In our adult Sunday school class today, one of the scripture stories that we discussed was the one where the scribes and Pharisees apprehend a woman while she was having sex with a married person (or perhaps she is the married person, or perhaps they are both married to other people) and take her to Jesus. As those of you who are familiar with the story already know, they demand from Jesus to tell them whether she should be stoned, which they claim the Law of Moses allowed them to do.
Of course, Jesus famously sees past the binary options of their question meant to bait them and encourages them to look at their dichotomy from a different lens: that anyone of them who was sinless could stone her.
I don’t really want to discuss that part of the story, as it’s probably been picked apart a lot. However, there is one element toward the end of the story that I have been thinking about recently.
After the scribes and Pharisees are overcome with guilt at Jesus’s carefully worded invitation and leave the scene, Jesus, who had been focusing his attention to the ground and missed their departure—asks the unnamed woman where her accusers were, whether any of them had condemned her.
When she said that no one had ended up condemning her, he responded with “Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more.”
The part I want to focus on is “sin no more”.
When I hear this story discussed, when we get to this point, almost always people frame it as Jesus labelling her actions as sinful, despite having just said he didn’t condemn her. Almost as though this were a prime example of the oft-repeated saying, “Love the sinner. Hate the sin.” According to this interpretation, Jesus is being merciful to her, while acknowledging the wrongfulness of her actions.
But I wonder if “sin no more” might mean something else.
Just 3 chapters before another familiar story takes place. Jesus arrives at the Pool of Bethesda, where he finds a man who has been living with an “infirmary” for nearly 40 years. People believed the pool and supernatural healing properties at certain times, so some who travel to the pool hoping to be healed of their afflictions. We learn that each time the man has tried getting to pool, he is pushed aside by others, so he keeps missing the short healing window.
Jesus invites him to rise, take up his bed, and walk. Which he then does, having been healed by Jesus, rather than by the waters of the pool. In the commotion of being healed and being subjected to questioning by some nearby Jews, the man ends up separated from Jesus. However, the two cross paths later in the temple. The text says that Jesus “found” him in the temple, but it isn’t clear whether he was searching for him or just came across him there.
Regardless, having encountered him a second time, Jesus counsels him, “Behold, thou art made whole: sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto thee.”
Once again, he uses the phrase “sin no more”.
This time, however, the counsel is less cut and dried. When he declared it to the woman mentioned earlier in this post, it was pretty apparent to most readers that he was referring to adultery as sin and telling her to not commit adultery anymore.
However, in this case, despite using the exact same phrasing, it’s not clear what sin Jesus would be referring to that he wanted the man to cease committing.
In this instance, the man was at the pool, sick with an illness, trying to be healed. There was no obvious sin that he was committing. As such, it’s not obvious that there was a specific sin he had to “no more” commit.
Perhaps Jesus saw this opportunity to help the person to start not only a new physical life with his newfound freedom and mobility but also to start a new spiritual life. Not because he had a particular sin to stop doing but because he should commit to living a life dedicated to trying to do what’s right.
And if that’s the case, maybe the first story I referenced earlier in this post wasn’t so much about the woman having to no longer commit adultery, but rather an invitation to begin a new spiritual life, born again as a new follower of Jesus.
So, maybe it’s less a specific warning to avoid adultery and more a general invitation to just do better overall.
