“This is my part.” Even though he was sleepy and bleary-eyed without his glasses, Benji wanted to read the Lessons. We were praying the Morning Office earlier today. Or at least, we were trying to. We got to the Gospel lesson and started fumbling around, somewhat baffled. My copy of the Revised English Bible left off at John 7:52 and picked up again at 8:12, missing precisely the passage that the lectionary assigned for today. I had vague childhood memories of a disputed section somewhere in the Gospels, but I had written over any specifics long ago. We forewent the Gospel lesson and moved on with our prayers. But I wanted to go back and look at the passage more closely.
In my Bible, the passage bears the heading ‘An incident in the temple*’, the asterisk gesturing at two lines in the footer that note the contested nature and placement of this account. I’ve read the Bible several times; so, it only took a quick read to refresh my memory. The story recounts how the proto-rabbinical Pharisees brought a woman caught committing adultery before Jesus as he sat teaching in the temple. They intended to test him, hoping that he would fail to condemn her, thus discrediting his status as a rabbi. He then utters the famous words, “Let whichever of you is free from sin throw the first stone at her.” This statement is the horizon which most exegetes seem to focus on.
But as didactically important as the aphorism is, I’m coming to see this decontextualized, aphoristic approach to reading scripture as incomplete… perhaps even harmful. Rev. Janet (who seems to have assumed a position as my de facto spiritual guide, at least for my transition into Anglicanism), emphasizes a dramaturgical reading of Scripture, and I wonder what happens when we focus not on the individual statement that seems to encapsulate the whole, and rather on what the major dramatic turns and narrative arc tell us about the passage.
The setting is a pedagogical one. As in the Sunday Gospel lesson in the Fourth Sunday after Epiphany, we see Jesus speaking with authority. An interlocutor enters the stage, initiating the conflict that constitutes the plot of the story. The framing of their intent focuses on challenging Jesus’ authority, not on judging the woman. This is a point that I think we miss if we read the passage with a focus on summative aphorisms. The Pharisees stage the encounter to discredit Jesus as a Teacher, with a big T. This staging takes up the first six of the twelve verses in the section.
Jesus responds to this with the aphoristic proclamation: “Let whichever of you is free from sin throw the first stone at her.” We can’t judge unless we are free from sin ourselves. That’s the nugget of truth at the heart of the story, right? Maybe, but I think a more dramaturgical reading that looks at the overall narrative arc of the story might yield a different understanding—perhaps less clearly instruction, but at the same time more Christological, in keeping with the Gospel nature of the passage’s context.
Jesus’ verbal responses are bracketed by narration that he is bent over writing on the ground. Growing up I heard an endless series of speculations about what he wrote, and what significance it might have. Others placed great emphasis on the fact that he was writing, an act incongruous with a carpenter’s lifestyle that serves as proof of his divinity. This is hardly an original take on my part, but I think the narrative bits about Jesus writing are incidental. Almost like marginalia about staging, if we’re taking this dramaturgical idea further. I think they function like a shorthand, further underscoring the idea that Jesus was speaking with authority. I can only gesture at my train of thought in a blog post of this length, but: I went from ‘writing’ to ‘word,’ from ‘word’ to its Greek counterpart ‘logos,’ and from ‘logos’ to its alternate translation ‘Torah,’ the source of Mosaic law. In the Gospel writer’s observation of Jesus writing, I see a parenthetical not at the true theme of the story: Jesus in relation to the Law.
A stretch? Maybe, but I think it holds up. Intertextual word play was not invented by Derrida and Barthes. They merely put a name to it. If we accept this referential chain, then we see the passage as painting a picture, not about interpersonal judgment, but about Jesus’ nature as the Christ. The fulfillment of the Law, not the opposition to or negation of it. The passage highlights that Jesus’ new covenant of baptism is a culmination of the old covenant of circumcision. It moves us away from a reading of the Gospel as an admonition of how we should act. It moves us towards a reading of the text as a profound (and deeply allusive) testament to who Jesus is. Isn’t that the whole point of the Gospel after all?