The Woman Taken in Adultery

1 But Jesus went to the Mount of Olives.

2 At dawn he appeared again in the temple courts, where all the people gathered around him, and he sat down to teach them. 3 The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before the group 4 and said to Jesus, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. 5 In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?” 6 They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him.

But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger. 7 When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” 8 Again he stooped down and wrote on the ground.

9 At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the woman still standing there. 10 Jesus straightened up and asked her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”

11 “No one, sir,” she said.

“Then neither do I condemn you,” Jesus declared. “Go now and leave your life of sin.” (John 8)

A still of the woman taken in adultery from the 1920 film "Madame X."

A familiar story.

Naturally enough, when we hear it, our attention is focused on the woman taken in adultery. What happens next, after all, means life or death to her.

Yet this is not at all where Jesus’s attention is focused, is it? He is instead busy writing something on the ground, so engrossed that he is not aware of what is happening with regard to the woman, and must ask her later for an account of what took place.

William Blake's depiction of the woman taken in adultery. He is one of the few artists who seems to have gotten the point, and actually shows Jesus drawing on the ground.

This is remarkable on the face of it. It seems to me obvious that the story is thereby directing us, in proper imitatio Christi, to focus our own attention on the writing on the ground.

We do not know what Jesus was writing (or drawing). Presumably, it does not matter what it was. What matters is that he was engaged in some act of creation. The fact that he was so thoroughly engaged as to be unaware of the dramatic events going on around him shows the kind of intense concentration characteristic of the artist at his art.

Part of the point of the story is that we should forgive sinners. But the larger part of the story is that the creation of art is more important to true Christian religion even than attending to morality, or to matters of life or death.