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 The woman caught in adulteryWhen a woman is dragged before Jesus, sentenced to death for being caught in the act of adultery, he refuses to apply the stone-carved letter of the law. Instead, incredibly, he just writes in the sand with his finger. For a people bred on the story of God writing the laws that defined their nation onto stone tablets with his finger, this is a fairly inflammatory gesture. Long before anyone had heard of Judge Dredd, it seems, someone else was hinting pretty broadly: "The rules are just shorthand, I am the law." The implications of this little story are enormous. What is the difference between the old laws and any written on sand? Well, simply, that no one can know what the sand version might have said: it is applied in that instant, then it is gone. So was Jesus offering a new situational ethics, perfectly suited to our flexible 21st century morality? That hardly seems likely. He did, after all, tell the woman in no uncertain terms that adultery was sin and she should stop it. "Go, and don't sin again," he told her. Nonetheless, there is a problem with written instructions. They can be applied (and more significantly misapplied) in the absence of the person who gave them - indeed, with no reference to that person. |
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 That's why, if I want my children to "play nice", leaving them a note to cover all the possible disputes that could arise between them probably isn't going to work. But being there to arbitrate myself, that's a different matter. After a while they might even start applying some of my adult principles of fairness for themselves. For a long time the Jews had been dreaming of a day when the law would no longer be carved in stone, but etched in people's hearts. Is it possible that this first case of the new sand-written laws was the start of that long-awaited process? According to the propeht Ezekiel, God had promised: "I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws" (Ezekiel 36:26-27). |
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