Last week I read about Jesus and the woman caught in
adultery (John 8.1-11). And as the Bible often does, it surprised me again with
something new.
Jesus knew his Hebrew Bible, he knew it said the
situation warranted a death penalty. He also knew his religious opponents
wanted to catch him fudging it so they could prosecute him accordingly.
The irony is scalding. Here’s a bunch of zealous
Bible-readers in a white-knuckle frenzy against the very one their Bibles are
about. How does this happen? How does something meant to lead people to Jesus
become the very thing used to thwart him?
“Okay, stone her,” Jesus said. “But let the ones who’ve
never sinned throw first.”
Sheer brilliance. On my good days I can honestly say I
love Jesus but even on the less than good ones I can always say I admire
him. That was a tight spot. And I imagine it might’ve felt like a bit of a
gamble, given the company he was in. Who could be sure there wasn’t at
least one within that self-righteous group who imagined himself sinless?
The phrase that caught me last week was this: the older
ones first. The gamble worked, thank God,
the mob dispersed. And it was the older ones who left first.
I’m not old yet. The stats tell me I’m likely somewhere
in the middle. It’s a strange place to be, this midway. It means I can easily
remember what it was like to be young, and I can almost hear what it will be
like to be old. From this place I know that unsolicited advice is very unlikely
to find its mark. But I’m not crusty yet. There’s still enough youth in my
veins to give this a shot.
So here goes: Allow yourself space to be uncomfortable
because there is more freedom in questions than answers. Truth is slippery when
we try to grip it, like water through the fingers, but it comes free and
undeserved when we’re tired and thirsty, like beer from a friend. In the church
we call this ‘grace,’ but it’s true everywhere: Life gets smaller when we hold
on tight and bigger when we lift our heads and listen.
As far as I can tell, faith is like that. It’s more like
listening than gripping, more like accepting a gift than crunching data.
The temptation for you and I at this point is to think we
already know this. We nod at quaint thoughts about a relationship with God as
if we’ve already checked that item on our list. “Next, please.” But the
checklist is fooling us. The most important truths neither fit in boxes nor
line up beside them waiting for checkmarks. The big truths take a whole life to
learn, over and over again.
The one on my mind at the moment is this: We don’t have
faith in Jesus because the Bible has informed us about the mysteries of God, of
which he is one. We have faith in Jesus because God enables us to trust him
like a man trusts his wife or a close friend.
That sounds a bit weird. Or it should anyway. After all,
we’ve never met Jesus in the flesh. But this is where the Bible comes in. With
God’s help we can know Jesus through this book and through others who’ve believed it.
And that’s the spot we’re in. Like a mob of religious Bible-believers
surrounding the one it’s all about.
I used to think that faith in God meant knowing a lot of
things about him, that my faith would grow by keeping hold of what I already
knew and carefully adding more and more knowledge until one day I had all the
answers. As a young man I would’ve been one of the last to finally
drop his stone.
So here’s a request from a guy somewhere in the middle:
Please don’t make the same mistake. It’s better to be dirt-level and sobbing at
the feet of Jesus than disappointed by his grace and walking away.
