent in French so the
Belgium miners couldn’t understand. “You would think we were in the jungles of
Africa,” one of them said. “It may take years to bring these people back to
Christianity,” the other said. “This is shocking!” The refined clergymen said,
“Send these filthy dogs home!” Vincent protested, “But the services, we haven’t
finished the services for 57 of their loved ones killed in the mines.” The other
clergyman said, “Never mind the services, send them home.” The miners silently
filed out. The clergyman asked Vincent, “What sort of a new barbarous cult have
you started? Have you no sense of decency, of decorum? Is this conduct befitting
a Christian minister? Are you utterly mad, that you behave like this? Do you
wish to disgrace our church?” (p. 88).
The next day
Vincent had to advise the miners to go back to work, even though no safety
concerns in the mines had been addressed. He was sending them back to their
graves, and Vincent left the church, never to return. He remained with the
miners for a while and took up painting, and in our house we have a copy of one
of his paintings of the miners and their families in this Belgium village, a
dark but sympathetic painting called “The Potato Peelers.”
The two clergy
cared little for the poor, only for the decorum of the church. And they came to
judge Vincent regarding the shape of his hut, not the shape of his heart.
Jesus preached,
“Judge not, lest you be judged” (Matthew 7:1). “For with the judgment you make
you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get. Why do
you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but fail to notice the log in your own
eye? Or how can you say to your neighbor, ‘Let me take the speck out of your
eye,’ while the log remains in your own? You hypocrite, first take the log out
of your eye and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your
neighbor’s eye” (7:1-5).
It is clear that
Jesus calls us not to judge one another. Here was this woman caught in “the very
act of adultery.” Perhaps some article of clothing was slung over her so as not
to embarrass these devout men. The man with whom she had been sexually engaged,
no less guilty, was allowed to leave. We are left with the suspicion that it
wasn’t moral outrage over the woman’s misconduct, but rather that she was a
convenient pawn. By throwing her down before Jesus, they backed Jesus into an
embarrassing dilemma. Either he condemns the woman and they stone her to death
or he lets her go condoning her sin. Jesus is trapped. There is no easy way
out.
But instead, Jesus
uses the occasion to focus the men upon their sin: judging another human
being. “Let him who is without sin, cast the first stone.” And the men, in their
angry circle, realize that not one of them is sinless, not one of them can cast
the first stone. They have all sinned and fallen short, maybe not in adultery
but in other ways. “And when they heard Jesus, they dropped their stones, one by
one, and went away, beginning with the elders” (John 8:9).
Do you suppose that
Jesus really meant it when he said that the measure you use to judge others will
be the measure used to judge you? How will your life be judged? How have you
judged others? Would you welcome being judged yourself by the measure you have
used to judge others? How quickly I have judged others! May it not be so quick
with me!
As I think over my
career, I have rarely preached about a God of Judgment. I preach about Love and
Forgiveness. Yet the Psalmist says, “For judgment comes not from east or west,
not from the desert or mountain, but from God, who is the Judge, who brings some
low and raises others high” (Psalm 75:7-8).
I must admit that
God judges people with love and accountability. And God promises that the
measure you use to judge others will be the measure used to judge you. The hell
you create on earth will be the hell facing you, and the heaven you leave on
earth will be the heaven facing you.
God judges people
by holding a mirror before our lives, and we, stripped of pretense and façade,
finally have to face the honest truth about ourselves. We can no longer
masquerade. It is our moment of truth.
I think one of the
reasons I’ve been so reluctant to view God as Judge is that I confuse being nice
with being loving. Nice is defined by culture. It is nice when you excuse
yourself from the table. It is nice when you swallow your anger rather than
express it. It is nice when you give someone a passing grade who doesn’t deserve
it.
It may be nice to
give an undeserving grade, but it isn’t necessarily loving. It’s nice when you
don’t tell someone they have been disrespectful, but it isn’t necessarily
loving. It’s nice when you don’t confront an injustice, but it isn’t
loving. Sometimes when we are nice we are also careless about love. If I don’t
sense you are living up to your potential, and I love you, I trust you with the
truth. When we love someone, we hold them accountable to their best and to live
their utmost.
I cannot imagine my
relationship with Jan if she had no expectations or aspirations for me. Jan
holds me to my utmost and highest. How would a relationship be with someone who
settled for your mediocrity, who didn’t care whether you gave life your very
best or your very worst? That simply isn’t love’s way.
True love holds
people accountable. In Greek, eros love is seeking the highest in others.
It has come to mean erotic today, but that wasn’t it’s original
meaning. Eros love seeks the highest and best in one another. If you think back
to the best teachers, they were the ones who believed in you, and who held you
to a higher standard. They judged weak effort sternly, and they held you
accountable to do better the next time.
If I believe that
about an excellent teacher, and I believe that about human beings who truly love
each other, then why can’t I believe that a Loving God also holds us
accountable? The God who is Love believes in us and sees the whole potential of
our lives and judges our weak efforts and holds us accountable to do better the
next time. Why can’t I believe that? Why don’t I preach that?
The emphasis upon
Jesus’ forgiveness of sins is that we are held accountable for our actions and
for our lives. And in accountability, forgiveness is always offered. New
beginnings are always possible. The first and foremost message of Jesus was:
“Repent and believe in the good news” (Mark 1:15c).
We cannot repent
until we recognize what we have done that has damaged ourselves, that has hurt
others, that is destroying the earth, that is betraying the public good, that is
defying God’s loving ways. In accountability, we see with our own eyes what we
have done. When we repent, God’s forgiveness is ready and God’s pardon is real.
This, truly, is what is meant by God’s judgment. Not vindictive harshness, not
eternal hell, not punishment, but loving accountability so that we will repent
and be forgiven and start anew. And if Jesus is correct, the measure we use will
be the measure used for us.
All that remained
in that corner of the Temple were the stones left behind by the judging
men. Jesus and the woman are still standing within the Stoning Ring. And these
stones of judgment on the floor have become stones of forgiveness. Jesus invites
the woman to stand within that transformed holy altar of stones and commit
herself to a new way.
God’s judgment
isn’t condemnation. It invites the woman to repent, “to sin no more,” and to
walk from that circle transformed. She has hurt herself. She has hurt her
husband and family. She’s probably hurt her village. She and the man have hurt
each other. She has betrayed her vows before God. But this isn’t a circle of
condemnation. He invites the prodigal daughter to repent, to sin no more, to
receive God’s undeserved forgiveness, and to live her life anew.
Harsh judgment and
condemnation lead to death. Loving accountability, repentance and forgiveness
lead to life.
It was Jesus’ words
that changed the harsh judgment of the elders into a scene of repentance and
forgiveness. Jesus straightened up and said to her, “Woman of Israel, where are
they? Has no one condemned you?” The woman looked around at the circle of
stones, and said, “No one, Lord.” And Jesus said to her, “Then neither do I
condemn you. Your sins, though they be many, are washed white as snow. Go on
your way, forgiven, and sin no more” (John 8:9-11, adapted). Amen.
