Everyone loves the famous line of “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” Even better, today people love the line “Judge not, lest ye be judged.” That may be the motto of our era. These are some of the most popular lines from the Gospels and are used as often by non-believers as by believers. These lines can be interpreted to fit into almost any shape you like, and can be raised to affirm any faith or ideology. These lines, when cherry-picked as standalone zingers, behave kind of like what we do with chicken today in the grocery store. We shape these lines to fit our needs and wants. How are these lines like chicken? Well, in the past, we just cooked the whole chicken and broke it apart in the separate parts: chicken legs, wings, breasts, and thighs. Life was simple then. Now we mass produce the chicken and carve it up and pluck out the white meat and blend up the dark meat, and run it through machines and slicers and shapers until it looks nothing like the original chicken. We can shape and press chicken into any bun-fitting shape that we like. There’s chicken patties, chicken strips, chicken nuggets, popcorn chicken, dinosaur shaped chicken, chicken in a can, chicken fries, and chicken burgers. There are even vegan chicken products that have no chicken whatsoever in them, yet are sold under the name of “chicken.” From this poor bird we have created The Island of Dr. Moreau in the frozen food aisle.

We pick out the parts we want and make it fit our own yearnings. We want the bloodless version. If you think of the idea of “the Gospels” and are never disturbed at all, you are missing some major sections. You might be reading the Gospel like you shop the frozen food aisle. In the grocery store, we push our carts and listen to elevator music and pause in the air conditioning, all in complete comfort. We open a glass door and feel a blast of cold air to pick out a bag of dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets, thinking how cute they are. But that product in the freezer has no resemblance to a chicken. It has sealed us off from all the realities of the life of a chicken. There is no feed, dung, or blood anywhere near our shopping centers. We don’t see anything but the clean, happy ending of the cartoonish dinosaur nugget. There is no evidence of a chicken at all, let alone the sacrifice the chicken made. But the chicken is there, and the sacrifice was most certainly made.

Few people read the words that come before or after the “don’t judge me” parts of the biographies of Jesus. Why is that? Well, for one thing, it disrupts the comfort of feeling safe and nourished. There is no shortage of confusing and disturbing lines that came from the mouth of Jesus. For anyone that accuses believers of cherry-picking lines from the Bible to suit their beliefs, there is an equal amount of cherry-picking done to suit non-beliefs as well. For this latter group, the two lines about judgement are leveraged heavily in the ongoing effort to make Jesus into a non-miraculous, non-divine but cool hippy instead of the incarnation of the creator of the universe who took on our sins for the greatest sacrifice in history.

For the life of me, I will never understand why any non-believer would care for anything said by a non-divine version of Jesus, since then he would be a lunatic and a fraud. Anyone who denies Jesus’ divinity but is still quoting him as a moral teacher should ask themselves: “Why would you care what he said at all, if he’s lying about his primary claim of being the messiah, of being God?”

But let’s continue. Let’s look at these famous lines where Jesus told us not to be ‘judgey’. Let’s go get stoned. Here’s the cast of the scene: Jesus, a bunch of angry Pharisees, and the adulterous woman.

When the Pharisees want to stone the woman who was caught in adultery (Jn 8:1-11), they try to corner Jesus on interpreting the law. They know that he is a follower of the law, that he is a devout Jew. Let me stop right here, since this is probably the main point people miss right out of the gate.

The Holy Family of Mary and Joseph observed Jewish law with devotion. That is, they were devout. So was Jesus. Thus to understand Jesus at all requires understanding that he was very Jewish, and to be a devout Jew means understanding what “the law” means. This also means that to understand Jesus at all means you have to understand the Old Testament, the bloody and gritty parts of the Bible. This is the part of the Bible where the chicken was still on the farm, not in your freezer. The classic mistake people make, from Marcion in the second century to the Third Reich in the 20th century, is thinking that you can understand Jesus without diving into his Jewish heritage. Marcion wanted to get rid of the Old Testament just like many modern people do, and it’s one of the oldest heresies we have to look back on for guidance. People have always tried to throw out the books of Genesis and Exodus and Leviticus and Deuteronomy. Why? Because they want to unhitch the train of Christianity from the Jews, but you can’t. Even if Leviticus does sound like your angry old uncle who lacks spiritual bedside manner, you can’t kick him out because he’s part of the family. Without the whole family of books, hardly any of Jesus’ life and teaching makes sense. Without the history that precedes his life and ministry, half of the Gospel of John would not make sense, and most the Gospel of Matthew would confuse the heck out of us. We need the whole, not just parts of it. You know, eventually if you eat enough dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets, you start to wonder where the dinosaur came from, and once you start digging into the ingredient list and the supply-chain you will arrive back at the whole food: the chicken. You must have the whole, not just some industrial product in a shiny wrapper.

“The Old Testament is an indispensable part of Sacred Scripture. Its books are divinely inspired and retain a permanent value, for the Old Covenant has never been revoked. Indeed, ‘the Old Testament was deliberately so oriented that it should prepare for and declare in prophecy the coming of Christ, redeemer of all men.’ Christians venerate the Old Testament as true Word of God. The Church has always vigorously opposed the idea of rejecting the Old Testament under the pretext that the New has rendered it void (Marcionism). (CCC 121-123)

So I haven’t gotten very far yet on this story, and no where near the attempted stoning of the woman. But Jesus cannot be understood without the old books, nor can any part of this story. Moreover, this need for the old books doesn’t only apply to Jesus, but how could anyone understand Peter or Paul or John or the various dudes named James without understanding the history of the Chosen people? You have to understand Adam and Abraham and Moses and David and Jeremiah all the way up to the Maccabees and all the rest of the Hebrews in between to get to any sense whatsoever of what is happening in the circle of Pharisees. If you just rush to find the line, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone,” you have just gone for the dinosaur shaped chicken nugget and pretended that it spontaneously grew in the freezer via the debunked scientific “theory of spontaneous generation.” Nuggets come from somewhere, they don’t just happen.

(Ok, I’m unhitching from the chicken metaphor from here on out, so as not to beat a dead horse. I wanted to say horse-shaped chicken nugget, but I don’t know if it has been invented yet.)

Jesus stated that he came to “fulfill the law and the prophets,” which is a statement forgotten by those who want to carve the hippy version of Jesus away from the Old Testament laws of Moses. So what does “the law” mean? Jesus is talking about the Ten Commandments and the Torah. Now, I don’t want to get into whether he is talking about natural law or specific ceremonial law or cultural law of the Hebrews, because that’s more than I can handle. You need a Trent Horn or Jimmy Akin or Jim Blackburn to break all that down. In his ministry he corrects some of the old law, and does away with some. The good news is this: we know that Jesus perfects the Old Testament law. But while he makes these corrections, he still has immense respect for the old law. He also said, "Amen, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or the smallest part of a letter will pass from the law, until all things have taken place."

Why did Jesus believe in the old law so much? How could he be so deeply dedicated to the old law? Talk about dramatic, too. He defends the old law so much that he says not only will every letter be fulfilled, but even the smallest part of each letter.

I can think of one reason.

There is one reason in particular, one primary reason that really sticks out to me. And it seems to be very clear, and make perfect sense once you consider it.

It’s because he made the law. He wrote the law. He’s God. So yeah, he’s down with the law. He’s the author. Again, for anyone that forgets that Jesus is claiming to be God while reading the Gospels, these statements will make no sense. The chill teacher version of Jesus would not speak this way of the law, but the divine author of the law, who used human authors to record his will, would speak this way of the law.

He gave the law to his chosen people. If he is God, then he certainly agrees to his own law, because he is the author.

The mistake people make when reading about Hakuna Matata version of Jesus is that they have already rejected him as divine, and therefore nothing he says makes sense, because he is actually speaking as God himself. To read his words as a profound teacher makes little sense when he starts dropping lines like “I saw Satan fall like lightning.” Wait what? If he’s just a dude with peaceful ideas, then he didn’t witness Satan fall from the sky. Surely someone has already tried to fit that into their desire to legalize drugs. “Oh, that must mean that Jesus was on psychedelics.” No, he wasn’t. He was high all right, but that’s because he was the highest being, incarnated into the flesh to walk with us.

Here’s another question: how do you reconcile a purely human Jesus with a line like: “No one can come to me unless the father who sent me draws him, and I will raise him up on the last day.” How is an entirely human Jesus going to raise anything up? And on what day? If he’s not God and claims this power, then he’s crazy or an arrogant liar. If he is God, then it makes sense but it’s also terrifying. No wonder Jesus gets irritated with the people around him and says, "O faithless and perverse generation, how long will I be with you? How long will I endure you?"

Sometimes I wonder if he would say that to me at least once a day. When I imagine Jesus living with me, it’s a good mental exercise, because when I pour an oversized bowl of Kellogg’s Raisin Bran from the MEGA-sized box, and then cut up a banana to throw on top, I just have to wonder - what would Jesus think of such a food spectacle? Worse, what would he say when I ate that bowl, and then poured a second bowl? I suspect he might say, “I never knew you…were such a pig.”

So for everyone today that throws out the Old Testament and Ten Commandments, I wonder if they have not just seized on the most culturally shocking lines of the ancient texts and got stuck there. Some of the old books are difficult to read, without a doubt, and the cultural differences and scientific understanding of the universe creates a gap in understanding, but focusing on those things clouds the religious truth of the texts. To toss them out is to lose the whole backstory of Jesus’ life and his purpose. Jesus does not sound like someone who rejects the past and the law when he says “not one letter of the law will pass away”? Further, he says not even one part of a letter of the law will pass away. Then he later says, “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s,” meaning we should follow the law of the land where we live, as long as it doesn’t conflict with the law, the real law, the natural law, God’s law, which is the Ten Commandments and those obvious laws which we can know in our conscience.

If you do not read Jesus words as if it were God speaking, then you will get a very odd interpretation of what the Gospels mean. You will have to skip over many parts because they make no sense, and all of the miracles. You will have to throw out all of those completely if Jesus is not divine. If you read his words as the speech of an ordinary man with wisdom, you may just as well go to the airport bookstore and pick up a self-help book full of vanilla maxims on being yourself and pursuing happiness. You can stay in the comfort of ignoring the many times Jesus talks about separating the sheep from the goats, or the wheat from the chaff that will burn for eternity. Because if Jesus is not God but is only claiming to be, then it doesn’t matter and your ego can run buck wild. But if he is God, then the only way to read the Gospels and make sense of them is with the understanding that he is speaking as God himself. It is precisely when you make this turn that you may experience fear of the Lord, which is a good thing because it means you are on the right track.

The self-help gurus say something different than what our carpenter, who is God, tells us. He’s saying something very different. As God he is showing and telling us in every word and action the exact opposite of the feel-good books on the airport bestseller cart. He does say, “Be yourself.” But he doesn’t say it at all like the books of affirmation at the airport do. He said, “Surrender to me because you are a sinner. Then you can finally be your true self.”

He also says (paraphrasing here into bro-speak): “Only I can save you because I am God. I’m not giving you some self-help tips here for kicks, but for eternal life, so take up your cross daily, crucify your ego, and follow me. Oh, and you will find happiness in me because I am God. But - fair warning - you will get mocked and possibly murdered if you do this thing correctly, and I’m about to show you what that looks like.”

Jesus questioned few of the existing laws of his people, slicing only those ceremonial, cultural laws that strived for outward cleanliness. He only corrected the laws that needed correction, the ones that blocked the interior conversion of the heart, the rules that stifled mercy and humility. (For a great listen on this story, check out Tim Keller’s podcast on “The Humility of Jesus.”)

According to the law, adultery was illegal and stoning was the punishment. So the situation was this: the Pharisees have a woman in the middle of the circle. With rocks in hand, they put the question to Jesus on what should be done to her as a violator of the law of Moses. However, before he answers with his famous line, Jesus squats down and draws in the dirt with his finger. No one knows what he was drawing in the sand or dirt, or why he does it, although there is plenty of speculation. Perhaps he was doing something profound in the sand, or perhaps he was just bored with their games and like a nine-year-old shortstop drawing in the dirt during a boring baseball game he found something more interesting in shaping the sand. Regardless of what he drew in the sand, Jesus stands up and delivers the ultimate one-liner, the greatest microphone-drop in the history of life and literature, saying the famous line, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” Then he bends down once again and draws in the dirt, again doodling like the detached young shortstop or writer of something profound and creative. Whatever the case, it causes the Pharisees’ pride to crumble.

Stunned, the men with rocks fall silent. They slowly fade away, leaving one by one. Hungry for blood and justice, they suddenly lose interest as the one-liner from Jesus seems to annihilate their motivation to kill the woman. Their goal of trapping Jesus in a legal argument snapped upon themselves. The comment seems to turn the mirror onto the men, showing them their own sin, and they drift away leaving the woman and Jesus in the center of the disappearing circle.

This is often how God works in my own life, where something will happen that bothers me, gets me all wound up, and slowly, gradually, I come to realize that my perception of the problem is not exactly right and that I’m probably more prideful and lacking humility than the person I’m upset with. This whole “drawing his finger in the sand” is like a metaphor for God taking his time to correct us, stirring up our consciences, awakening us to our own flaws and failures. What a shame that I am so talented at seeing others’ failures first before my own, as this talent does me little favor. Perhaps I should have pursued being a judge on American Idol or at the county fair or bodybuilding competitions, because I’m so keen on finding the flaw in others instead of myself. Perhaps I missed a career opportunity. Seeing my own flaws is a brutal process of introspection, and God does seem to walk me to that place. He lets me burn off the passions before showing me my own faults.

Everyone takes this quote from Jesus and runs with it. This one gets mixed right in with his other comment about non-judgement. “Don’t judge me,” we say. Or maybe, “Only God can judge me.” But I would argue that those who say those words don’t understand what Jesus is saying. He’s not saying we won’t be judged. He’s saying, if you have no sin, you can judge. But who has no sin? Only one person can say that, and it’s Jesus. It’s God. He is the one that can judge. In this case, he can judge the woman, but he’s not judging her. Not yet, but he will.

In these cases, he’s always indicating that the judgement is not happening right now…but it will happen. Judgement is coming, but there is time yet. These lines are about mercy on living persons, but the final justice is 100% guaranteed for every person upon their last breath. His mercy does not affirm violations of the law, but rather corrects behavior and offers a second chance.

That’s why the last verse of this story is the most important of all. He tells her to “Go and sin no more.” The implication is that she did sin, but she has another chance. She’s forgiven. This is the most important line in the story and has parallels to the story where Jesus heals the paralyzed man. In that story, Jesus considers what is more amazing: that he can make a paralyzed man pick up his mat and walk, or that he can forgive the sins of the same man. Obviously the medical miracle is amazing, but the claim that he can forgive sins jumps infinitely ahead in terms of wonder. The people who witness the event are more amazed at the medical healing, but truly the forgiveness of sins is far more profound and meaningful, which is what he’s trying to convey to the people.

This forgiveness brings up two questions. Who can forgive sins? Well, obviously only God can do that. A cool hippy cannot forgive your sins, and I know a few cool, aging hippies who still believe in peace, love, and dope but they cannot forgive sins. A drug user on psychedelics cannot forgive my sins. If one of these types told me that he forgave me for all the evil things I’ve done, I would buy them another beer (or whatever their drug of choice) because I would consider them already intoxicated.

So why do non-believers and deniers of Jesus’ divinity read these lines and consider that an ordinary man has any power to forgive sin? I think it’s more likely that this forgiveness question is ignored, or glossed over, or not looked at very closely. Actually, I think many people do feel like Jesus is divine, but they don’t want to think about it too closely, because once you really dive into the Gospels, or stare at the crucifix for a long time, you start to see your own sins and feel the need to change. In fact, this is why I feel that crucifixes should have the spent body of Jesus hanging in defeat, so that when you look upon it - and really look at it - you see your flaws in the wounds of Christ. A bare and clean cross doesn’t deliver the message like a cross with the mangled body of Jesus fully exposed does, with his bloodied head, punctured hands and feet, the many cuts and bruises from the scourging, the scuffed joints from falling three times on the road to Calvary, and the gaping hole in his side by a spear that rammed into his heart. On that cross, the cross with the body, you can imagine how the sinless man squirmed and hung and suffocated under his own weight, while being jeered at and mocked for all his goodness, while he thirsted under the heat of the sun, for three hours, dehydrating and struggling to breathe. He had no sleep the night before and had been beaten and ripped apart with Roman whips. That is the cross I need to see, not the empty cross with no nails and no body. I do not want to see the “before” cross, I want to see the “after.” I don’t want to see the cleaned up Disney version of the cross. The ugly cross is where the life of Christ makes sense and the mystery of his sacrifice can just begin to make sense to me. Then I can begin, just barely, to see how my own sins and fallen nature put him there in that horrible place, and somehow, strangely, how that awful sight shows the greatest act of humility and love the world has ever seen and becomes the ultimate example of how to live, and the ultimate symbol of hope for our souls.

The second question is: how can he forgive her sins, or anyone else’s sins? How can that be? What is happening? How can there be no consequences for breaking laws, when he says no part of the law, not one letter, nor a part of a single letter, will pass away?

That’s the question the Pharisees want answered, and in a clever way Jesus does answer it. He answers it by showing the men that judgment is not taking place that day, not by them. There is so much more to this story.

For starters, did the woman commit adultery alone? No. That’s not possible. So where is the man and why isn’t he also in the center of the circle? Surely he too committed adultery. Shouldn’t he also be stoned? Where is the man that committed the act with this woman? Why is she the only one being accused and tried for adultery? This is one of those moments where you can see Jesus treating the dignity of all people equally, woman or man. He cuts through the double-standard. He subverts the culture. Wait…is he…wait…what? Is he smashing the patriarchy? He is establishing some kind of equality in eternal judgement here, as Paul realized a few years later: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free person, there is not male and female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” So there is that. But if you believe Jesus is God and he is speaking as God, and he speaks highly of the first and most famous patriarch, Abraham, and does the same about many of the others like Moses and Elijah and Jacob and Isaac, then he doesn’t seem real keen on “smashing” them, since after all, he chose them.

Next, who are the men that want to stone her? Jesus implies something incredible here: the men that want to stone her are adulterers themselves. At the very least they are guaranteed to be sinners of some kind, breakers of the law, and likely worthy of stoning as the fullness of the law prescribes. Should they be stoned themselves for the same crime, or for a different crime? I would bet they are guilty of it, just as most men today are guilty of it, nearly all of them as they pore over the porn in their phone and degrade the women in the images and then clear their browser history and then pretend they haven’t committed adultery. I have been as guilty as any in that regard, as the websites beckon us, tempt us men, into easy-access lust and defile our marriages and relationships while we project our sin onto those performing the act on the screen, instead of looking at our own behavior. How many millions of men have partaken in looking at porn, only to go online afterward and lament the fallen morals of our society? The Pharisees are still encircling the woman today, as we sinners act as spotless as a lamb. We do this while the Lamb of God squirms in agony on the cross for our fallen hearts, to forgive us, to give us a second, third, seventh, and seventy-seventh chance.

And what happens to the woman then? She is not condemned. But saying “Go and sin no more” implies that she was guilty of the accused act. I feel it’s safe to assume the woman is forever changed after this moment, like so many others that Jesus comes into contact with, as he fundamentally re-plants them in rich soil. He rips out the roots of old ways out. But that redemption, that re-planting, comes with a huge caveat, one that I feel most people miss when they throw around the “Judge not, lest ye be judged” one-liner as if it were a shield.

This redemption that Jesus preaches only happens in the Gospel stories to those that have the correct humility before God. He cures people who have faith. In some cases, he cures people but not all of them change their ways, such as the ten lepers that he cures and only one comes back to thank him. (A Samaritan, of all people!) The one leper comes back to him, and Jesus tell him:

“Ten were cleansed, were they not? Where are the other nine? Has none but this foreigner returned to give thanks to God?” Then he said to him, “Stand up and go; your faith has saved you.”

Faith has saved this one leper. What’s the implication? His sins are forgiven. This implies the other nine may be healed from leprosy, but they are not changed. They have not changed. The other nine are back in the arcade of life, living without their physical malady, but afflicted with the spiritual malady, and not giving any thanks and honor to God. This is what happens when you make God a transactional being for redemption only when you think you need a lift. You cry out for help when you need it, but turn away as soon as you have what you want. That is where the judgment will come down, and this cleansing of the ten lepers states it pretty plainly, in my opinion.

The change is what must happen. Without the change, the condemnation will come. Forgiveness entails expected duties that follow, otherwise there is a lack of understanding about what the forgiveness meant. Fortunately, we get repeat attempts here. God is well aware of our weaknesses, and I believe he wants us to know and embrace our own. If you don’t know your weaknesses, how can you be prepared to fight off the temptations that will cause you to fall? Knowing my weaknesses becomes a great gift. Gifts and crosses come to us all, and sometimes the cross is the gift that awakens my faith.

If we receive forgiveness, it must really be received, and not as a “Get out of jail free card.” The one unforgivable sin the Jesus alludes to is the rejection of the Holy Spirit, which is the rejection of God. So anyone that rejects God, inside their hearts, will not receive forgiveness. That sends a chill to me, as I often wonder about that. Obviously, nothing can be hidden from God, as we are an open book to God, and how easily our petty pride can rise up and knock us off course, tipping us right back to a subtle rejection of Jesus, making him into a personal redemption center where we go when we need to exchange our token prayers for forgiveness.

Those who receive the Holy Spirit see their whole life change. Those that understand, change their ways out of joy. Those that do not understand, do not change. The “Judge not lest ye be judged” line is shortened by most people, to the detriment of the concept, as there is a key line that follows it elsewhere when he mentions the idea of “judge not.” In this story of the stoning, Jesus says nothing of judgment, as she appears to have a clean slate. “Go and sin no more.” Like the lepers, she is starting fresh, but as we saw in the ten lepers, only one is actually saved. Curing or forgiving should arouse faith in the healed or forgiven, but this doesn’t always happen. But elsewhere Jesus does say “Stop judging, that you may not be judged.” (Mt 7:1-2) Everyone loves that line. But the very next line in Matthew after that is this: “For as you judge, so will you be judged, and the measure with which you measure will be measured out to you.”

I’ve never heard anyone add this part when quoting this line: “measure for measure will you be judged.” We just say the first part because it makes a good comeback, and then allows us to agree to disagree, or more likely just permits us to make up whatever rules we like. “Judge not” alone allows our own pride and disobedience to continue un-chastised and unchanged, but it doesn’t account for the next words that Jesus says, because a judgement is coming, in full measure, and that includes our choices that we make. So even if you, or a co-worker, a friend, a schoolmate, or a relative doesn’t get to have the final word on judgement in this world, someone or something does in the next.

So who is doing that judging? Is it the cool hippy Jesus? No. This is the fiery Jesus, speaking as God. We forget about this Jesus, who killed the fig tree for not producing fruit. We forget about this God-man who said, “The son of man will send his angels, and they will gather out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers, and throw them into the furnace of fire; there men will weep and gnash their teeth.” (Mt 13:40-42)

In fact, if you don’t believe in God, nor believe in Jesus as God, but you read the line “so will you be judged,” who exactly do you think Jesus is talking about as doing the measuring? For those that do not believe, but who quote these lines, how can this idea of cosmic judgement still mean anything? Yet these lines resonate, because even when reminded of the measure for measure, non-believers nod. Even while claiming atheism and disbelief in heaven or hell, people still want some kind of ultimate payback or justice. An infiltration of “karma” seems to have wafted into the room, but it doesn’t fit into Christianity. Judgement is to karma as an apple is to an orange. Jesus shares no concept of karma. He’s talking about a final judgement, and he will direct you to heaven or hell. He mentioned hell many times. He mentions it all over the place, and souls are going there. Does that sound like the cool hippy allowing us to do whatever you want? Does anyone remember a verse that says: “That’s cool; get drunk, trash the place, lie, cheat, steal, be prideful, commit adultery, have random hookups. Do whatever you want, it’s all good, I’ll just save you at the end.” No, there’s nothing like that. Maybe that will turn up in the next version of the Dead Sea Scrolls that is found in a cave in Qumran, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

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