A mob came to Jesus
with a woman allegedly caught in act of adultery. The penalty was stoning to
death according to "God's" law in the Bible. It seems females were the usual
victims of such barbarism. The community took the judge’s word for it that
they should stone and they collectively murdered the condemned. Involving
everybody including those who didn’t want to do it and those who enjoyed it is
making fun of the deaths.
Unsurprisingly, Jesus said that whoever has
no sin may cast the first stone, that can be seen as mockery of this form of
capital punishment – mockery of the deaths of the victims. And mockery of this
woman they said they wanted to stone.
They could not cast the first
stone as it was an illegal situation so mockery alone makes sense of this.
Commonsense says that no man is seriously going to cast the first stone when
he is told that is a job for a sin-free person and believes he has sin. It is
a joke. On the other hand, those men were self-righteous and not conscious of
sin and so what Jesus said would have encouraged one of them to lift a stone.
If that is the case it is still a joke.
The story does not tell us if
he was laughing or not. He could have been. It does not matter – the story
reads like a joke that ended up in the Bible.
It is important not to
read too much into the fact that the man she supposedly sinned with was not
mentioned. He could have run off. The story would have mentioned his absence
if it mattered. Arguments that Jesus protected the woman for the man was
allowed to go free are just childish.
As life was very short then, the
woman would have been a naive girl by our standards today. For Jesus to drag
this nonsense out instead of just walking on was a disgrace as she would have
been frightened out of her wits.