A Modern Telling of John 8:1–8
The officers, chief priests, and Pharisees each departed to their own house. But Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. Early in the morning, he came to the temple courts again. But it had been two thousand and twenty-five years and a lot had changed—the location of the temple for one. But old habits die hard, and most people were still accustomed to going to some other place to be taught by religious experts.
Jesus didn’t mind though. In fact, he preferred the one-on-one time with those who would slow down enough to journey inside themselves to find Jesus where he always was… sitting in courts of our inner being, waiting ever so patiently for his friends.
One by one they began to wander in and make themselves comfortable at his feet. Eyes met one another with the giddiness of young children on Christmas morning. Nobody who visited these courts ever really knew what to expect—only to expect. Sometimes, you’d leave this court with what you wanted. Always, you’d leave this court with what you needed.
That’s just how this Jesus worked.
Suddenly, the experts in law appeared with a woman, and a man, caught in the very act of adultery. Like I said, it had been two thousand and twenty-five years, and the experts in the law had evolved with the times. The experts understood power dynamics in gender, and even power dynamics in the workplace. CEOs had fallen out of fashion in the court of public opinion as of late. In fact, not only was the man brought forward this time, he was centered. After all, he was the one with all the power.
With each step the experts in law took, they gathered more people to their cause. Those sitting at the feet of Jesus could make out murmurs of “must be held accountable” or “internet, do your thing!” The crowd picked up steam as they marched this embodied collision of need and neglect right past Jesus and the inner courts and straight to the court of public opinion, because that’s what we do now.
They paraded them before the world and said to the masses, “Masses, this man and woman were caught in the very act of adultery. In the law of moral righteousness, we are commanded to hold them accountable. What then do you say?” In this court, there is no trap. In fact, it’s as scripted as a Hallmark Channel love story.
Find out who they are.
Find out where they work.
And then let the internet do its thing.
I don’t recall anybody asking Jesus what we should do this time. Nobody needed to. They knew what he’d say. It’s not like he’s changed his mind. And we haven’t either.
We’ll offer up a shoebox of mercy, but only after we’ve delivered cargo ships piled high with judgment.
This time, stones were thrown.
Memes were posted. Reels were created. We took to it like college students to South Padre on spring break. We knew none of this was good for us, but dammit if it wasn’t a welcome break from the news cycle that flooded our feed.
No politics could stick here. Both sides have had their fair share of adulterous behavior. There was no spin, just raw video uploaded to TikTok that anybody who’s ever been in, or a casualty of, an unfaithful relationship can recognize for what it was.
On the buffet of life, we found the junk food and we indulged, because it’s what we always do when the world seems like it’s about to come apart at the seams. We find our scapegoat, and we drag it until we feel better about ourselves. Rinse. Repeat.
Meanwhile, Jesus sat in the inner courtyard with the few who’d gathered to dwell with him in the inner court. As the few watched the scenario play out, Jesus knelt, and without anyone noticing, began scribbling in the dirt. The few lost track of how long they’d been watching the spectacle across the street, each lost in their own feelings of sadness—more than a couple feeling a tinge of superiority for having taken the high road.
It wasn’t until they saw Jesus crossing the street and moving toward the crowd that they were stirred to their senses and noticed the message left for them, spelled out in gravel and dust.
The message wasn’t long, but it was enough to undo them.
Soft on Sin
Let me own my biases outright. My wife has known the pain of a sucker punch that levels a marriage and throws the unsuspecting spouse onto the stage of public opinion.
The blinding spotlight. No script. Navigating a life she didn’t choose. Doing it with a peanut gallery of friends, family, and community members critiquing her every move—all made while she navigated fear, grief, and rage on two hours of tear-soaked sleep and two children under five.
She’s known the humiliation forced upon someone whose only mistake was loving someone incapable of loving themselves.
And me?
Well, I know what it’s like to be the cheater. To be the one who made mercy necessary.
I’ve been accused of being “soft on sin” more than a few times. I wear it like a badge of honor, because I outright reject the idea that you can be hard on sin. You can’t be any harder on sin than you are hard on the final score of the Super Bowl. You don’t have to like the score, but once the final second ticks off the clock, it is what it is. You can’t change it. The game happened, and the score reflects the outcome of how that game was played.
It’s the smoke, not the fire. It’s what happens when something’s already gone wrong inside us.
So when we get hard on “sin,” we’re really just being hard on people who are already hurting, already lost, already struggling. People God loves—right in the middle of the mess they’ve made, been dragged into, or, most likely, both.
Sin, for those who insist we use that word, should break our hearts. It might even stir a righteous anger deep within us. I say might because I’ve often confused my emotional reactions as righteous anger, when the truth was it was unhealed wounds that got poked. Maybe you have too.
When it’s my pain speaking, my core message is shame. I want a pound of flesh.
But shame doesn’t heal sin.
Punishment doesn’t prevent it.
But when I’m responding from a healed place, the core message is mercy—and only mercy can get deep enough to nourish dead roots.
Mercy doesn’t excuse the offense. It attends to the wound that caused it.
Mercy is a hard language to master—but once you’ve learned to speak it, all other languages feel clumsy in your mouth.
And once you’ve heard it spoken over you—once you’ve been fully seen, for everything you are and everything you’re not, and someone chooses to love you anyway…
It changes everything.
But What About Accountability?
That’s a fair question. Actions have consequences, and people should be responsible for the pain they cause themselves and others. Accountability happens in natural spheres—and those spheres are usually small. It’s your family, your friends, your church, your job. Those elements tend to make up our modern village.
And it’s not the whole village’s role to dole out accountability—and damn sure not the internet’s either. It belongs to those willing to walk with the accused because they have relationship. They can ask the hard questions and make the tough decisions.
It’s a nuanced few that shoulder the weight of holding people accountable: wives and husbands, mothers and fathers, friends and confidants. But the rest of us have a role to play as well, and I think they fall into two camps: Heal and Hold.
Heal
I’m keenly aware that there are some who didn’t make it to this part of the read. The idea that the two people caught at the Coldplay show are victims in any way is a bridge too far to cross. My assumption would be that they’ve seen firsthand the horrors of infidelity and the tax imposed on the real victims—wives, husbands, and children. Maybe that’s you, but you muscled through to this point. I understand.
It’s cruel to suggest victims should be advocates for their abusers. That isn’t at all what I’m suggesting. Not everyone can, or should, be an advocate for everyone else.
At the same time, harm begets harm. We don’t always mean to judge or punish. But from our unhealed pain, we’ll hurl five stones before we even realize what we’ve done. If you’re like me, when the shame of our impulse meets the anger of the moment, you might even double down and chuck five more for good measure before you come to your senses.
We’ve all experienced unspeakable grief and unnecessary cruelty that have left us wounded. That’s the nature of sin. But wounds can heal if we’re willing to meet Jesus in the court of our inner being and be honest about it. That’s the nature of mercy.
So when these situations come up, we have the opportunity to pay attention to our emotions and the way we want to respond to someone else’s folly. These reactions light the path inward to the place we were wounded, or wounded ourselves.
Throwing stones is a release for sure—but on a long enough timeline, our unhealed pain will eventually have us on the wrong end of that equation.
You may never become a flag-waving advocate for the adulterous community—but you might. That’s the beauty of mercy: it transforms us into things we never dreamed of being. Not by ignoring the wound, but by healing it.
Hold
Then there are some of us who have an entirely different job—to unapologetically hold space for people who are going through hell, even if it’s of their own choosing.
It’s unlikely the people in question saw our clever memes or heard our conversations about them. But the people in our circles did. And while we didn’t intend to relay this message to the world, we absolutely did.
There’s no margin for error. None. Zero.
We will meet you in the safety of the digital arena, with our stones skinned in humor, and we will feast on your pain and bathe in your tears until we’ve had our fill—or the next scandal comes along.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but that’s in us. Just watch how the next trending topic plays out.
How easily we dogpile.
How quickly we trade compassion for clicks.
How scandal gives us cover to avoid our own inner work.
“Thank you, God, I am not like this man.”
And maybe… we’re not.
Maybe we have healed—and it’s just another case of mob mentality at its finest.
But if we’ve done the inner work,
if we’ve allowed the pain to become a teacher and not a weapon,
then we can be gutted by the outcome—and still filled with compassion for the people who played the game.
We can suspend judgment.
We can leave room for wonder.
We can resist the broad strokes of certainty and choose the subtle shades of compassion.
We can hold space for people actively harming themselves and others—not to excuse the harm, but to interrupt the cycle long enough for healing to take root.
Because we don’t have to choose between loving the victim or the abuser.
Gospel-centered love holds both, while still creating boundaries that protect.
Not either/or.
Mercy and wisdom.
Love and limits.
And I’d argue… that’s who we really are.
Because we’ve seen it in every natural disaster:
We show up.
We meet needs.
We give generously.
We sit with the hurting.
Why?
Because when no one is “at fault,” it’s easy to love like Jesus.
Jesus made his way to the two caught in the act of adultery. The crowds had shrunk by two-thirds because a couple of celebrities had passed. The third that remained saw Jesus and decided the gig was up and moved on.
“They all condemned us, Jesus,” she said, through broken breath and tears.
Jesus whispered things to them both. Things that weren’t for the gatherers to hear.
His followers that had met him in the inner courts had moved on too.
All that was left was the message in the dirt.
It’s easy to love when no one’s at fault.
But the point of the Gospel is to love like that—even when someone is.
✌🏼🧡
How you can shine a mirror and humble a reader with the inspired message of Jesus's grace is also healing.
Thanks Jon, somebody really....really needed to say this. About everything not this one instance but all instances. Thank you brother for always being a voice for what Jesus tells us to be.