Jerusalem Presbyterian Church

When I was about fourteen, my parents, sister and I had moved to a new house—one  my parents had built out in the country.  It was a smaller house than the one I had previously lived in.  Our family was smaller then without foster children, and my brother had moved out, having gotten married at the ripe old age of 19.

In the 70’s if you recall, there was a sudden upswing in gas prices.  My parents had decided to sell our camper because it was too expensive to haul it around to various camp grounds with a van that got about 8 miles to the gallon.  The decision was made to buy instead an above ground swimming pool, so we could “vacation at home”.

Instead of hiring some  expensive installation experts to put the pool in our back yard, my parents and some friends did it, with the help of my older brother.  The hardest part of installing an above-ground pool is getting the ground ready for it.  You want the place where the pool will stand to be absolutely level.  This involved hauling in a couple of truckloads of sand for the pool to sit on.   Then the sand is raked, and rolled until it is flat and level.  I remember after the sand had been just about finished, my brother, the newlywed went out and with a stick carved “L.B. + C. B.” in the sand—a public declaration of his love for my sister-in-law.  I’m pretty sure my father made him go erase it, but I wondered what it would have felt like if the letters had remained—once the pool was on it and filled with water, would we have been able to feel those letters with our feet for summers to come?

Even though it probably made my dad a little mad, I remember thinking that was a pretty impressive thing for my brother to do to let his young wife know how much he loved her.  And you know what?  Thirty years later, even though I now have a son almost as old as those newlyweds, and I am far less impressionable than the adolescent girl I was then, I still think it was pretty cool.

There is this strange little moment in Jesus’ encounter with the adulterous woman in which he seems to kind of leave what is happening right in front of him, ignoring the seriousness of the situation, and starts doodling in the dirt.  The scribes and Pharisees have brought before him someone who clearly has violated the law, the social order, and the mores of decent culture.  At the same time, it appears that they are on to Jesus—they are setting a trap, hoping to catch him being Christ-like.  And Jesus does not disappoint.

Jesus’ act of bending over and writing in the dirt is not about him writing himself notes about the Mosaic law in a case like this.  It is rather a dismissive act, a way for him to show the Pharisees that he is quite finished with the conversation.  It is the same kind of signal we would understand if the judge in a trial opened up a laptop and started playing solitaire, or made himself a sandwich on the bench.  Jesus is refusing to engage the Pharisees, therefore not allowing them to exercise control in the situation.  Clearly it is Jesus who is on trial here, on this day in the temple, not the woman.  If it had been her, the Pharisees would have used a more complete interpretation of the Mosaic law, in which the man also is subject to the death penalty.

The Pharisees keep questioning Jesus, and he keeps refusing to bite, turning instead to his doodles in the dirt once again. The Pharisees, bent on getting more dirt to use against Jesus, stick with it until he comes back with the argument that none of them can beat,  “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.”  That is not a very good interpretation of the law, but it is salvation in a sentence.  Deflated and unable to answer, but having gotten the proof they need that Jesus is indeed a heretic,  the Pharisees slip away, one by one.

  In the final scene, it is just the two of them—a woman who has escaped death, and a man who will surely face it, and soon.  God stands there in the temple that day, with dirt on his hands--God who perhaps has scratched a declaration of Love there that day in the dirt, a declaration that cannot be erased, that the world has felt and seen ever since God came to earth as mud that breathes.  We are forgiven and transformed from those who are sinful and lost, to those who are redeemed and made worthy, all by a God who is not afraid to get his hands dirty for our sake.  What wondrous love is this?

Thanks be to God.