Rev. Taylor Morgan
March 11, 2007
SERMON TITLE: “Neither Do I Condemn You”
John8:1-11
Dear Lord: We do thank you for
this wonderful day in which we have been given. And it is a beautiful day! We are so grateful. We are
grateful for life. We are grateful for our time under the sun and Lord, may we live this life for you and may you be with me this morning as I bring Your word and may we have
the ears to hear, for it is in Your Name we pray, Amen.
This morning I take my text from the
Gospel of John, chapter 8, verses 1 through 11, and I suspect this is a
familiar passage for most of you here. Again that is from the Gospel of John,
chapter 8, verses 1 through 11 and I will be reading from the New Revised
Standard Version which you may have in the pews in front of you so if you would
like to follow along, please do so.
(Please read these scriptures.)
(May the Lord bless the hearing and
the reading of His word.)
I’m going to ask you to do something for me and I don’t
want anybody testifying this morning. But I suspect
for those of us who have lived on this earth you have committed that, when you
think of that sin, you feel some shame; you feel some shame; you feel some
guilt or possibly even some humiliation. Take a moment to re-live that moment
or that time in your life.
Now just think if what you know
about yourself was made public and others knew of that
sin? Think of the shame, think of the humiliation that you would feel! That is
what happened to this woman. It was very difficult for this woman because she was brought before these scribes and these Pharisees with
her humiliation, with her shame, and it was put on public display. Can you
imagine her feelings, what it was like for her?
But before we continue any further with her, let’s take a
moment to look at the scripture. Let’s put it in
context of how this woman came to this place where she was in front of all
these scribes and Pharisees; where she was here with Jesus and possibly many
other people. If we look at the scripture this morning, in some ways it’s quite a natural. We have to ask the question, first of all, why was only the woman brought before Jesus?
Deuteronomy, chapter 22, verse 22 says this, “If you discover a man in the
process of sleeping with a married woman, kill both the man who slept with the
woman and also the woman, so you must remove evil from the midst of
However, the other side of the coin
is this: If Jesus says, “Don’t stone the woman,” then He appears to disregard
the law of God spoken through Moses. Then Jesus may lose the respect and the
confidence of His followers and they might feel like He does not respect
the law of God. So, do you see the dilemma that they were trying to place Jesus
in? That’s what this whole
scene in the scripture was about. They-were trying to ensnare Jesus, so they
thought!
The scripture tells us that Jesus
stood down on the ground writing in the sand. Now I don’t
know what he was writing with my simple mind. I think he was drawing a big ‘ole
happy face’! ‘You think you had me but you don’t!’ For Jesus raised
up and He spoke these words: “The person who has never committed a sin among
you, please go ahead, throw the stone at her”! And then
he stooped down again and he started drawing another happy face! What Jesus was
saying to the scribes and the Pharisees was what He said in Matthew chapter 7,
verses I through 3, “Why do you see the speck in your
brother’s eye but you do not notice the log in your own eye?” Within a few
seconds Jesus annihilated, Jesus destroyed hours and hours of planning by the
scribes and the Pharisees, and I love this verse in the Bible. It says that
their response to what Jesus said was this, “They went away one by one
beginning with the eldest”. I see some smiles. ‘Beginning
with the eldest’. To me that’s pretty
significant, isn’t it? I wonder why the eldest? I had this picture in my mind
that these scribes and Pharisees had these stones in their hands ready to stone
this woman and Jesus says, “Yeh, go ahead and stone her. Any of you, without
sin, throw that stone”! And the oldest among them,
drops the stone first and walks away! Why? I think we
probably will hear it best from Nathaniel Hawthorne in his book, “The Scarlet
Letter’. In “The Scarlet Letter” he writes this,
“There is no man who draws nigh his autumn and finds himself completely
innocent”. Did you hear those words? ‘There is no man who draws nigh his autumn
and finds himself completely innocent!’ I think we know that as we grow older
in this life, that we aren’t so innocent, are we?” Maybe we have learned not to
be so judgmental, not to condemn so quickly because we know that as we grow
older in this life, many of us may have skeletons in our closet that we don’t want others to know about; that we don’t want on
public display. You and I know that we have fallen short of the glory of God.
That in our lives we have also sinned.
There’s an interesting story about the English playwright, an
actor, Noel Coward. It is said that he pulled a prank
on some 20-odd men who lived in
However, what I want us to hear
this morning from this scripture is the love and the grace of our God. There was really only one person in that crowd who could really
pick up a stone and throw at this woman. There was only one person in
that crowd that was without sin and that was the Unblemished Lamb, our Lord
Jesus Christ. Is that what he did? Did he pick up the stone? Did he throw the
stone? NO! He turned to the woman who was humiliated, who was chained, who was
guilty, who was placed before all these people to see her sin and he said,
“Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” And
she said, “No one, Lord”. And Jesus looked at her and
he said, “Neither do I condemn you! Go, do not sin again!”
Isn’t this the Good News of the Gospel? Isn’t
this the reason we celebrate the coming of Easter? This woman was wrong; this
woman had messed up, she had made a mistake, she had sinned and she knew it,
Jesus knew it, the crowd knew it, but the love and the grace of God covers a
multitude of sins. “Neither do I condemn you, go and sin no more”!
We are all
stained with sin but we can come before our Lord Jesus Christ with the
dirt in our lives and He will wash us white as snow. He will remove our sins as
far as the east is from the west. He will throw them into the sea of
forgetfulness and it is through the shed blood, the broken body of our Lord
Jesus Christ that we, you and me, have forgiveness for our sins. May we hear
the Good News of the Gospel? “Neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more!”
This morning may we hear the love,
may we hear the grace of our Lord God!
Amen