Read: John 8:1-11
The character of Javert in “Les Miserables” is a cold and pitiless police inspector, bent on bringing the fugitive Jean Valjean to justice. If you’re not familiar with the story, Javert is not what you would typically call a “corrupt cop”. He stringently adheres to the letter of the law. Caught between Javert and the law is the character of Jean Valjean, a man who is guilty of breaking parole after nineteen years but has since come to repentance and a new, honest life. Despite this, Jevert still hunts him down without sympathy, bent on seeing ‘justice’ done.
We love to hate Javert for his cruel application of the law, but his most troubling quality is how convinced he is that he is in the right. Javert is a corrupt cop, but not corrupt in the sense of using his authority to get away with crime. He’s corrupt in the sense that he uses the law to fuel his personal vendetta against Valjean. [NGR2] Similarly, we love to hate the pharisees, but let’s not confuse a hatred for the pharisees with a hatred for the Law. You may be surprised just how easy it is to think like a pharisee.
In John 8:1-11, there’s an often-overlooked tug of war going on between Jesus and the religious leaders of His day. It’s easy to caricature the story of the woman caught in adultery as a case of forgiveness versus the Law; but we know that God Himself gave them the Law of Moses, so it mustn’t be villainized. But if so, does this mean the pharisees were right and Jesus, God in the flesh, actually contradicted His own Law? Not exactly.
The battle-lines in John 8 are not drawn simply between Law and forgiveness, but between the Kingdom of God and the kingdom of mankind. [NGR4] The kingdom of man, which the pharisees had built, weaponized God’s Law for their personal use, when it had been given to bring about life. They did not see the Law as God’s plan to redeem humanity, instead they saw it like Javert did, as a tool they could use to manipulate and trap those they disagreed with. Since we don’t see the man who was also caught in adultery, odds are they would have normally turned a blind eye to this sort of thing. But on this occasion, they saw their chance to use the Law against Jesus and they took it without question.
On the other hand, there’s Jesus, the crowning climax of the Law (Mat. 5:17), stepping in to obey the will of God, not merely the letter of the Law. He did not engage them in a debate, nor try to argue semantics, instead He addressed their heart, “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone”. He overlooked all their scheming and double-talk and saw this lost and humiliated woman as a way to illustrate what the Kingdom of God was really like.
The mindset of a Jevert or a pharisee is frighteningly easy to fall into. You can quote Scripture, you can profess faith, you can write whole systematic theologies, but if you think these are tools to leverage your own agenda, you’ve completely missed the point. The point is to advance God’s agenda, to be an agent of redemption, to let God’s Kingdom be on earth as it is in heaven, to know Jesus, and this by following Him. Ask yourself, do you prefer to use the bible as a trump-card for debates rather than looking in it for what pleases God. Is your ultimate goal to please God and do His will, or to advance your kingdom with a stamp of biblical approval? Take some to time to meditate on what you think it is that God loves in this passage, and pray that God would build up in you the kind of heart that would love like Jesus loved this stranger.
