| John 8:10-11 – “Jesus straightened up and asked her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” “No one, sir,” she said. “Then neither do I condemn you,” Jesus declared. “Go now and leave your life of sin.” |
We have heard the expression, “hate the sin, but love the sinner.”
It sounds like a slogan, something we put on a bumper sticker to capture a sentiment.
But it doesn’t seem possible. Isn’t loving the sinner tolerating his sin? Should we not condemn sin wherever we find it?
Don’t you find it difficult to separate the two–the torn feeling between detesting something and loving someone?
C. S. Lewis struggled with the same thing. Listen to what he said:
I used to think this is a silly, straw-splitting distinction: How could you hate what a man did and not hate the man?
Years later, it occurred to me that there was one man to whom I had been doing all this all my life…namely, myself. However much I disliked my own cowardice or conceit or greed, I went on loving myself. There had never been the slightest difficulty about it. In fact, the very reason I hated the thing was that I loved the man. Just because I loved myself, I was sorry to find that I was the sort of man who did these things.
Consequently, Christianity does not want us to reduce by one atom the hatred we feel for cruelty and treachery. We ought to hate them. Not one word of what we said about them needs to be unsaid. But God does want us to hate them in the same way in which we hate things in ourselves: sorry that the man should have done these things and hoping, if it is possible, that somehow, sometimes, somewhere he can be cured and made human again.
It was something Jesus knew to do.
In John 8, those who were the moral police of their time, took up stones to kill a woman for committing adultery. They were within their rights, the law bolstering their blood-spitting vengeance.
They took it as an opportunity to embarrass Jesus. They offered him the chance to either ignore the law and condone the sin or to ignore that forgiving nature that he had been preaching.
Jesus would have none of the hair-splitting. Instead, he looked at the woman and told them that if they were not guilty of anything then go ahead. But that one person must unleash the bloodshed. No one could accept the challenge since all were in some way just as guilty of something as this woman was of adultery.
They quietly left the field of battle dying the death of a thousand cuts.
Jesus stood there, looked at the woman and wondered what happened. No one could accuse her. But what about him.
“Jesus straightened up and asked her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”
“No one, sir,” she said. “Then neither do I condemn you,” Jesus declared. “Go now and leave your life of sin.”” (John 8:10–11, NIV)
The next time you feel the urge to be self-righteous, look in the mirror and start with you. And however, you see yourself, apply it to others.
–Robert G. Taylor
robertgtaylor.com
